With today’s orders, the Texas Supreme Court formally accepted review of In re Deepwater Horizon, No. 13-0670 , the case that it received from the Fifth Circuit last week. The issues covered by the certified questions will now be briefed, and the Court will most likely set the case for argument in January or February.

The Court did not grant any other petitions for review. Among the denials, there was only one case that had reached the merits-briefing stage: Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center v. Margarita Hernandez Villagran, et al., No. 12-0531 . Because petitions that reach full briefing are usually handed down after conference weeks (which this week was not), I decided to look a little more closely.

The Texas Tech petition raised immunity issues under §101.106 and had been fully briefed for about six months. It was apparently waiting on the outcome of Texas Adjutant General's Office v. Michele Ngakoue, No. 11-0686 . That decision was handed down last week, and marked a 5-4 rejection of the state’s strict view of §101.106 — which was also at the heart of the petition denied today.

Next week: The first oral arguments of the new term will be held Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. The Court’s calendar shows both Thursday and Friday blocked out for the State Bar appellate CLE in Austin, at which several Justices and members of the Court staff will be speaking.

I’m working on a kind of “StatPack” about the Court’s term. I hope to finish that next week. If you’d like numbers sooner, you can peek at the updated authorship tables and voting charts. These tables are integrated with my case database, so you can drill down to see exactly which opinions are being counted.