The battle to get Donald Trump's nominee to the US Supreme Court, Amy Coney Barrett, confirmed by the Senate is beginning. The shifting ideological balance of the court will have an impact in all areas of American life and across the US - perhaps in no place more than Texas. Susan Lippman, a Democratic activist in Austin, Texas, was sitting in her car when she heard the news that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died. "I'm not too emotional," she says. "But I let fly. I was raging and screaming. Pounding the steering wheel." Lippman instantly knew the impact that the loss of Ginsburg, a liberal legal icon, would have on the ideological composition of the court. If Donald Trump could successfully replace her with his choice for a justice, it would secure the conservative tilt of the top US judicial body for a generation. So, a week after Ginsburg's death, Lippman and her friend, Debbie White, were heading to protest outside the office of Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican senator who has pledged to confirm Ms Coney Barrett. White says a 6-3 conservative majority in the court could directly attack Democratic Party priorities like government-managed healthcare and access to abortion services. "I'm afraid that it's going to do away with some very important things like the Affordable Care Act, which would be just awful because that would bother so many lives," White says. "All the women's rights and women's health issues are a goner on a conservative Supreme Court." While the political battle over Trump's appointment of Barrett is taking place between the White House and Democratic senators in the US Capitol, some of the biggest legal fights that have made it to the Supreme Court in recent years have come out of Texas. For instance, the current challenge to the Affordable Care Act - Barack Obama's signature law when in office, aiming to expand access to healthcare - was brought by the state of Texas. It will come before the Supreme Court just days after the election, possibly with Barrett on the bench. A major 2016 court decision on regulating abortion clinics also originated in the state, as did recent disputes over federal voting rights laws, the consideration of race in university admissions, the constitutionality of Obama-era immigration reforms. Texas was also a key player in several challenges to capital punishment, anti-sodomy laws and, going back to 1973, the landmark Roe v Wade decision that legalised abortion across the US. Part of this, explains University of Texas law professor HW Perry, is a result of Texas being a large state, both in population and size, with interests touching on most aspects of American life. More recently, however, Texas's prominence in high-profile court battles is the result of a concerted effort by the state's top Republican politicians to become a major player in the conservative legal world. "Texas has become quite a leader in pushing cases to the Supreme Court to get accepted for review, and then often they are the ones who wind up arguing it," Perry says. "It's developed this highly professionalised office which is also the one leading many of the other conservative states in getting cases before the Supreme Court."