School Trust Lands: The Law of America's Educational Land Trusts

Appendix A — Texas (v2)

Built September 27, 2026 against the five Texas opinions held in the Library's collection, each read in full; first publication. Drafted with Claude, an AI system, and published by America's School Trust Library. Not legal advice.

About this appendix. The hornbook reads forward, from doctrine to cases. This appendix reads backward, from state to doctrine: Texas's cases are listed in bullet form, each entry cross-citing the hornbook sections it supports, so a practitioner can open her own state's entry and walk into the treatise from there. Every case below was read against the full primary opinion held in the Library's collection; claims that could not be resolved from a primary are flagged rather than asserted.

Why Texas is worth a reader's time. Every other state in this treatise received its school lands from Congress. Texas did not. It entered the Union in 1845 keeping its own public domain, and its school lands were set apart by its own constitution and statutes. That makes Texas the one place to watch a court take up the trust-character question with no federal grant to read. The answer the Texas courts gave, in the opinions held here, is not the answer most federal-grant states give. Dedicating land to the school fund, they said, did not make the State "a mere trustee": "As the sovereignty, it continued to own the lands just as fully as before their dedication." Yet the same courts treated the constitutional command to sell as mandatory, read the Legislature's duty as a duty to sell "to the best advantage" of the fund, and tested mineral leases for diversion of the fund's money. Texas protects its school lands with binding constitutional commands, not with trust title. A reader who brings the federal-grant vocabulary into Texas should know where it stops fitting.

What this entry corrects. Three of the five opinions came into the Library's collection with internal catalog descriptions that the opinions do not bear out. A fourth came with a court's paraphrase set in quotation marks as though a judge had written it. None of those descriptions had reached a published page, and all four are corrected here. The details are at the end.

TEXAS

Granting instrument. None from Congress. Texas entered the Union under the Joint Resolution for Annexing Texas to the United States, March 1, 1845, 5 Stat. 797, and the Joint Resolution for the Admission of the State of Texas into the Union, December 29, 1845, 9 Stat. 108. The annexation terms let the new State retain "all the vacant and unappropriated lands lying within its limits ... to be disposed of as said State may direct." Congress granted no section 16 and no section 36, and there was no enabling-act trust covenant. [VERIFY: neither resolution's text is held in this collection, and none of the five Texas opinions held here quotes or mentions either one. The quotation is carried from the Library's research file and must be checked against the Statutes at Large before anyone relies on it.] → Ch. 2 (the no-grant contrast); Appendix B.

Constitutional dedication and administering body. The Texas Constitution of 1876, article VII, sets the school and University lands apart. The held opinions quote parts of it as it read when they were decided:

• Article VII, § 4. The opening words, as quoted in Theisen v. Robison at 502: "The lands set apart to the public free school fund shall be sold under such regulations, at such times, and on such terms as may be prescribed by law."

• Article VII, § 15. As quoted in Theisen at 500: "In addition to the lands heretofore granted to the University of Texas, there is hereby set apart, and appropriated, for the endowment, maintenance, and support of said University and its branches, one million acres of the unappropriated public domain of the State". The section closes: "and the Legislature shall not have power to grant any relief to the purchasers of said lands."

• Article VII, § 2. No opinion held here quotes this section. The Library's other pages describe it as dedicating one half of the public domain to the Permanent School Fund. State v. Bradford refers to § 2 and paraphrases it at 542, and it holds that the section did not, by its own force, place the beds of navigable streams in the fund.

[VERIFY: the text of § 2, and of every other article VII provision, against the Constitution itself. Several have been amended since these opinions were written.]

The only administering body any held opinion describes in the court's own voice is the General Land Office: "The GLO is a constitutionally created agency empowered to supervise and manage state-owned lands." Bush v. Lone Oak Club, slip op. 4 n.4 (citing Tex. Const. art. XIV, § 1). [VERIFY: the School Land Board, the State Board of Education's role over the Permanent School Fund, the Permanent School Fund Corporation, and current corpus and distribution figures are carried from the Library's state dossier. No primary held here establishes any of them.] → Ch. 3.

Why Texas matters to the field. Four contributions, the first two the ones most often needed.

1. The trust-character question answered from a state constitution alone. The Texas cases reject the proposition that dedicating land to the school fund made the State a "mere trustee." The line runs from Smisson v. State through Greene v. Robison, neither of which is held here. Bradford quotes Greene at length, and Theisen restates Smisson. This is the clearest counterpoint in the collection to the federal-grant cases gathered in Chapter 4. It does not settle the question for any federal-grant state, because the Texas cases construe a Texas dedication, not an act of Congress.

