The Hilltop Docket

"As of this issue, the court has issued 92 opinions since opening on September 1, 2024 — sequential per-year citations from 2024 Tex. Bus. 1 forward, verified contiguous across the canonical corpus. Forty-five were formally published opinions; forty-seven were styled memorandum opinions. We have PDFs of each…"

"Between the publication of Issue No. 1 on Wednesday, May 20 and the editorial cutoff for this issue at noon Central today, the Court issued no new opinions. The corpus held at 92 total opinions. We have therefore organized this edition around the work the Court did on the docketing and calendaring side: four new Business Court filings on Friday, and a substantive week of motion practice ahead…"

"Goodwin asks what the proxy does now. Sautter asks what the Texas move enables later. … The exchange operates through specific, sourced disagreement. Sautter and Goodwin disagree sharply, but the disagreement is conducted through sources: proxy filings, statutory text, empirical claims, and published scholarship…"

“ExxonMobil’s shareholders approved the company’s redomestication from New Jersey to Texas on May 27 — roughly 71.2% of votes cast (8-K Item 5.07, acc. 0000034088-26-000078) — while the Business Court published three opinions to its official index, including Brown v. Exxon Mobil (2026 Tex. Bus. 35), in which the court declined jurisdiction over a removed employment-discrimination suit…”

“The Business Court resumed the bench with four opinions confirmed on its official index. In Brown v. Exxon Mobil the court declined jurisdiction over a removed employment-discrimination suit, reading ‘internal affairs’ narrowly; in Energy Founders Fund v. Daskevich it held a drag-along ‘Affiliate’ means present control, not post-closing rights. A crude-oil contract dispute and the Mavericks–Stars Arena matter round out the week…”

“Three new opinions, each denying the moving party. The First Division denied Boeing’s motion for judgment on the pleadings in the 737 MAX/SWAPA suit (leave to replead by June 19) and denied both cross-motions over a ‘relocate to Dallas’ employment term as ambiguous — a jury question. In South Shore ER v. Bashiri, the Eleventh Division denied a remand on four independent grounds, reaffirming whole-action jurisdiction under Reed v. Rook…”

“A single new opinion. In Local Marketing, Inc. v. Bennett, the Eleventh Division granted a Texas Citizens Participation Act motion dismissing a departing employee’s defamation and tortious-interference counterclaims — the customer letters at issue ‘pertain[ed] to’ the underlying lawsuit, and the counterclaimant offered no clear and specific evidence of damages, nor a viable defamation-per-se theory. The court awarded the statute’s mandatory $18,010 in attorney’s fees and declined sanctions…”

“A second consecutive quiet week on the bench. No opinion posted to the court’s official index since Local Marketing v. Bennett (2026 Tex. Bus. 40); the per-year corpus runs contiguously through that citation with no gaps and nothing added. Continuity, not length, is the point of an edition like this one: we record that the published docket did not move, summarize the re:SearchTX alert posture, check the ExxonMobil redomestication status, and restate the threads we are carrying forward — the SWAPA repleading and the fallout from Local Marketing’s mandatory anti-SLAPP fee award…”