Dubai Petroleum Inc. v. Kazi

In Dubai Petroleum Inc. v. Kazi, 12 S.W.3d 71, 76 (Tex. 2000), the supreme court determined that statutory prerequisites, while mandatory, were no longer jurisdictional. Id. at 76. The court rejected the dichotomy between statutory and common-law causes of action established in Mingus v. Wadley and its progeny on the ground that district courts in Texas were courts of general jurisdiction. Id. at 75-76; see also Tex. Const. art. V, 8. Under this rationale, a party's failure to satisfy a statutory prerequisite did not deprive the district court of jurisdiction to hear the party's claim but merely determined whether a party "established their right under the statute to go forward with their suit." Dubai, 12 S.W.3d at 75-76. The court explained, "The right of a plaintiff to maintain a suit, while frequently treated as going to the question of jurisdiction, has been said to go in reality to the right of the plaintiff to relief rather than to the jurisdiction of the court to afford it.'" Id. at 76-77. The Texas Supreme Court disapproved of a long line of cases holding that, when a claim is based on a statute, the statutory provisions are mandatory, exclusive, and require compliance in all respects, otherwise the trial court lacks subject-matter jurisdiction. See id. at 75-77. The Kazi court sided with the modern trend that treats failure to comply with statutory requirements as defeating a claimant's right to relief but not defeating the trial court's jurisdiction: "The modern direction of policy is to reduce the vulnerability of final judgments to attack on the ground that the tribunal lacked subject matter jurisdiction . . . The right of a plaintiff to maintain a suit, while frequently treated as going to the question of jurisdiction, has been said to go in reality to the right of the plaintiff to relief rather than to the jurisdiction of the court to afford it." Id. at 76-77. The Texas Supreme Court held that courts should not assume that all statutory requirements are jurisdictional requirements. The Court observed that a lack of jurisdiction deprives the court of the power to act (other than to determine that it has no jurisdiction), and to ever have acted. Id. at 74-75. Consequently, any jurisdictional irregularity suscepts a judgment to attacks upon its finality, even if no party raised the issue at or before the time of judgment. Id. at 76. In Kazi, the court held that the Legislature did not intend the statutory requirements for suing in Texas for an injury or death that occurred in a foreign country to be jurisdictional. Id. at 77.