2. Binding commands without trust title. The same opinions hold the Legislature to the dedication.

   • Sale is the mode of disposition the constitution commands.
   • The Legislature must sell "to the best advantage" of the fund.
   • Mineral-leasing statutes are tested for diversion of the fund. The two before the court passed because each required the whole price to be paid in money. The court left open whether a statute allowing part payment in kind would be valid.

   (Theisen, at 503–11.) Chapters 7 and 9 describe the field's prudence and full-value duties, and Texas reaches comparable results by construing its constitution.

3. What is in the fund depends on express dedication. Bradford holds that neither article VII, § 2 nor the Act of February 23, 1900 put the beds of navigable streams in the school fund. It will not read a grant of riverbeds into an act without "plain and unmistakable language." A beneficiary who claims land for the fund must show where the dedication says so. → Ch. 3; Ch. 9.

4. The public trust is a different trust. Bradford says the State holds the lands under navigable waters "in trust" for "all the people", and Bush v. Lone Oak Club says it holds them "in trust for the public." That is the public trust, not the school trust. Bush holds that the Legislature may convey such lands by a sufficiently plain act, and that the 1929 statute known as the Small Bill did so for the beds of navigable streams. → § 5.2 (two sources of title, two trusts).

The cases

• Theisen v. Robison, 117 Tex. 489, 8 S.W.2d 646 (1928) (Greenwood, J.).

  • Posture. An original mandamus proceeding.
    • Theisen asked the Supreme Court to order the Commissioner of the General Land Office to issue him an oil and gas prospecting permit on 2,560 acres of University land in Crane County, under the Act of 1917. The Commissioner refused, on the ground that the Act of 1925 had repealed the 1917 Act.
    • The University of Texas, through its Board of Regents, intervened and attacked both acts. It argued "that neither the Act of 1917 nor the Act of 1925 authorizes a sale of University land as required by the Constitution, and on the further ground that each act undertakes an unconstitutional diversion of portions of the permanent University fund" (at 499).
    • The court framed "[t]he principal question in the case" as "whether the Acts of 1917 and 1925 violate section 12 of article 7 of the Constitution" (at 499). Mandamus was refused (at 512).
  • Holdings.
    1. Section 12, on University lands, means what § 4, on school lands, means: "We cannot give a different meaning to the language of section 12 from that ascribed to section 4 of the same article" (at 503). The Legislature's "[u]nlimited discretion to make the sales at one or more times, unlimited discretion to formulate regulations governing the sales, and unlimited discretion to fix terms for the sales necessarily implied power to divide the lands for purposes of sale" (at 503). That includes selling the minerals separately (at 504).
    2. The oil and gas leases the two acts authorize are sales, not licenses. The acts "authorize conveyances by the State of minerals in place and hence the Legislature in passing the Acts obeyed the command of the Constitution to sell the University lands" (at 507).
    3. Neither act diverts the fund, because each requires the whole consideration in money (at 509). The court reserved the harder case: "It is unnecessary for us to consider whether an act for the sale of minerals in University lands would be valid if it authorized a part of the consideration to be paid in a mineral which all men know is readily convertible into money instead of in money" (at 509). "The leases under either act accomplish no unconstitutional diversion of the University’s permanent fund" (at 510). "As a result of the sale, the purchaser owns the oil and gas, and the University permanent fund owns the entire proceeds of their sale" (at 511).
    4. After 1925, the 1925 Act governed sales of University lands and their minerals. Theisen had not applied under it, so "the Land Commissioner followed the law in rejecting relator’s application for a permit" (at 512).
  • The "mere trustee" passage, exactly. It is at 503. It is the court's summary of an earlier decision. It does not quote that decision, and it is not Theisen's holding: "The Court, in an earlier opinion by Mr. Justice Stayton, had made clear that the Constitution was mandatory in prescribing sales as the mode of ultimate utilization of these lands, but the Court had positively rejected the proposition that the State was a mere trustee for the owner of these lands with a bare power of sale, saying that the lands belonged to the State as fully as before they were appropriated to public educational purposes." The earlier decision is Smisson v. State, 71 Tex. 222, which the passage cites at 231–32. "These lands" are public free school lands under § 4. Theisen reaches University lands only through its holding that § 12 means what § 4 means.
  • The limits the same opinion sets. The Constitution imposed "the duty on the Legislature to sell University lands to the best advantage of the University’s permanent fund" (at 506). Any other reading "would defeat the cardinal purpose of the framers of the Constitution to realize as great a fund as possible from these lands — including their minerals — for the University" (at 506). And: "While in place, before being sold, the oil and gas were potential assets of the fund" (at 511).
  • ⚠ Cite with care. Do not write that Theisen holds the State is not a trustee. The passage is background to the § 4 analysis, and what it rejects is only a "mere trustee ... with a bare power of sale." The words "fiduciary" and "beneficiary" do not appear anywhere in the opinion. [VERIFY: the held copy carries no decision date; the Library's catalog record gives June 25, 1928. The held copy also carries scanning errors, so check any quotation near one against the printed reporter.] → § 3.4; § 4.7; Ch. 7; Ch. 9; Ch. 11.

