Longtime Eastern District of Texas U.S. District Judge William Wayne Justice has long been one of most controversial federal judges and, thus, one of the best-known in Texas. The 86-year old Judge Justice was recently back in the news as the first honoree of the Morris Dees Justice Award, named for the famed Alabama civil rights lawyer, which prompted this profile from the Chronicle’s Janet Elliott.
Judge Justice is the quintessential activist federal judge, so he is not the most popular fellow in all quarters. Maybe he should have been in the legislature, but it’s hard not to admire a judge who at 86-years of age still handles a full court docket and chooses to be activist in cases that promote desegregation in education, equal educational opportunity and prison reform. The legislature has never done a particularly good job of dealing with those issues, anyway.
Houston's Clear Thinkers
Longtime Houston attorney Tom Kirkendall's observations on developments in law, business, medicine, culture, sports, and other matters of general interest to the Houston business, professional, and academic communities.
You know, you say that about an “activist judge,” but my father represented corporate defendants in high-dollar civil suits in Justice’s court for decades in Tyler, and he says he never practiced in front of a fairer judge. I’ve even heard my father ask someone to stop criticizing the Judge in his presence rather abruptly in a social setting. He always thought the Judge’s critics were ill-informed and never wanted any part in it. Since my Dad’s pretty much a Reagan Democrat/Bush Republican, mostly with insurance companies as legal clients, I always thought that was awfully high praise for a judge with a reputation as a flaming liberal.
The main substantive charge of “activism” probably stems from the Ruiz case where he basically took over the state prison system for a time. OTOH, the recent Sunset Advisory Review found that, since that monitoring ended, many of the old problems resurfaced. So in that he may have just been ahead of his time, not necessarily as slanted as his detractors have claimed.
In the era of Bush v. Gore and the Sharon Keller’s CCA, Judge Justice perhaps doesn’t appear quite as activist anymore, anyway. At this point, the goalposts have moved quite a bit.