IN THE SUPREME COURT OF TEXAS

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NO. 16-0773

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WALLACE L. HALL,JR., IN HIS OFFICIAL CAPACITY AS A REGENT FOR THE 

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS SYSTEM, PETITIONER

v.

WILLIAM H. MCRAVEN, IN HIS OFFICIAL CAPACITY AS CHANCELLOR FOR THE 

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS SYSTEM, RESPONDENT

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ON PETITION FOR REVIEW FROM THE

COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE THIRD DISTRICT OF TEXAS

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JUSTICE WILLETT, concurring.

In 1935 a stone carver named Wood Hall risked his life for nearly three weeks to chisel 

twelve words across the iconic centerpiece of the University of Texas campus: “Ye shall know the 

truth and the truth shall make you free.”1

 

1

John 8:32 (King James).
2

The UT Tower, the definitive landmark of a world-renowned “University of the first 

class,”2soars 307 feet. The 360-degree view from high above is spectacular, stretching far and 

wide.3

Once the site of unspeakable sorrow, the Tower is the signature backdrop for exultant 

commencements and is regularly illuminated in orange to mark athletic championships and 

academic honors—plus Texas Independence Day, of course.

When the words from John’s Gospel were inscribed above the south entrance to the 

Tower’s Victorian-Gothic Main Building, the building fittingly served as the University’s central 

library, the place where truth was sought and curiosity quenched.

The architecture is commanding, and from the observation deck roughly two-dozen stories 

above Jesus’s words, one can locate other Austin landmarks that help tell the story of perpetually 

curious UT System Regent Wallace Hall:

 Texas Capitol—where Governor Rick Perry appointed, and the Senate confirmed, 

Hall to the System’s governing board, and where Regent Hall’s dogged inquiries 

regarding various matters at flagship UT-Austin, most notably improper favoritism 

in admissions, sparked legislative and criminal investigations of his penchant for 

requesting records and posing uncomfortable questions;

 UT System Offices—where the Board of Regents heard the results of an external 

investigation confirming “frequent pressure” to admit students “connected to 

influential people,”

4

and where the Board adopted measures to deny Regent Hall 

access to a disk containing the unredacted records compiled in the investigation; 

 

2 TEX. CONST., art. VII, § 10.

3 Proud Texans will put aside the fact that UT’s majestic Tower was partly inspired by the city hall building 

in . . . Camden, New Jersey. As UT’s esteemed architect, Paul Cret, sketched Tower designs, he gazed from his 

Philadelphia office across the Delaware River into Camden, whose new city hall dominated the skyline. How “Texan” 

is the UT Tower? https://jimnicar.com/2013/03/23/how-texan-is-the-ut-tower/ (last visited Jan. 24, 2017).

4 Kroll Associates, Final Report to the Office of the Chancellor of the University of Texas System, at 39 

(February 6, 2015).
3

 Texas Attorney General’s Office—where the state’s chief legal officer concluded 

that Regent Hall, as a System fiduciary charged with overseeing UT governance, 

has an inherent right of access to the records underlying the Kroll Report,

5

thus 

spurring the Board, two days later, to stiffen its information-access rules for 

Regents; and

 Texas Supreme Court—where the years-long saga ends, the Court having 

concluded that Regent Hall’s ultra vires suit against the chancellor (the first by a 

regent against the University or the chancellor since UT opened in 1873 with eight 

professors and 221 students) cannot overcome the State’s sovereign immunity.

UT sculptor Wood Hall is probably unrelated to UT Regent Wallace Hall. But both risked 

much in service to the twelve words of aspiration—both scholarly and heavenly—etched onto 

UT’s most iconic building.

I join the Court’s opinion. The doctrine of sovereign immunity, by insulating imprudence, 

is innately unfair to those wronged. The deal it strikes is often a raw deal.

* * *

Everything is bigger in Texas, including political theater, and the odyssey of Wallace Hall 

is, like most Texas tales, filled with outsized personalities. Regent Hall has never been bashful 

about asking unwelcome questions. He is inquisitive. His detractors brand his inquiries an 

inquisition. He is probing. His decriers consider his probes a problem. He is questioning. His 

disparagers deem his questions a quandary. Regent Hall takes his oversight role seriously, spurred 

by a no-nonsense fiduciary duty to the University, including the specific statutory responsibility 

to “set campus admission standards.”6 But his questions about wrongdoing (and not just about 

 

5 Tex. Att’y Gen. Op. No. KP-0021 (2015). The Attorney General has filed a brief supporting Regent Hall in 

this case.

6 TEX. EDUC. CODE § 51.352(d)(4).
4

admissions) have sown discord. The Board considers Regent Hall’s request for the Kroll disk less 

oversight than overreach. 