• State v. Bradford, 121 Tex. 515, 50 S.W.2d 1065 (1932) (Sharp, J., of the Commission of Appeals; the opinion was adopted as the opinion of the Supreme Court, at 553).

  • Posture. The State sued in trespass to try title to the bed of the North Fork of Red River in Gray and Wheeler counties, an inland river in the Panhandle, not a coastline.

    • It alleged that the bed had been "appropriated to the public school fund, either by section 2 of article 7 of the State Constitution, or by the Act of February 23, 1900". The quoted words are from the statement of the case, which the Commission adopted from the Court of Civil Appeals.
    • It alleged that surveys and patents crossing the river were void to that extent under the 1837 statute: "All streams so far as they retain an average width of thirty feet from the mouth up shall be considered navigable streams within the meaning hereof, and they shall not be crossed by the lines of any survey" (quoted at 528).
    • The trial court sustained general demurrers. The Commission reversed generally and remanded for trial (at 553).

  • Holdings.

    1. The State's pleading of navigability survived demurrer. "If it be determined that the river is navigable, then the title to the land in the river bed belongs to the State, subject to the provisions of the Small Bill hereinafter discussed" (at 531).
    2. The 1929 Small Bill "expressly purports to be retrospective and to validate the titles to lands whose surveys have heretofore been made across streams, now claimed to be navigable, and which had theretofore been awarded or patented" (at 536). On conditions to be proved at trial, it reaches suits already pending (at 536–37).
    3. The school-fund theory failed. "Nor can it be successfully contended that Section 2 of Article 7 of the Constitution, independent of the Act of 1900, automatically places one-half of the public domain, including beds and channels of navigable streams, in the permanent school fund" (at 542). Neither the 1900 Act nor "any other law" set riverbeds apart to the school fund (at 544). An act will not be read to include riverbeds "unless the Act contains plain and unmistakable language expressly conveying the land under river beds and channels" (at 543).
    4. The Small Bill violates neither article VII, § 4, "because the lands in river beds have never been appropriated to the school fund" (at 546), nor article III, § 51 as the court stated it, because "the Small Bill did not undertake to give the patentees and awardees and their assignees anything belonging to the State" (at 546).

  • The Greene passage. At 547 the court quotes with approval Greene v. Robison, 109 Tex. 367:

    While these lands were by the Constitution dedicated to the school fund, the school fund acquired no title to them as against the State. The State did not thereby become a mere trustee. As the sovereignty, it continued to own the lands just as fully as before their dedication.

    And, in the same quotation: "The State, not the school fund, is the source of titles to school lands." Bradford describes Greene as holding "that the Legislature had the right and power to validate titles to lands belonging to the Permanent School Fund" (at 546). Greene held that the statute "granted no relief to purchasers of school lands and was not unconstitutional under Section 4 of Article 7 of the Constitution, as that provision has been uniformly construed", and that "[i]t was no appropriation of the school fund to foreign purposes" (both at 547, quoting Greene).

  • Public-trust language. "From its earliest history this State has announced its public policy that lands underlying navigable waters are held in trust by the State for the use and benefit of all the people" (at 530). That trust runs to the public, not to the school fund, and the same opinion states "the rule that the State can grant soil beneath navigable public waters" (at 549).

  • ⚠ Cite with care. Bradford is a ruling on demurrers followed by a general remand, and it adjudicates no title. It is not a school-trust breach case: the State lost its school-fund theory outright. The statutory text quoted in the held copy appears garbled in at least one place, so take the Small Bill's language from the session laws. [VERIFY: the reporter's headmatter (docket number, date, counsel) is not in the held copy; the catalog record gives June 1, 1932.] → § 3.4; § 4.7; § 5.2; Ch. 9.

