Duke v. San Jacinto River Authority

This dissent is respectfully filed. This appeal before us involved directly the sole common-law exception to the employment-at-will doctrine in Texas law. Appellant, Duke, necessarily had to demonstrate three vital elements of his claim to remain in court. The three are: (1) a discharge or firing (2) for the sole reason (3) that he refused to perform an illegal or unlawful act. Hence, the absence of a material issue of fact as to any one of the three essential prongs of the plaintiff’s case would totally justify the granting of a summary judgment.

The River Authority takes the position that,…