Last Saturday our firm participated in the annual Austin parade celebrating Juneteenth, the day in 1864 it was announced in Texas that all slaves were free. The parade is the biggest in Austin, a celebration of freedom that has become a state holiday in Texas and 44 other states. June…
My blog has been nominated in The Expert Institute’s 2018 Best Legal Blog Contest! I’m in the category “Niche & Specialty.” And I have one vote already! So vote early and often.
Five years ago I wrote a blog entry titled “The Limits of Rational Decision-making.” The topic was a sociological study testing subjects’ ability to make decisions based on facts. The conclusion of the study was that knowledge does not increase a person’s ability to reason when it comes to politically…
Osler McCarthy, the Staff Attorney for Public Information at the Texas Supreme Court, sends out an email to subscribers each time the Court issues opinions or orders. The email summarizes the facts and opinions of cases decided by the Court. It also includes a section called “Returning to Yesteryear” in…
Lawyers’ tools are words. We are often accused of using too many of them. In today’s political climate, words have often lost much of their meaning. It is good to be reminded of the elegance and poetry of good legal writing. So take a few minutes to read the Declaration…
Here’s another flow diagram, from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, showing sources and uses of energy in the US, sent to me by a client. Note how much of our energy comes from fossil fuels – natural gas, coal and petroleum. We are addicted to hydrocarbons, and will be for some…
Although this has nothing to do with oil and gas, I’d like to share a great story about one of my partners, Doug Kilday. Doug is one of Graves Dougherty’s senior litigators. He and his family are also active members of Covenant Presbyterian Church in Austin. In 2017, the Kildays decided…
On February 2, 1848, the United States and Mexico signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ending the Mexican-American War. I’ve been reading the biography of Stonewall Jackson; he and many of the generals in the Civil War first experienced combat in that war. As part of the treaty Mexico ceded…
Every year I look forward to receiving William Osborn‘s holiday photo. William is an Austin oil and gas attorney, an amateur historian, a historic preservationist, an alley gardener, an all-around renaissance man, and my cousin. Every December for the last twenty-five years he has sent a photo to his clients…
I got the idea to start this blog after I made a presentation to a landowner group in which I distributed a checklist for negotiating an oil and gas lease. Soon thereafter, I began receiving calls from people who had found the checklist on the internet. The organization that sponsored…