Last week’s live edition here focused on the Court’s May 8 civil hand-down and a separate cluster of Attorney General enforcement threads. This canvas tracks what actually moved afterward: a sharply split Friday read of TEX. CIV. PRAC. & REM. CODE Chapter 52 alongside a mandamus posture involving the Attorney General and Austin’s transit partnership, plus May 15 releases on minerals jurisdiction and Rule 91a — then the OAG’s parallel tech and higher-ed filings that hit the statewide newswires the same cycle.
Scroll for May 22 and May 15 releases, enforcement lanes, and the forward calendar.
The Judicial Branch index lists Ken Paxton, Attorney General of Texas v. The City of Austin and Austin Transit Partnership Local Government Corporation out of Travis County with Fifteenth Court of Appeals styling. The Court’s disposition line states it treated the petition for review as a petition for writ of mandamus and conditionally granted the writ — a procedural posture appellate counsel watch closely because it forces immediate trial-court attention rather than a conventional merits remand alone.
Transportation authorities, bond counsel, and municipal lawyers should pair Chief Justice Blacklock’s slip opinion with the partnership’s governing instruments and any concurrent state oversight of project finance.
The index page clusters these releases with other per curiam and juvenile-calendar entries — practitioners should still open the specific PDF for any caption that matches an active client file.
Justice Busby’s lead opinion in John P. Boerschig v. Rio Grande Electric Cooperative, Inc. draws four additional votes for the Court; Justice Hawkins concurs, while Justice Bland dissents with three others — signaling a fractured rationale practitioners must read in the slip PDF before advising on rural distribution infrastructure and trial-court dispositions out of Kinney County.
Prior styling on the Judicial Branch index shows the Fourth District as the intermediate court — confirm the mandate line in the May 22 release for what remains for trial-court compliance.
The Court reverses the court of appeals in part, renders in part, and remands — the precise division matters for cooperative counsel pairing state regulatory filings with any remaining nuisance or easement claims.
Justice Huddle’s opinion for the Court reverses the Thirteenth Court of Appeals in part and remands — a rural land-law bookmark for title lawyers even if the underlying facts stay hyper-local to Victoria County.
County courts at law and statutory partition dockets often accumulate overlapping survey, heirship, and contract claims — the Supreme Court’s May 22 release is the controlling statewide law layer on the issues actually decided below.
Pair the slip opinion with the Thirteenth Court’s prior disposition to see which issues are open on remand and which findings survive intact.
Chief Justice Blacklock’s unanimous opinion reverses the Second Court of Appeals and remands — a decision practitioners summarize as clarifying when Texas courts may hear contract-heavy disputes even when related real property sits beyond state lines, displacing certain “gist of the action” dismissals intermediate courts had used.
“The Court instead clarified that, under the appropriate framework, Texas courts can have jurisdictional authority to compel specific performance of contractual or deed reformation matters and adjudicate contractual real estate ownership disputes, regardless of whether the underlying property in dispute is located out of state.”
National Law Review — summary of Braxton Minerals III, LLC v. Bauer (May 15, 2026)
Justice Devine’s opinion conditionally grants mandamus — reinforcing that when pleadings expose a claim that cannot survive as a matter of law, Rule 91a remains a front-loaded exit ramp rather than a slow-burn discovery tax.
Justice Busby’s May 15 opinion reverses the Fourteenth Court of Appeals, renders in part, and remands — a Harris County consumer-finance marker for auto lenders and bankruptcy crossover counsel who track certificate-of-title disputes.
The Office of the Attorney General filed suit alleging WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption marketing does not match investigative reporting on employee access and message handling — claims are pleaded under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act alongside the office’s broader data-privacy enforcement streak.
Consumers are told only senders and recipients can read message content — a representation the State argues is material to Texans choosing the app for sensitive communications.
Counsel should read the petition’s factual predicates rather than inferring holdings — no Texas court has entered final injunctive language in this file as of the generation date below.
The State’s petition asks a Collin County district court for structural remedies — including defaulting safety settings to maximum for new Texas accounts and age verification aligned with the Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment Act — while separately pleading deceptive-trade theories.
Practitioner note: Parts of the SCOPE Act remain in constitutional litigation in other files. This edition simply flags that the Attorney General is actively pleading surviving provisions as enforcement hooks — compliance counsel should map which statutory sections the petition actually invokes.
Within days, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board publicly demanded cessation of unapproved degree marketing, the Texas A&M University System challenged confusingly similar branding, and the Attorney General sought seven-figure DTPA penalties — a tri-stack that shows how quickly Texas postsecondary enforcement can move when an entity lacks a certificate of authority.
Public cease-and-desist materials directed at “Texas American Muslim University at Dallas” and related protected terms.
Separate trademark pressure on names and marks that could imply an affiliation with College Station’s flagship.
Civil petition seeking injunctive relief and penalties under the DTPA and Texas Education Code provisions cited in the release.
The Office opened an investigation into Meta AI Glasses, citing press and whistleblower accounts about subcontractor access to intimate video snippets and questions about LED indicators during always-on modes — issues that sit at the intersection of Texas privacy statutes and hardware product marketing.
The digit is a mnemonic, not a penalty tally: one statewide investigation file can still force enterprise document holds, vendor diligence, and parallel consumer suits — read the actual Civil Investigative Demand scope in the OAG release.
No. 07-25-00386-CR · memorandum opinion. The court deleted newly assessed appointed-counsel reimbursement because the defendant remained indigent and the record lacked affirmative proof of a present ability to pay — aligning with Mayer and Cates from the Court of Criminal Appeals on present-resource requirements.
The First District held that when trial counsel argues only about which adult qualifies as the outcry witness, appellate counsel does not preserve a separate complaint that the child’s statements were unreliable under time, content, and circumstances — and further held any error harmless given overlapping evidence channels.
Raise reliability under TEX. CODE CRIM. PROC. art. 38.072 § 2(b)(2) explicitly if that is the appellate theory.
Harmlessness analysis still requires reading the full record — the memorandum opinion ties its result to duplicate fact channels.
Commissioners approved a seven-figure penalty package spread across dozens of regulated entities — the public breakdown by program area matters for environmental counsel budgeting settlement authority before June’s next agenda cycle.
Local reporting ties a May 20 written notice of violation to an earlier TCEQ complaint investigation into cover soil and vector control at the municipal landfill — a procedural reminder that state enforcement letters may not automatically escalate to elected officials without a deliberate compliance routing policy.
The May 15 index shows the Court stayed a Travis County temporary injunction at 5:00 p.m. on May 28, 2026, pending further order — a precise timestamp hemp retailers and health-agency counsel should calendar alongside the Court’s eventual merits disposition.
Verify every date on an official docket before advising clients to rely on it — this list is a watch sheet, not a scheduling order.
See the Supreme Court’s May 15 stay line for DSHS v. Sky Marketing — confirm no subsequent orders supersede it.
Environmental penalty and agreed-order pipelines typically publish supporting staff memoranda the week prior.
Fridays remain the Court’s habitual release window during the October–June term; refresh the Judicial Branch index Thursday evening.
Monitor Collin County dockets for Discord filings and Travis or transferred venue for WhatsApp coordination with other states’ parallel cases.