The Board of Regents did much to keep critical documents away from Regent Hall, 

instituting, as the Court describes it, “a governance structure that leaves Hall at the mercy of the 

Chancellor’s discretionary legal determination.”7 But even before the Board’s July ratification of 

the chancellor’s proposed two-step process, the Hall hubbub had already incited rules changes. In 

May 2015, just two days after the Attorney General issued his pro-Hall opinion—concluding the 

Board “may not prohibit an individual regent from obtaining access to records in the possession 

of the University that are necessary to fulfill his duties as a regent”8—the Board made telling 

deletions to Regents’ Rule 10101 § 3.1:

In carrying out the duties and responsibilities referenced . . . above, it is the 

responsibility of each Regent to be knowledgeable . . . and each member of the 

Board of Regents has the right and authority to inform himself/herself as to the 

duties, responsibilities, and obligations of the member in such a manner as they 

each may deem proper. Members of the Board of Regents are to be provided access 

to such information as in their individual judgments will enable them to fulfill their 

duties and responsibilities as Regents of the U.T. System.

Besides dialing back § 3.1’s prior emphasis on Regents’ individualized discretion and judgment, 

the Board that same day also (1) amended § 5.4.5 to require a Board majority (up from two votes) 

to approve a Regent’s unresolved information request, and (2) adopted § 5.4.6 to delegate to the 

chancellor the duty of applying federal privacy law. The Attorney General’s pro-access opinion 

predated—indeed, likely provoked—these Hall-proofing restrictions, and the Attorney General’s 

brief in this Court argues that Regent Hall, as a member of the UT’s governing board charged with 

 

7 Ante at ___.

8 Tex. Att’y Gen. Op. No. KP-0021 (2015).
5

setting admissions policies, satisfies the federal “legitimate educational interest” standard that 

entitles him to access the complete, unredacted Kroll file.9

But Regent Hall did not sue his fellow Regents for limiting his right to access. He sued the 

chancellor, who carried out the Board’s directive to strip out confidential material. The 

chancellor’s record redactions were carried out at their behest. As the Court explains, his 

withholding of unredacted records did not exceed his granted authority; it was fully within it—

intra, not ultra, his vires—per the Regents’ express, parameter-setting command: Regents’ Rule 

10801 § 5.4.6. Regents’ rules carry the same legal force as an enactment of the Legislature and 

prescribe the chancellor’s specific responsibilities.10 It may seem a distinction without a difference, 

to name the CEO instead of the Regents to whom the CEO reports. But amid the Byzantine 

complexity of sovereign-immunity law, which admittedly elevates form over substance, missing a 

procedural bull’s-eye is sometimes fatal.11 As the Court notes, the limits on Regent Hall’s claimed 

right to complete access “are limits imposed by the Board . . . attributable to the Board and no one 

else.”12 We take suits as we find them, and this one, ably argued by both sides, named the 

chancellor who enforced the Regents’ access restrictions rather than the Regents who enacted

them.

 

9 20 U.S.C. § 1232g(b)(1)(A).

10 Univ. of Hous. v. Barth, 403 S.W.3d 851, 855 (Tex. 2013).

11 For example, under the Texas Tort Claims Act’s election-of-remedies provision, “if suit is filed against a 

government employee in that employee’s official capacity, then ‘[o]n the employee’s motion, the suit against the 

employee shall be dismissed unless the plaintiff files amended pleadings dismissing the employee and naming the 

governmental unit as defendant’ within thirty days.” Tex. Adjutant Gen.’s Office v. Ngakoue, 408 S.W.3d 350, 352 

(Tex. 2013) (quoting TEX. CIV. PRAC. & REM. CODE § 101.106(f)).

12 Ante at ___.
6

The Court recognizes the disquieting concerns raised by the Board’s access restrictions: 

“We are not unsympathetic to Hall’s plight.”13 Under Texas law, individual Regents owe an 

individual duty to exercise individual judgment.14 That necessarily requires individual access. The 

Legislature does not see a Regency as a sinecure, but as a solemn fiduciary committed to 

institutional accountability, including blowing a whistle on potential improprieties. The Board’s 

new access hurdles have the potential to short-circuit unwanted inquiries by Regents who, like 

Wallace Hall, wield an abundance of verve and resolve. The Court concedes as much, noting the 

access scheme perhaps “elevates the status quo above transparency,”15 something Machiavelli 

warned of 500 years ago: “the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and 

only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit from the new order.”16

* * *

“Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”17

 

13 Ante at ___.

14

“Each member of a governing board has the legal responsibilities of a fiduciary in the management of 

funds under the control of institutions subject to the board's control and management." TEX. EDUC. CODE § 51.352(e) 

(emphasis added). The Regents’ own rules still underscore individualized responsibility. For example, Regents’ Rule 

10101 § 3.1, swiftly diluted after the Attorney General’s May 2015 opinion, still stresses “it is the responsibility of 

each Regent to be knowledgeable” adding, “each member of the Board of Regents has the right and authority to inform 

himself/herself as to the duties, responsibilities, and obligations of the member.” (emphases added).

15 Ante at ___.

16 NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI, THE PRINCE AND THE DISCOURSES 21 (Luigi Ricci trans., McGraw Hill Educ. 1st 

ed. 1950) (1532).

17 John 8:32 (King James).
7

I am not a Longhorn alumnus. But I revere what is doubtless the most-read inscription on 

the Forty Acres, an inscription I hope, notwithstanding today’s result, will hearten future truthseekers and truth-tellers . . . til Gabriel blows his horn.18

__________________________________________

Don R. Willett

Justice

OPINION DELIVERED: January 27, 2017

 

18 LEWIS JOHNSON & JOHN LANG SINCLAIR, “THE EYES OF TEXAS” (1902).