§ 101.061.Tort Committed Before January 1, 1970

A commencement provision written as an exclusion: the chapter does not apply to a claim based on an act or omission that occurred before January 1, 1970.

The Texas Tort Claims Act took effect on that date, and before it sovereign immunity in Texas was near-complete. The section confirms the Act does not operate retroactively.

The measuring point is the act or omission, not the injury, the discovery, or the filing. A latent harm manifesting decades later is still outside the chapter if the conduct predates 1970.

The section is not dead. Claims involving long-latency conditions — exposure cases in particular — can turn on conduct from the 1960s, and the limitations chapter's discovery rules can keep such a claim alive long after the conduct.

The provision also dates the Act itself, which is useful context for the rest of the chapter. The waiver is a little over fifty years old, and everything in Texas governmental liability before it was a matter of legislative permission granted case by case — the practice the permission-to-sue language in the waiver section still echoes.