The issue in this case is whether a title dispute permits a payor of oil-and-gas proceeds to withhold payments without interest under the safe-harbor provision of the Texas Natural Resources Code. The safe-harbor statute permits payors of oil-and-gas proceeds to withhold payments without interest if there is a payee title dispute that would affect distribution of payments or reasonable doubt as to the payee's clear title.

In this dispute over a warranty deed by a previous owner after that owner gave the property as a gift to his spouse, the principal issue is whether the estoppel-by-deed doctrine requires the previous owner's sons, who inherited from their mother, to surrender their interest to satisfy their father's warranty breach.

The issue is whether devise of a "double-fraction royalty" was a "fixed" fractional royalty or a "floating" fraction of royalty. In this case one line of descendants who took royalty interests bequeathed to three children in 1949 sued to declare the will split royalties equally among the three children (and, later, their descendants and successors) after other another in a line of descendants executed a lease with a royalty greater than 1/8th. The will provided an undivided one-third of an undivided 1/8th royalty to each child who got separate tracts but mineral rights in all. But did that mean sharing a one-third royalty equally or that those children - and their descendants - got a 1/24th royalty from production on the other tracts? Texas courts have been split on how such a bequest should be interpreted. In this case the trial court granted the Hysaw descendants summary judgment, ruling that the will devised to each of the three children a one-third royalty from all tracts. The court of appeals reversed, holding that descendants were entitled to a 1/24th share of production from the other two tracts.

The issue is whether a floating royalty interest or a fixed royalty was created by language that reserved an undivided one-half interest in the royalty and restating that as "being equal to one-sixteenth of the production."