• Bush v. Lone Oak Club, LLC, No. 18-0264 (Tex. Apr. 24, 2020).

  • Busby, J., wrote for the Court. Green, J., joined by Hecht, C.J., dissented. Bland, J., did not participate.

  • [VERIFY: the reporter citation. The held slip opinion carries none, and pins below are to its pages.]

  • Posture. "This case is a title dispute between the State and a private landowner over portions of the submerged bed of Lone Oak Bayou, a navigable body of water located near the Gulf of Mexico" (slip op. 1). The Club's tract in Chambers County traces to 1872: "The tract was patented in 1872 to Sophronia Barrow, who purchased it from the Governor of Texas" (slip op. 3). The Club sued the Land Commissioner and won summary judgment, and the court of appeals affirmed.

  • Holdings.

    1. "We therefore agree with the trial court and court of appeals that the Small Bill validates patents conveying the submerged beds of navigable streams, whether above or below the tide line" (slip op. 9).
    2. "If the Small Bill is a sufficiently plain and positive conveyance of public-trust beds of navigable streams above the tide, it is a valid conveyance of such beds below the tide as well" (slip op. 24). The court declined to overrule Bradford (slip op. 24).
    3. A fact question remained whether the bayou is a navigable stream within the statute, so "the Club was not entitled to summary judgment that the Small Bill validated the bayou bed’s conveyance" (slip op. 30). The court reversed and remanded (slip op. 31).

    The Commissioner won the judgment; the Club won the main legal question; neither side obtained title.

  • Trust language. "The government holds title to the beds of navigable streams in trust for the public, and the Legislature can convey those beds to private owners. It did so expressly in the Small Bill" (slip op. 2). The dissent would have held "that the General Land Office (GLO) owns title to the disputed submerged land in this case" (Green, J., dissenting, slip op. 1).

  • ⚠ Cite with care. Neither opinion mentions the Permanent School Fund, school lands or the School Land Board. The court calls the land "public-trust submerged land" (heading to Part III.D), never school-trust land. The holding is limited by its own terms: it "does not affect the State’s ownership of land below mean high tide and outside the gradient boundary of a watercourse or navigable stream" (slip op. 28). → § 5.2.

• State v. Balli, 144 Tex. 195, 190 S.W.2d 71 (1944). "Opinion adopted by the Supreme Court December 20, 1944." "Rehearing overruled November 7, 1945." (Both at 252.)

  • What it is. "This is a suit for the title and possession of Padre Island instituted by the State in the district court of Nueces County" (at 198). The island is described as "containing 135,213 acres of land" (at 198). The claimants traced their title to proceedings before the Mexican state of Tamaulipas in 1827–1829.
  • The State lost. The trial court gave judgment for the claimants, the Court of Civil Appeals affirmed, and: "The judgment of the Court of Civil Appeals, which affirmed the judgment of the trial court, is affirmed" (at 252).
  • Why it is here. The court read the proviso in the 1852 confirmation act as preserving only "those rights the State had as a successor in sovereignty by virture of reservation of the former government" (at 224; the misspelling is in the source). It then held that "whatever right remained in the State of Tamaulipas, if any, passed to the State of Texas, and that such right was expressly relinquished to the owner of the island by the Act of Confirmation of February 10, 1852" (at 247). Its use to this treatise is narrow: it shows the State's claim to public domain yielding to a title the State's own Legislature had confirmed.
  • ⚠ Cite with care. The lead opinion never mentions the school fund, school lands or the Permanent School Fund. The school-fund purpose of the suit appears only in the reporter's editorial synopsis, not in the court's words, so do not cite Balli for anything about the school fund. The held copy is the lead opinion only. The synopsis reports three dissenting opinions, and those are not held. [VERIFY: the vote and the content of the dissents. The held text does not name the author. It also has no star markers for pages 199–200, so check pins near 198 against the reporter.] → § 5.2 (noted only).

• Kerlin v. Sauceda, 263 S.W.3d 920 (Tex. 2008) (O'Neill, J.; Brister, J., joined by Hecht, Medina and Willett, JJ., concurring).

