The Senate hearings on Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court have brought public attention to the role the Supreme Court, and courts in general, play in our trilateral system of government – a role that the public usually does not see in headlines other than when the Supreme…
A recent case from the Ohio Court of Appeals, Fifth Appellate District, raises some interesting questions about forced pooling. The case, American Energy – Utica, LLC v. Fuller, Case No. 17 CA 000028, involves an oil and gas lease covering 40 acres in Guernsey County, Ohio, dated in 1981. The…
This month the Texas Supreme Court refused to hear the case of Lindemann Properties, Ltd. v. Campbell, 524 S.W.3d 873 (Tex.App.-Ft. Worth 2017). Although the case involves an easement for a radio transmission tower, it provides some lessons for negotiating easements for pipelines. In 1977 Smith granted to Campbell an…
A recent opinion from the El Paso Court of Appeals, Harrison v. Rosetta Resources, illustrates how important groundwater has become in oil and gas development in the Permian Basin. Harrison signed a lease on Relinquishment Act land, as agent for the State. The lease provided that the Lessee has the…
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…
Jarndyce v. Jarndyce is a fictional court case in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, an interminable suit over a large inheritance. The case itself is a principal character in the book. Dickens wrote in Bleak House: Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, over the course of…
An article in yesterday’s Austin American-Statesman – “How gas flare-offs could bring water” – caught my attention. It was written by Vaibhav Bahadur, an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at UT Austin. He posits that natural gas could be used to harvest water from the atmosphere (“atmospheric water harvesting”), enough…
Solaris Water Midstream announced last month that it is building an 11-mile water supply line from Loving County to Eddy County, New Mexico that will be able to transport about 150,000 barrels of day to supply water for completion operations in Eddy County. The water comes from wells in Loving…
In U.S. Shale Energy II, LLC v. Laborde Properties, L.P., the Texas Supreme Court grappled again with a royalty reservation. In a 1951 deed, the grantors reserved the following: There is reserved and excepted from this conveyance unto the grantors herein, their heirs and assigns, an undivided one-half (1/2) interest…
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…