Texas Business Court.

The Texas Business Court is a specialized statewide commercial bench. It opened on September 1, 2024 and is the centerpiece of Texas’s effort to attract companies that might otherwise stay incorporated in Delaware.

The Texas Business Court is a specialized statewide trial bench created by House Bill 19 of the 88th Texas Legislature (2023) and operational since September 1, 2024. Its scale is disclosed by its own statute: eleven authorized divisions, a dedicated statewide appellate court (the Fifteenth Court of Appeals), and statutory jurisdiction over corporate-governance disputes — an institutional design assessed in Goshen & Stein, 125 Colum. L. Rev. 2077 (2025). It sits at the center of the post-2024 architecture by which Texas is positioning itself as an alternative to Delaware in the market for corporate domiciles.

It only takes a narrow slice of cases — large, complex commercial and corporate-governance disputes that clear specific dollar and subject-matter thresholds. Appeals go to a separate statewide appellate court.

The court hears specified complex business disputes — derivative actions, corporate-governance disputes, securities-fraud and shareholder-disclosure claims, internal-affairs litigation, and high-value commercial matters — that meet statutory amount-in-controversy and subject-matter thresholds under Texas Government Code Chapter 25A. Appeals from the Business Court are heard by the newly-created Fifteenth Court of Appeals, a statewide appellate court operational since the same date.

SB 29 assigns its new procedures — including § 21.4161 advance-determination petitions — to this court, and SB 1057’s opt-in regime completes the reform package: the statutes and the bench are designed as one system. SMU CGI tracks whether that system is working, case by case.

The Texas Business Court is the institutional anchor of the SB 29 / SB 1057 reform package that Texas adopted to court companies considering moves out of Delaware. Without a specialized trial bench, the substantive Texas corporate-law reforms would lack the institutional infrastructure to be plausible alternatives to the Delaware Court of Chancery. The Business Court is the institutional answer Texas is offering. SMU CGI's research vertical tracks whether the answer is working — case by case, opinion by opinion, doctrine by doctrine.