The Chronicle is reporting this morning that 39 year-old Don Willett, an Austin attorney with close ties to President Bush, will be nominated today by Governor Rick Perry to replace Priscilla Owen on the Texas Supreme Court.
Mr. Willett is a native Texan who graduated from Baylor University and received a JD with honors and an AM in Political Science from Duke University in 1992. After law school, Mr. Willett clerked for Judge Jerre S. Williams of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and then worked in employment law at the Austin office of Haynes & Boone for several years.
From 1996-2000, Mr. Willett served as Research/Special Projects Director for then-Governor Bush in Texas and advised Mr. Bush on various political and legal issues. He parlayed that position into a Domestic Policy & Special Projects Advisor position on the Bush-Cheney 2000 Presidential Campaign and then later on the Presidential Transition Team. In 2002, Mr. Willett was appointed as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Policy where he developed civil and criminal justice initiatives and special projects for the President, including coordinating assistance with judicial nominations and confirmations. After that stint, Mr. Willett served as Special Assistant to the President and Director of Law and Policy for the White House Office of Faith-Based & Community Initiatives and, most recently, as a key advisor for his old friend, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott.
After nomination, Mr. Willett could serve on the Supreme Court without Senate confirmation until the Legislature is called into session, but he would still have to run for election to the seat next year.

One of the more interesting (and longstanding) local civil lawsuits turned an interesting corner yesterday.
U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes — unquestionably the Houston federal judge most likely to challenge the government’s position in any case — handed down this 133 page broadside yesterday ordering the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to pay Houston financier and longtime environmentalist target Charles Hurwitz $72.3 million in sanctions for the FDIC’s conduct in connection with prosecuting a civil lawsuit to hold Mr. Hurwitz and other directors of the defunct United Savings of Texas personally responsible for $250 million in connection with the $1.6 billion loss resulting from the S&L’s 1988 failure.
There is a lot of background to this saga. The FDIC sued Mr. Hurwitz — the chairman and chief executive of Houston-based Maxxam Inc. — and other United Savings directors (including the talented Barry Munitz) in 1995. Interestingly, the FDIC did not contend in the lawsuit that Mr. Hurwitz and Maxxam had looted United Savings; rather, the agency contended merely that Mr. Hurwitz and Maxxam had an obligation to invest more money in the sinking ship of United even after it was clear that the S&L was going down the tubes.

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This Wall Street Journal ($) book review previews U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer‘s soon-to-be-published book, Active Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution (Knopf Sept. 2005) in which Justice Breyer offers a rejoinder to his longtime intellectual opponent on the Supreme Court, Justice Antonin Scalia, who advocates “originalism” – i.e., a more literal interpretation of the Constitution’s meaning at the time of its writing. Justice Scalia’s views were set forth in his book, A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law (Princeton Univ. Press 1997).
In the book, Justice Breyer advances the longstanding criticism that originalism is simply a self-righteous political cover for the fact that all Supreme Court justices, regardless of their judicial philosophy, rely on common elements such as “language, history, tradition, precedent, purpose and consequence” when interpreting laws. It’s the way in which they afford different weight to each factor, contends Justice Breyer, that often has a monumental impact on the American republic.
Justice Breyer’s view does have merit, as the entire originalist rationale has a questionable historical basis (the Founding Fathers had widely divergent views on the Constitution and the role of the judiciary) and certainly does not always lead to a coherent uniform approach to resolving cases. However, even though some of the originalist-based decisions have had the consequence of enlarging the governmental bureaucracies and divesting local communities of control, my sense is that Justice Breyer’s approach is still more likely to result in debacles such as this.
Update: Jim Lindgren over at the Volokh Conspiracy speculates as to the source of Justice Breyer’s theory.