From the editor
Editorial commentary on the day's most consequential development — a new opinion, a doctrinal shift, a notable filing or hearing.
Live since May 20, 2026
The Hilltop Docket
Research-grade intelligence on the Texas Business Court — opinions, dockets, hearings, and doctrine. A research publication of the SMU Corporate Governance Initiative.
Opinions tracked
95
Dockets monitored
1,420
Update cadence
30 min
Issues archived
3
Subscribe
The first serious independent monitor of a serious new court.
The Texas Business Court has issued 95 opinions since opening on September 1, 2024 — sequential per-year citations, 45 published and 50 memorandum opinions. Opinion volume has increased each quarter since the court's first opinion on October 30, 2024. The Hilltop Docket covers every opinion, every new filing, every scheduled hearing — anchored to primary sources, with human editorial review of every case treatment before publication.
Inaugural Issue No. 1: Wednesday, May 20, 2026 (soft launch). Public launch: Friday, May 22, 2026. Issue No. 2 — Week in Review — published Monday, May 25, 2026. Faculty Exchange feature publication — ExxonMobil and the Leopard Paradigm — Wednesday, May 27, 2026 (ExxonMobil shareholder vote day). Cadence going forward: publishing as warranted, typically weekly. Subscribe below to receive subsequent editions by email.
Free during research preview
Subscribe to The Hilltop Docket
Weekly digest during the academic launch period. Cadence advances as subscriber count crosses our threshold.
By subscribing you consent to receive editions of The Hilltop Docket. You can unsubscribe at any time. We do not sell or share subscriber data. Privacy policy.
What every edition contains
Six recurring sections.
Each edition is built atop the SMU CGI live-monitor pipeline. Opinions are collected every 30 minutes from the court website. Filings, cases, and hearings flow from re:SearchTX Premium alerts. Press releases come from the court's distribution list. Every issue is reviewed by a human editor before send.
From the Bench
Case-by-case treatment of newly-issued TBC opinions — caption, citation, ruling, procedural posture, numbered holdings, and tagged keywords for cross-edition search.
Summaries of New Petitions
Structured summaries of each newly-filed TBC case — parties, counsel, claims, jurisdictional basis, and any preliminary motions pending.
Daily & Weekly Schedule
The court's calendar: hearings, conferences, and trials across all five currently operational divisions (First · Dallas; Third · Austin; Fourth · San Antonio; Eighth · Fort Worth; Eleventh · Houston), with case captions and motion types.
Borderlands
Developments outside Texas that bear on TBC litigants and doctrine — Delaware Chancery, Nevada's new business court, federal circuit, SEC actions.
Verbatim
Quoted excerpts from court orders and opinions, presented as primary source material with citation and link to source PDF where available.
Read the inaugural edition
Issue No. 1 · May 20, 2026.
A research-grade monitor for a new Texas court. The corpus count, the methodology, the editorial standard, and five recent opinions from the Texas Business Court’s expanding docket.
SMU Corporate Governance Initiative
The Hilltop Docket
"As of this issue, the court has issued 95 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 are formally published opinions; fifty are styled memorandum opinions. We have PDFs of each…"
This week's edition
Issue No. 2 · May 25, 2026 · Week in Review.
A quiet opinions week at the Texas Business Court — no new opinions issued May 21–25. Four new Business Court petitions were filed Friday across the First and Eleventh Divisions. The week's hearings calendar runs through Friday. Wednesday brings the ExxonMobil shareholder vote and a same-day Faculty Exchange feature.
SMU Corporate Governance Initiative
The Hilltop Docket
"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 95 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…"
Faculty Exchange feature
May 27, 2026 · ExxonMobil vote day.
ExxonMobil and the Leopard Paradigm: A Faculty Exchange — a sourced chronicle of the published exchange between SMU Dedman’s Associate Dean Christina M. Sautter and SMU CGI Executive Director Shane Goodwin on ExxonMobil’s New Jersey–to–Texas redomiciliation, presented in publication order, with every Bloomberg Law, CLS Blue Sky Blog, Texas Lawbook, Law360, SSRN, EDGAR, and statutory source hyperlinked.
SMU Corporate Governance Initiative
The Hilltop Docket
"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…"
Editorial
Standards.
Primary sources only.
Every claim of fact in The Hilltop Docket is anchored in a primary source — a court opinion, a public filing, an enacted statute, or a transcript. Footnote URLs point to primary sources, not commentary. Practitioner blogs may appear as scholarship cites but not as URL targets. This is the editorial discipline of the SMU CGI corpus generally and it applies to this publication without exception.
Human review.
Every opinion summary is reviewed by a human editor against the court's actual order before publication. We do not publish AI-generated summaries that no person has read. We mark our sources, we mark our methods, and we mark our editors. The masthead lists everyone who reads before send.
Independence.
The Hilltop Docket is a research publication of the SMU Corporate Governance Initiative. Interpretations are the authors' own. SMU CGI has no financial or advisory relationship with any litigant before the Texas Business Court. If that ever changes, we will disclose it on Page One.
Editor
Shane Goodwin, PhD, LLM
Executive Director, SMU Corporate Governance Initiative
Professor of Practice, Finance, SMU Cox School of Business
Adjunct Professor of Law, SMU Dedman School of Law
Convener, Hilltop Forum
sgoodwin@smu.edu ·
Faculty profile
Questions
Frequently asked.
Is The Hilltop Docket free?
Yes, during the research-preview launch period. We may introduce a paid tier later — most likely a freemium model with a free weekly digest and a paid daily edition with case-following and judge-alert features. Current subscribers grandfather into the free tier in any pricing change.
How often will it publish?
Publishing as warranted, typically weekly on Fridays during the research-preview period. The inaugural Issue No. 1 was published on Wednesday, May 20, 2026 (soft launch); public launch was Friday, May 22, 2026. Daily cadence is on the roadmap once subscriber count crosses our editorial-capacity threshold. The companion live monitor at smucgi.org/tbc-monitor/ updates every 30 minutes regardless of digest cadence.
Who is on the editorial team?
Editorial direction by Shane Goodwin (Executive Director, SMU CGI). Case-level review by SMU CGI research staff and Dedman Law students. Data pipeline by SMU CGI. A complete masthead is at /hilltop-docket/about/.
How do I cite a Hilltop Docket edition?
Recommended citation: The Hilltop Docket, Issue No. [N], [Section name] ([Date]), https://smucgi.pages.dev/hilltop-docket/[YYYY-MM-DD]/. We track our own corpus with stable URLs that will not change as the site evolves.
Can I redistribute or quote?
Editorial content is © SMU Corporate Governance Initiative. Fair-use quotation with attribution and link is welcome. For broader redistribution, please write to hilltopdocket@smucgi.org. The case summaries themselves are reportorial; the underlying court orders are public.