AUSTIN (LN) — The Texas Supreme Court on Thursday reversed an intermediate appellate ruling that had sided with Fasken Oil and Ranch in a mineral-royalty fight stretching back to a 1933 deed, holding that the Eastland court of appeals wrongly concluded it lacked jurisdiction to consider the presumed-grant doctrine and must now weigh both legal paths to ownership under the court's own freshly clarified double-fraction precedent.

The dispute centers on a deed reserving an "undivided one-fourth (1/4th) of the usual one eighth (1/8th) royalty" in lands on the Mabee Ranch. For roughly 85 years, every party to the deed and their successors treated that language as locking in a fixed 1/32 royalty. Fasken's own representative acknowledged that "for 85 years, the Faskens treated the royalty on the Mabee Ranch as a 1/32nd," that the royalty "did not float" for 85 years, and that Fasken "has paid taxes on a .03125 [1/32] royalty interest" and never on a greater amount.

In 2019, Fasken reversed course and filed suit claiming the deed actually reserved a floating 1/4 royalty interest. The trial court granted partial summary judgment for Fasken on deed construction and found no evidence that the presumed-grant doctrine applied. It then certified two controlling questions for permissive interlocutory appeal: whether the deed reserved a floating 1/4 or a fixed 1/32 interest, and whether Fasken was barred from claiming anything beyond 1/32 by affirmative defenses including estoppel, waiver, ratification, and limitations.

The Eastland court of appeals affirmed Fasken's floating-royalty construction and also affirmed on the affirmative defenses. But it declined to reach the presumed-grant doctrine at all, concluding that the trial court's certification order had not specifically listed that doctrine among the controlling questions and that the court therefore lacked jurisdiction to address it.

The Texas Supreme Court reversed that jurisdictional conclusion. Once a trial court authorizes a permissive appeal that an appellate court accepts, the court wrote, the appellate court must resolve the appeal "according to the same principles as any other appeal, including addressing all fairly included subsidiary issues and ancillary issues pertinent to resolving the controlling legal issue," quoting its 2022 decision in Elephant Insurance Co. v. Kenyon. The jurisdictional question, the court said, is not whether the trial court expressly named the presumed-grant doctrine, but whether it was among those fairly included issues — and it was, because the certification order encompassed the summary-judgment ruling that had rejected the doctrine outright.

The court also pointed to its March 13, 2026 decision in Clifton v. Johnson, which clarified how courts should interpret deeds involving double fractions and reaffirmed that "the double-fraction presumption sits alongside the presumed-grant doctrine" — with both prongs asking, "who owns this property today?" Sending the case back without requiring the court of appeals to address both, the court said, would give "the parties half a loaf" and thwart the purpose of permissive appeals.

The per curiam opinion vacated the merits judgment and remanded to the Eastland court of appeals for a fresh assessment of both the deed-construction and presumed-grant arguments. The appellate court has discretion to render judgment outright if it concludes the case may be resolved as a matter of law, or to remand to the trial court for further factual development. The court expressed no view on the correct outcome under either prong.

Justice Devine and Justice Hawkins did not participate in the decision.

Fasken admitted it was "not aware of any of Fasken's Predecessors-in-Interest ever describing the [nonparticipating royalty interest] as anything other than a 1/32nd (or 3.125% or other mathematical equivalent) royalty interest" — a concession the presumed-grant doctrine, if applied, could turn decisive on remand.

The case consolidated two petitions for review: Boren Descendants and Royalty Owners v. Fasken Oil and Ranch, Ltd. (No. 25-0010) and The Mabee Ranch Royalty Partnership, L.P. v. Fasken Oil and Ranch, Ltd. (No. 25-0012).