And a late self-reply as I've found the relevant case citation, for whomever may find this useful, most likely Future Me....
Texas Supreme Court cases are recorded in West's South Western Reporter. Westlaw is famously obsessive with copyright, but all cases prior to 1928 are now in the public domain.
There's an online archive of South Western Reporter at Hathi Trust:
The full citation for the case, which gives the volume and page number, is:
H. T.C. Ry. Co. v. East
Full title: HOUSTON TEXAS CENTRAL RAILROAD COMPANY v. W.A. EAST
Court: Supreme Court of Texas
Date published: Jun 13, 1904
Citations
81 S.W. 279 (Tex. 1904)
81 S.W. 279
So we want South West Reporter, volume 81, page 279.
(Hathi infuriatingly doesn't permit full-volume downloads, but you can download PDFs one page at a time...)
I'd turned this up using a GPT (FastGPT from Kagi), asking it what the early-20th century Texas case concerning rule of capture was, whether that case was online anywhere (reply: not really, though there are several discussions of it), and then where Texas State Supreme Court rulings were published. OCLC failed to give reasonable references, the Internet Archive doesn't seem to carry these, but the UPenn Online Books Page (Homepage: <https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/>, a hugely useful tool I'm deciding) pointed me to Hathi.
On GPT: the ability to go through a series of questions about a topic, rather than just doing a keyword search, really is transformational. I'd been an early user of Google (1998/9), and online library catalogues for over a decade before that. Being able to inquire about topics and narrow down where to find things is tremendously useful, and I'm still wrapping my head around this as a tool.
Texas Supreme Court cases are recorded in West's South Western Reporter. Westlaw is famously obsessive with copyright, but all cases prior to 1928 are now in the public domain.
There's an online archive of South Western Reporter at Hathi Trust:
<https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100333420>
(Via the Online Books Page at University of Pennsylvania: <https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=swrep...>)
The full citation for the case, which gives the volume and page number, is:
So we want South West Reporter, volume 81, page 279.Which is here:
<https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044103152245&se...>
(Hathi infuriatingly doesn't permit full-volume downloads, but you can download PDFs one page at a time...)
I'd turned this up using a GPT (FastGPT from Kagi), asking it what the early-20th century Texas case concerning rule of capture was, whether that case was online anywhere (reply: not really, though there are several discussions of it), and then where Texas State Supreme Court rulings were published. OCLC failed to give reasonable references, the Internet Archive doesn't seem to carry these, but the UPenn Online Books Page (Homepage: <https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/>, a hugely useful tool I'm deciding) pointed me to Hathi.
On GPT: the ability to go through a series of questions about a topic, rather than just doing a keyword search, really is transformational. I'd been an early user of Google (1998/9), and online library catalogues for over a decade before that. Being able to inquire about topics and narrow down where to find things is tremendously useful, and I'm still wrapping my head around this as a tool.