22-0631·Petition For Review
- The Railway Labor Act does not preempt a pilots' union's state-law misrepresentation and tortious-interference claims against Boeing over the 737 MAX, because resolving them is not substantially dependent on interpreting the collective bargaining agreements: the claims turn on whether Boeing's alleged misrepresentations induced the union to agree in 2016 to fly the MAX, and the union could have declined to do so regardless of what the 2006 agreement required.
- The pilots' assignments of their claims to their union are not void as against public policy, giving the union standing as assignee, though it must prove each pilot's injury and the trial court retains discretion over joinder, consolidation, and severance.
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23-0384·Petition For Review
- Courts may not blue-pencil words into a contract: the trial court erred by adding "scheduled" and "physical" to Section 9.1 of a firm gas-balancing agreement, whose plain language excused the pipeline from providing balancing services whenever the upstream pipeline required the pipeline or the shipper to limit imbalances attributable to the shipper.
- The Court rendered judgment for the pipeline on the shipper's repudiation and fraud, fraudulent-inducement and negligent-misrepresentation claims, remanded the breach-of-contract claims for a new trial, and cautioned that lost profits from an untested forward-sales strategy dependent on volatile gas prices are speculative.
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23-0427·Petition For Review
- The anti-fracturing rule bars a client from recasting a professional negligence claim as fraud or another claim to gain a litigation advantage such as a longer limitations period; a fraud claim whose gravamen is that accountants made accounting errors and overstated their competence is barred.
- A breach of fiduciary duty claim against accountants fails as a matter of law where the only basis is an "informal" fiduciary relationship built on friendship and a client's subjective trust, and the engagement letters set an arm's-length relationship.
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23-0564·Petition For Review
- A mineral owner cannot show justifiable reliance, as a matter of law, on a lessee's oral representations that it would drill rather than "flip" the lease, where the signed paid-up lease gives the lessee an unqualified right to assign it and imposes no drilling obligation.
- Fraud by nondisclosure fails without a duty to disclose, and arm's-length counterparties owe none, particularly about the contents of public deed records; a claim that a promise about recording the lease was a scheme to induce a later sale fails for lack of evidence of intent.
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24-0171·Petition For Review
- When a sophisticated party negotiating at arm's length grows suspicious that a business partner's representation may be false, blindly relying on that representation without asking a simple follow-up question is unjustifiable as a matter of law—context, not a tally of "red flags," decides whether reliance was justified.
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24-0239·Mandamus
- The Court denied Novartis's petition for writ of mandamus challenging a qui tam suit under the Texas Medicaid Fraud Prevention Act (now the Texas Health Care Program Fraud Prevention Act) on relator standing and separation-of-powers grounds, and Justices Young and Sullivan issued a statement.
- The statement said the issues are weighty and the Court might have set the case for argument, but denial is understandable because the new Fifteenth Court of Appeals has statewide jurisdiction and, under In re Sanofi-Aventis, may hear mandamus petitions like this one, so the Court awaits its written analysis of the Act's constitutionality.
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24-0516·Petition For Review
- An appellate court must address issues that, if meritorious, would require rendition of judgment before remanding for a new trial based on jury-charge error; skipping them was reversible error.
- The court of appeals' harm analysis of a spoliation instruction was also too underdeveloped to justify discarding the verdict, so the Court reversed and remanded to that court.
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24-0616·Certified Question
- Answering a Fifth Circuit certified question, the Court held that Labor Code chapter 21 (the Texas employment-discrimination statute) does not abrogate a plaintiff-employee's common-law defamation and fraud claims against another employee, even when they are based on the same course of conduct as discrimination and retaliation claims against the employer, because there is no clear repugnance between them.
- Waffle House's rule that chapter 21 is the exclusive remedy against an employer when the gravamen is covered discrimination stands; a plaintiff still cannot obtain a double recovery, and if her only substantive claim is discrimination or retaliation, chapter 21 remains exclusive.
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24-0625·Petition For Review
- The Court granted the petition, vacated the court of appeals' judgment and remanded to the trial court under the parties' settlement in a dispute over whether contract disclaimers and warnings barred a fraud claim arising from an option to buy a gas-gathering company.
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24-1062·Mandamus
- A pending qui tam claim under the Texas Health Care Program Fraud Prevention Act survives the death of the private relator, because the claim is brought on behalf of the State.
- The suit was not barred by a separate pending qui tam action or a public-disclosure bar, and dominant jurisdiction did not require abatement, so the Court denied mandamus.
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25-0127·Petition For Review
- The Texas Health Care Program Fraud Prevention Act imposes liability for an omission only if the omission is material to the government's payment decision, because the Act incorporates the common-law materiality requirement for fraud.
- LabCorp's alleged omissions and misstatements were immaterial as a matter of law because it disclosed its billing practices to the State in 2014 and the State kept paying its claims for seven years without objection, so summary judgment for LabCorp was reinstated.
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25-0806·Mandamus
- Whether a trial court abused its discretion by denying separate trials when a wrongful-death plaintiff joined negligence and gross negligence claims against a defendant with Texas Uniform Fraudulent Transfer Act claims against him, his wife, and entities they own, and whether the defendants lack an adequate remedy by appeal.
- Whether trying the two sets of claims together is unfairly prejudicial and inconvenient because it exposes the jury to the defendant's wealth and asset transfers, or whether that evidence bears on the reprehensibility of the conduct and on exemplary damages beyond the statutory cap.
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25-0865·Mandamus
- Did the trial court abuse its discretion by denying Ford's Rule 91a motion to dismiss a customer's contract, fraud, DTPA and assault claims, where Ford says it never dealt with him or repaired his vehicle and the Occupations Code bars it from selling repairs to consumers?
- Do the amended petition's allegations that Ford advertised its dealer network and told the dealership what repair to make state claims against Ford, or did Ford raise its merits arguments too late and too generally under Rule 91a?
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26-0467·Mandamus
- May a qui tam relator sue under the Texas Medicaid Fraud Prevention Act when it is undisputed that the relator itself suffered no injury, or does it lack constitutional standing, and can it rely on the State's injury as an assignee?
- Does the Act's qui tam provision, which lets a private party proceed for the State without the State's participation, violate the separation of powers, and is mandamus an available remedy or is an appeal after final judgment adequate?
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