§ 107.001.Grants of Permission Covered

A scope provision, and understanding what a permission resolution is comes first.

Sovereign immunity bars suit against the state unless the Legislature consents. Where no statute waives immunity for a particular claim, a claimant’s only route is a resolution granting permission to sue.

That means asking the Legislature for a private bill — an individual act of consent, passed for one claimant, allowing one lawsuit.

This chapter governs those resolutions, and it applies to permission to sue the state or any of the agencies of government that collectively constitute the government of this state.

The list that follows is comprehensive: agencies, departments, bureaus, boards, commissions, offices, councils, courts, and institutions of higher education as the Education Code defines them.

Naming courts is worth noticing, since it means the judiciary is within the chapter along with the executive.

Institutions of higher education are named because they generate a substantial share of such claims — construction disputes, contract claims and medical claims at university hospitals.

The chapter’s function is to standardise what a resolution does. Before it, each resolution stated its own terms, and what a claimant had been given varied from one to the next.

Now a resolution has a fixed effect, set out in the following section, which a resolution may narrow but not enlarge.