  • What it is. A private suit by descendants of Juan Jose Balli against the man who bought their claimed Padre Island interests, and against his companies. The Court held "that the Ballis’ claims were not subject to statutory tolling and, accordingly, are time-barred" (at 922), and rendered judgment for the defendants (at 928).
  • ⚠ Not a school-trust authority. The opinion never mentions the State's title, the school fund or any duty the State owes. Its fiduciary discussion concerns private parties only, and nearly all of it is in the concurrence. The lead opinion cites Balli only in a string citation and says nothing about what Balli decided. The case is listed here only so that no one mistakes it for school-trust authority. [VERIFY: the decision date; the held text carries none.]

Authorities identified but not yet held

• Smisson v. State, 71 Tex. 222. The source of the "mere trustee" rejection, on the account given in Theisen at 503 and in Greene as quoted in Bradford at 547. Not held. [VERIFY: year; and the passage's own words, which no held opinion quotes.]

• Greene v. Robison, 109 Tex. 367. Known here only through the long quotation in Bradford at 547. Not held. [VERIFY: year and parallel citation.]

• Reed v. Rogan, 94 Tex. 177, and Glasgow v. Terrell, 100 Tex. 584. Quoted in Theisen at 503.

  • Reed is quoted there for the Legislature's "unlimited discretion" over the times, terms and manner of sale.
  • Glasgow is quoted for the standard of the sale that "would yield the largest sum of money to the fund for which the lands were set apart". Theisen also describes Glasgow as upholding a school-land lessee's preference right to purchase, which bears on Ch. 11.
  • Neither case is held.

• The three dissenting opinions in Balli.

• The annexation and admission resolutions (5 Stat. 797; 9 Stat. 108), and article VII of the Texas Constitution in its current text.

• The 1939 statute. The Library's other pages credit it with dedicating the minerals under riverbeds, lakes and tidelands to the Permanent School Fund and with creating the School Land Board. No primary held here mentions it, and Bradford (1932) predates it. [VERIFY]

• Texas Attorney General opinions. The Library's other pages cite KP-0229, GA-0407 and GA-0707. None is held.

Cross-reference map (section → Texas authority)

What the build found

None of the Library's published pages is contradicted by these five opinions. The Library's internal catalog, however, held three case descriptions and one quotation that the opinions do not bear out. They are corrected here, before any of them reached a published page.

1. Balli was catalogued as "[t]he seminal Texas Permanent School Fund land-title case." The State lost the case. The lead opinion never mentions the school fund. The school-fund framing comes from the reporter's editorial synopsis, not from the court.

2. Bradford was catalogued as a case about accretions and relictions on the Gulf shoreline. It concerns the bed of an inland river in the Panhandle, and the words "accretion" and "reliction" do not appear in it. The State's school-fund theory in the case failed.

3. Bush v. Lone Oak Club was catalogued as a dispute over "school-trust land" administered by the School Land Board, turning on the line of mean high tide. The court calls the land public-trust land. Neither opinion mentions the school fund or the Board. The mean-high-tide line was the dissent's framing; the majority held that the tide line does not limit the Small Bill.

4. A paraphrase was set in quotation marks. The catalog put Theisen's words "the lands belonged to the State as fully as before they were appropriated to public educational purposes" in quotation marks, attributed through a citation to Smisson. The catalog also summarized Theisen as holding that Texas is not a "mere-trustee state." The words are Theisen's own paraphrase of Smisson, not a quotation of it. The passage is background, not Theisen's holding (see the entry above).

A tension flagged, not resolved. The Library's Texas state page and its essay on the states admitted without the federal floor describe Texas in trust terms. The state page calls Texas's two elected officers "two separately elected fiduciaries", and its verdict line reads "Built a trust with no federal land". Nothing in these five opinions contradicts the constitutional and statutory text those pages quote. But the Texas courts, in the passages set out above, declined to treat the State as a mere trustee of the dedicated lands. The trust vocabulary on those pages is the Library's description of the architecture, not the holding of any Texas court. Whether those pages should say so is an editorial decision, and this build does not make it.

Appendix A — Texas, v2. Built against the five Texas opinions held in the Library's collection, each read in full:

• Theisen v. Robison, 117 Tex. 489, 8 S.W.2d 646 (1928)
• State v. Bradford, 121 Tex. 515, 50 S.W.2d 1065 (1932)
• State v. Balli, 144 Tex. 195, 190 S.W.2d 71 (1944), lead opinion only
• Kerlin v. Sauceda, 263 S.W.3d 920 (Tex. 2008)
• Bush v. Lone Oak Club, LLC, No. 18-0264 (Tex. Apr. 24, 2020), majority and dissent

Items the primaries cannot establish carry a [VERIFY] flag rather than an assertion.