From the editor
Editorial commentary on the day's most consequential development — a new opinion, a doctrinal shift, a notable filing or hearing.
SMU Corporate Governance Initiative · research preview
The Hilltop Docket
Intelligence on the Texas Business Court — read from the signed opinions and cited to the paragraph.
- 123 Opinions in corpus as of 2026-08-18
- 2026 Tex. Bus. 60 Latest opinion signed August 17, 2026
- 550 Cases monitored Business Court & 15th COA
- 15 Issues published through August 2026
Editions
Every issue, newest first
Published as warranted — typically weekly during the research preview. Each issue is written from the signed opinions and the docket of record; the archive is open.
Latest · No. 15 · August 24, 2026
Is a corporate bond indenture a trust? The Texas Business Court says no — and in Delaware, $800,000 to the lawyers with a ruling from nobody.
Read the issue →Four opinions in eight days — and Chancery’s first word on Revlon and the public benefit corporation.
A quiet week in Texas. Then Delaware opened the Dropbox file.
The debt is paid — twelve full opinion treatments.
The index was never quiet — eight opinions, corrected without qualification.
The index goes quiet — so we read the opinions.
The streak breaks — two opinions, and ExxonMobil becomes a Texas company.
A second quiet week — no new opinion; the corpus holds.
A quiet week — one opinion, an anti-SLAPP dismissal with mandatory fees.
A denial week — three opinions, each against the moving party.
The bench's recent run — opinions that define the court's reach.
ExxonMobil approved; three opinions land on the index.
ExxonMobil vote day.
Week in Review.
Inaugural edition.
About the publication · The Hilltop Docket
The Hilltop Docket is the SMU CGI intelligence brief on the Texas Business Court, combining opinion summaries, new-petition treatments, weekly hearing schedules, and editorial briefs into dated issues published as warranted; typically weekly during the research-preview period.
A research publication of the SMU Corporate Governance Initiative at SMU Cox and SMU Dedman Law. Every case treatment names the source record it rests on — opinion PDF, docket metadata, filing of record, or a source-pending label. The archive is open.
- 15Issues published · through August 2026
- As warrantedTypically weekly cadence
- Source-statuslabeled
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A research publication tracking the Texas Business Court.
Background — the court, and what this covers
The Texas Business Court was created effective September 1, 2024, and began receiving cases that day (Tex. Gov't Code Ann. ch. 25A; added by H.B. 19, 88th Leg., R.S. (2023), eff. Sept. 1, 2023, providing for the court’s creation on Sept. 1, 2024). It issued its first published opinion — a jurisdictional remand — on October 30, 2024 (Energy Transfer v. Culberson Midstream, 2024 Tex. Bus. 1). It has since issued 123 opinions in sequential per-year citation order, carrying the corpus contiguously through 2026 Tex. Bus. 60. Opinion volume has risen markedly since first issuance. The Hilltop Docket covers the SMU CGI verified written-opinion corpus and selected case, filing, and hearing events drawn from permitted source channels. Every published case treatment is reviewed against its source record before publication. Opinion coverage is complete through the citation endpoint above, verified against the official register at each issue’s release date. Docket, filing, and calendar coverage is selected and source-limited; it is not a substitute for the docket of record.
Fourteen issues since the inaugural edition of May 20, 2026, each written from the signed opinions and the docket of record. Cadence: published as warranted, typically weekly. Browse every issue.
Free during research preview
Subscribe to The Hilltop Docket
Published as warranted — typically weekly during the research preview. Free; unsubscribe anytime.
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By the numbers
Nearly two years of the Business Court at a glance
Charts derived from the SMU CGI Live Monitor's verified opinion corpus and the Hilltop Docket source-status taxonomy. Color coding by division and doctrinal family is held consistent across this site. Each chart is interactive — click to enlarge.
Three more charts & method notes
generated_at_iso stamp — not a wall-clock animation. Green under 45 minutes; flagged stale beyond that. The opinions register is fetched on a scheduled twice-daily cadence; the 30-minute target applies to the re:SearchTX alert channels (cases, filings, and hearings), which are source-limited. Figures V-1 and V-2 are rendered from the canonical opinions.json (123 opinions, division-normalized) and were regenerated against the live feed on 2026-08-18. Figure V-3 is rendered from the live tags.json (regenerated 2026-08-18; 231 tag instances across 122 of 123 opinions). Figure V-4 measures live feed age. Click any figure to enlarge. The ring measures feed generation age, not channel health: the re:SearchTX alert channel is currently degraded, and docket events arrive through verified manual backfill, as disclosed on the Live Monitor.
