No direct duty, no arbitration.

In a macabre echo of the old English case about the two ships Peerless, in SIG-TX Assets, LLC v. Serrato, Serrato family members accused a funeral home of confusing the bodies of two women named Maria. The funeral home sought to compel arbitration under a theory of direct-benefits estoppel, and the panel majority disagreed: “[A]though SIG-TX’s duty to prepare and inter Maria’s body arose from the contracts, there is an independent duty under Texas tort law to immediate family members not to negligently mishandle a corpse.” A dissent saw the family-members’ claims as directly analogous to those of the nonsignatory to the construction contract in In re: Weekley Homes, 180 S.W.3d 127 (Tex. 2005). No. 05-18-00462-CV (April 23, 2019) (mem. op.) (Partida-Kipness, J., for the majority, joined by Carlyle, J.; Bridges, J., dissenting).