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Texas A&M;University-Kingsville v. Lawson6/20/2002
Argued on November 14, 2001
Justice Hecht delivered a plurality opinion, in which Chief Justice Phillips, Justice Owen, and Justice Jefferson joined.
Justice Enoch filed an opinion concurring in the judgment.
Justice Rodriguez filed a dissenting opinion, in which Justice Baker, Justice Hankinson, and Justice O'Neill joined.
If a government entity agrees to settle a lawsuit from which it is not immune, can it claim immunity from suit for breach of the settlement agreement? We answer no and accordingly affirm the judgment of the court of appeals.
After Texas A&M;University - Kingsville terminated Grant M. Lawson's employment as a faculty member and clarinet instructor, he sued the University for violations of the Whistleblower Act ; violations of his constitutional freedoms of association, expression, petition, and privacy; and interference with business relations. The University filed a plea to the jurisdiction asserting that all of Lawson's claims were barred by sovereign immunity. The trial court sustained the plea except as to Lawson's Whistleblower Act claim and his constitutional claims for equitable relief. The parties then reached a settlement agreement according to which the University paid Lawson $62,000 and Lawson released his claims and dismissed the action with prejudice. Although the University contends that Lawson had only been an instructor and never a professor, it also agreed as part of the settlement:
Any official inquiry made to the university regarding Lawson's employment shall be referred to the director of personnel. The director of personnel shall respond by confirming that Lawson was employed as an assistant professor at a salary of $31,000 a year, inclusive of benefits. The director of personnel shall state that he may not provide any other information.
Sometime later, Lawson brought the current action against the University for breach of the settlement agreement, alleging that the University had responded to inquiries from Lawson's potential employers differently than it had agreed. Specifically, Lawson claims that the University's director of personnel told one potential employer that Lawson had been an "instructor" and refused to elaborate on what that meant. The University filed a plea to the jurisdiction based on sovereign immunity, which the trial court denied with this explanation:
when somebody sues the state and the court has jurisdiction over that case, which the court did in [Lawson's earlier lawsuit], and that case is settled by the state and the state doesn't live up to the settlement agreement, a plaintiff can bring a suit to enforce or seek damages for violation of that settlement agreement and the state has waived its sovereign immunity, or doesn't have any sovereign immunity, however, you want to look at it, when you're talking about the settlement of a case within the court's jurisdiction.
The University took an interlocutory appeal, arguing that Lawson's action is barred, first, because governmental entities are immune from suit for breach of contract, and second, because the settlement agreement required the University to misrepresent that Lawson had been an assistant professor and was therefore void as against public policy. The court of appeals affirmed the judgment of the trial court but for a different reason than that court had given. The court of appeals held as it had in other cases, "that state agencies waive their immunity from suit by accepting some of the benefits of a contract and refusing to pay for them." The court also held that even if the settlement agreement was void - an issue the court did not decide - the University was st
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