The Texas Supreme Court on April 3rd in Entergy Gulf States Inc. v. Summers has revisited a controversial decision allowing a premises owner to avoid common law liability by purchasing a workers compensation policy for the benefit of employees of a contractor. The decision is a mixed bag for employees. It will as the majority suggests encourage premises owners to buy workers compensation insurance covering a contractors employees while denying them the right to sue the premises owner. If the injury is not the result of the negligence of the premises owner then this is a good thing. If the injury is the result of the negligence of the premises owner, then it is bad. Whether the trade off benefits the employee more than the premises owner is difficult to measure. I suspect that premises owners will not rush out to buy workers compensation insurance. It is generally more expensive than premises liability coverage. It might have been nice for the employees to get both workers comp. and legal liability, but that does not strike me as fair. In reality there probably was no legislative consideration of the trade off since apparently the legislature was thinking about some other problem when they changed the statute, but this happens all the time. The legislature attempts to fix some specific problem, but inadvertently changes something else. The courts should, of course, not legislate, but the legislature should be more careful. "Words mean what I say they mean, said the mad hatter, "nothing more, nothing less".