Recurring elements
Six recurring sections
Opinions, new petitions, hearings, editorial briefs, cognate-jurisdiction coverage, and primary-source excerpts.
What’s in every issue
Each edition is built atop the SMU CGI live-monitor pipeline. The live monitor checks source channels on separate cadences. Opinions are checked against the official Texas Judicial Branch opinions page; cases, filings, and hearings are drawn from permitted re:SearchTX alert or export channels and are source-limited. Each issue is reviewed by a human editor before publication.
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 newly filed TBC cases surfaced by the alert channels — parties, counsel, claims, jurisdictional basis, and any preliminary motions pending.
Hearings & Calendar
Selected hearings, conferences, and trials across all five currently operational divisions, as surfaced by the alert channels (First · Dallas; Third · Austin; Fourth · San Antonio; Eighth · Fort Worth; Eleventh · Houston), with case captions and motion types.
Cross-Jurisdiction
Developments outside Texas that bear on Business Court litigants and doctrine — Delaware Chancery, Nevada’s business courts, the federal courts, SEC actions.
Verbatim
Quoted excerpts from court orders and opinions, presented as primary source material with citation and link to source PDF where available.
Editorial
Standards.
Editorial standards in full
Primary sources only.
Every verified factual claim 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. Claims of fact rest on filings, opinions, statutes, dockets, and transcripts. Attributed practitioner commentary may be linked — and is labelled as commentary — but it is never load-bearing: no holding or definitive docket status stands on secondary reporting, and any fact resting on secondary reporting is labelled as such.
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 identifies the editor responsible for each issue.
Independence.
The Hilltop Docket is a research publication of the SMU Corporate Governance Initiative. Interpretations are the authors' own.
Editor
Shane Goodwin, Ph.D., LL.M.
Executive Director, SMU Corporate Governance Initiative
Professor of Practice in Finance, SMU Cox School of Business
Adjunct Professor of Law, SMU Dedman School of Law
sgoodwin@smu.edu ·
Faculty profile
Questions
Frequently asked.
Frequently asked
Is The Hilltop Docket free?
Yes — free during the research preview. Any future change will be announced on this page before it takes effect.
How often will it publish?
Publishing as warranted; typically weekly 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. The companion live monitor at smucgi.org/research/texas-business-court/opinions/ updates its docket-alert channels on a target 30-minute cadence and fetches the opinions register twice daily (actual freshness disclosed on the monitor), 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.org/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 sgoodwin@smu.edu. The case summaries themselves are reportorial; the underlying court orders are public.
Subscribe
Future editions of the Hilltop Docket are distributed by email to interested practitioners, scholars, and Texas Business Court counsel.
By subscribing you consent to receive editions of The Hilltop Docket. You can unsubscribe at any time. We do not sell subscriber data. Buttondown processes email addresses to deliver the newsletter and manage subscriptions. Privacy policy.
How we work
Editorial standards.
How we work — sources, citations, conflicts
Our disciplines: primary sources, human review, declared conflicts, and a refusal to take paid placement on coverage.
01 / Sources
Court text, dockets, filings of record.
Opinions are pulled from txcourts.gov/businesscourt; dockets from re:SearchTX; statutes from capitol.texas.gov. Practitioner blogs may appear in scholarship cites but are never load-bearing.
02 / Citations
Citation discipline on every entry.
Per-opinion entries follow Bluebook 21st short-form conventions; sequential per-year citations are preserved (e.g., 2026 Tex. Bus. 29 follows 28).
03 / Review
Every opinion summary read by a human editor.
AI assists with first-pass extraction. Every published characterization is read against the underlying opinion PDF; errors are corrected at the source with a dated note.
04 / Independence
No party may purchase coverage. Conflicts declared in-issue.
SMU CGI is funded institutionally. The Hilltop Docket accepts no paid placement and declares conflicts in the closing section of each issue. Editorial policy.