On this chart, the areas are proportional to the number of petitions at each stage. The width of each box has also been adjusted to represent the fraction of petitions that ever reach that stage. The narrower the box, the fewer petitions reach that stage.
The Texas Supreme Court considers cases in several steps. Like the U.S. Supreme Court, the Texas Supreme Court has discretion over which cases it decides. Litigants must first persuade the Court that the issue presented is important enough to warrant the Court's attention.
Petitions filed in 2026 or later have a new review process. Those petitions are first reviewed by the Justices to see whether the Court believes that a response is necessary. If not, the petition is denied. If the Court orders a response, then the next decision for the Court is whether to grant the case for oral argument. If not, the Court can either choose to deny the case immediately or to order merits briefing for a possible per curiam.
The most significant difference between these new rules and the pre-2026 rules is when the Court decides whether to grant review. Under the new rules, the Court intends to make most of those grant decisions based on the petitions alone. The case will be granted and merits briefs ordered, during the months leading up to argument. Under the old rules, the Court's practice was to first order merits briefing, and wait to review those briefs, before making that grant decision. That resulted in two rounds of briefing—petitions and then merits briefs—before a possible oral argument.