23-0067·Petition For Review
- Due process requires clear and convincing evidence to support a protective order that prohibits all contact between a parent and her children for more than two years under Family Code § 85.025(a-1), because such an order profoundly interferes with a parent's fundamental right to the care, custody, and control of her children in a way similar to termination.
- The trial court must also consider the child's best interest in deciding whether to ban all parental contact for longer than two years; because the court of appeals applied a preponderance standard, the Court remanded for a new hearing.
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23-0679·Petition For Review
- The Court denied rehearing of its denial of Fort Bend ISD's petition for review of a ruling that phone logs of district representatives' personal cell phones are public information subject to the Public Information Act to the extent they concern public business, and Justice Young concurred, calling the district's privacy arguments serious but not persuasive on this record.
- The concurrence said that in an appropriate case, such as one where government requires employees to give up privacy in their own phones, the Court should carefully consider how the Act applies to privately owned cell phones and the effect of the federal and Texas search-and-seizure provisions, and he would be inclined to grant review.
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23-0756·Petition For Review
- Texas courts lack specific personal jurisdiction over an Austrian aircraft-engine manufacturer whose engine reached Texas only through an independent Bahamian distributor's territory-wide distribution agreement, because the stream-of-commerce-plus test requires conduct specifically targeting Texas; mere foreseeability that products will arrive, a general worldwide or hemispheric distribution agreement, a passive website, and third parties' registration and repair of engines are not enough.
- Rotax and its independent distributor are distinct entities, so the distributor's activities cannot be attributed to Rotax absent agency or alter-ego proof, and a manufacturer's instruction not to ship to sanctioned countries does not mean it has availed itself of every other forum.
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23-0875·Petition For Review
- A former owner cannot set aside a subsequent purchaser's title on due-process grounds, even after a defective tax-suit citation by publication, if she received notice of the default judgment or of the property's sale during the two-year statutory period to redeem or sue, because she then had an adequate remedy at law.
- A subsequent purchaser may also raise equitable defenses such as laches against a former owner who learned of the judgment or sale after limitations ran but unreasonably delayed, to the purchaser's detriment; because the record did not show when the owner received notice, the Court affirmed the remand.
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24-0023·Petition For Review
- The Court vacated and remanded a lifetime firearm ban in a stalking-based protective order so the court of appeals can reconsider Noyes's Second Amendment challenge in light of United States v. Rahimi, which it did not have when it ruled.
- The Court held Noyes's constitutional challenges were sufficiently preserved; two concurrences (Sullivan and Hawkins) accompany the per curiam order.
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24-0207·Petition For Review
- Texas courts lack specific personal jurisdiction over a South Korean fuel-pump manufacturer that designed the pump for the North American region and knew it was sold in Texas, because designing a product for a large region that includes Texas makes arrival foreseeable but is not additional conduct targeting Texas; a replacement pump bought at a Texas dealer, an English-language website, and the automaker's U.S. sales do not show targeting either.
- The trial court did not abuse its discretion in overruling a personal-knowledge objection to the manufacturer's affidavit, which laid a foundation through the affiant's seventeen years of roles, meetings attended, and documents reviewed.
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24-0236·Mandamus
- The Court denied mandamus in a suit by two women who were sexually abused by family members against Bill Gothard and the Institute in Basic Life Principles, which challenged the civil-conspiracy claim under Rule 91a and the ecclesiastical-abstention doctrine, and Chief Justice Blacklock, joined by Justices Devine and Sullivan, dissented from the denial.
- The dissent would have granted the petition and required repleading because the petition's main link between Gothard and the abuse is the content of his religious teachings on authority, sexuality and family, which the dissenters said cannot be tried in a Texas court.
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24-0340·Petition For Review
- The redundant-remedies doctrine does not bar a congressional candidate's ultra vires and as-applied constitutional claims against the Texas Medical Board's cease-and-desist order over his use of the titles "Dr." and "physician," because those claims seek declaratory and injunctive relief broader than the reversal of the order that an Administrative Procedure Act appeal could provide.
- His substantial-evidence claim was properly dismissed for want of jurisdiction because a district court's review of an agency order requires a statute authorizing it, and a since-repealed Board rule cannot create jurisdiction.
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24-0573·Other
- The Texas attorney general has constitutional authority under Article IV, § 22 to file a quo warranto action seeking revocation of a corporation's charter based on alleged criminal acts, here knowingly harboring illegal aliens, and neither Business Organizations Code § 11.301(a)(5) nor Civil Practice and Remedies Code chapter 66 expressly limits it; on a motion for leave, the trial court asks only whether the petition states a cause of action, not how the evidence weighs.
- Neither RFRA, federal preemption nor vagueness justified denying leave to file, and Business Organizations Code §§ 12.151-.152, which let the attorney general demand corporate records "immediately," are not facially unconstitutional under City of Los Angeles v. Patel because "immediately" does not foreclose precompliance review, so the Court vacated the injunction against further records requests.
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24-0939·Petition For Review
- A Pakistani ex parte talaq divorce obtained through five days' publication in a small local newspaper, with no other effort to reach the wife, does not satisfy due process and cannot be recognized by a Texas court under principles of comity.
- The Court reversed the court of appeals and remanded for further proceedings on the wife's claim to a share of more than $100 million in community assets.
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24-1042·Mandamus
- The Court denied mandamus relief on whether a civil defendant is entitled to a stay while a parallel criminal case against him is pending, but two Justices wrote separately to propose (without adopting) a presumptive standard: courts should grant such a stay unless the opposing party shows a compelling reason to proceed or agrees to a no-adverse-inference jury instruction.
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25-0172·Petition For Review
- The Court granted the State of Texas's petition for review in its deceptive-trade-practices suit against Google and, on an agreed motion after settlement and without argument or considering the merits, vacated the court of appeals' judgment and remanded for rendition of judgment under the parties' settlement agreement; Justice Sullivan did not participate.
- The petition asked whether Google is subject to specific personal jurisdiction in Texas for allegedly deceptive collection of Texans' location and browsing data, and whether a court of appeals may limit its inquiry to the State's pleading when reviewing a special appearance.
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25-0267·Petition For Review
- Whether a court of appeals has jurisdiction over an interlocutory appeal from the denial of a plea to the jurisdiction when the officials' plea challenged only official-capacity claims and the plaintiff had nonsuited those claims, leaving only individual-capacity claims.
- Whether a court of appeals may dismiss individual-capacity claims against county officials, including federal section 1983 claims, when the officials never moved for summary judgment or otherwise challenged those claims in the trial court.
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25-0288·Certified Question
- Answering a certified question from the Fifth Circuit, the Court held that Canon 4A(1) of the Texas Code of Judicial Conduct does not prohibit judges from publicly declining, for sincerely held religious reasons, to perform same-sex weddings while performing opposite-sex weddings.
- The answer rests on an October 24, 2025 order adding a comment to Canon 4 that says refraining from performing a wedding based on a sincerely held religious belief is not a violation; a later motion for clarification, treated as rehearing, was denied.
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