As Wallace Jefferson prepared to end his historic 12-year run on the Texas Supreme Court in 2013 — as the court’s first Black justice and later chief justice — he gave a farewell speech in front of the court. In it, he announced he would be sitting out oral arguments until he officially left in October.
Nathan Hecht, the senior justice at the time, would soon replace him.
“I leave you in good hands. Unlike the rest of us, Nathan will be here forever,” Jefferson told a full courtroom that broke out into laughter.
Chief Justice Hecht came as close to being on the court forever as any Texas judge can. At 75 years old, Hecht is retiring from the top post on the Texas Supreme Court, as required by state law. And he’s made history of his own: His 35 years on the high court makes Hecht the longest-serving justice in the court’s history.
Hecht is nationally renowned for his legal scholarship, his efforts to increase access to justice for low-income individuals and for being vocal on issues burdening today’s judiciary. That’s despite leading a court that has increasingly attracted criticism for its conservative rulings.
Texas voters didn’t approve an amendment to the state constitution last year that would have raised the mandatory retirement age for state justices and judges from 75 to 79. Hecht said even if the amendment had passed, he only might have stayed on the court for six more months.
“I've been a judge 43 years. That's more than half my life — way over half my life,” Hecht told KERA News earlier this month. “So, I accept the will of the people, and I'm looking forward to the next chapter.”
Small-town beginnings
Born in 1949, Hecht grew up on his family’s grain farm in Clovis, New Mexico. The region’s wide, flat plains were the backdrop of his childhood — so flat Hecht could see massive storm clouds rolling in from the horizon miles and miles away.
Hecht majored in math at Yale because he loved the subject, but his grades after his first semester convinced him to switch up. He changed his major to philosophy and went to Southern Methodist University for law school on a scholarship.
After working in Washington, D.C., for a year and spending some time in the Navy, Hecht returned to Dallas and got his start as a business litigator at the law firm Locke Lord in 1976, known then as Locke Purnell.
“A lot of people told me at the time, ‘oh, you know, Dallas is kind of highbrow and you're from a farm. I don’t know how well you're going to like it,’” Hecht said. “But I liked it a lot. I liked the challenges, I liked the history of Dallas, I liked the old red courthouse. There's a lot of areas in Dallas I just kind of identified with.”
Gov. Bill Clements appointed Hecht the 95th District Court judge in Dallas in 1981. He won a seat on the Dallas-area Fifth District Court of Appeals in 1986. Then he and future Chief Justice Tom Phillips ran together to be on the Texas Supreme Court. Hecht was elected in 1988 and took the high court bench in 1989.
Playing the politics game
Just a decade prior to Hecht taking the bench, Texas Democrats dominated statewide races. Clements, elected in 1978, was the first Republican governor in Texas since the Reconstruction era.
But the Democrats’ tight grip on statewide politics began to loosen thanks to a number of high-profile scandals. That included news of lawyers donating to Texas Supreme Court justices and then going on to win their cases in front of the court, as the 1987 60 Minutes episode “Is Justice for Sale in Texas?” highlighted.
That gave Republicans a way to ascend to power, said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston.
“(Hecht) was really a solidification of Republican dominance of the state's high courts,” Rottinghaus said. “He wasn't the reason they started winning, but he was part of the reason that they kept winning. His ability to demonstrate a kind of fair-minded approach to conservativeness in the judiciary was something that other conservative justices were able to mimic and then to get reelected by.”
In fact, Republicans have been so successful that there hasn’t been a Democrat on the court since 1998.
Despite that, Hecht’s a vocal opponent of partisan judicial elections — although he acknowledged he’s been reelected more than any justice in the history of the court.
“The key thing for the judiciary is public trust and confidence,” he said. “And if people lose that, if they start thinking they're not getting a fair shake in court, well, then the whole value of justice becomes depreciated. And that's a very serious thing for the system.”
Legacy as a jurist
Hecht has signed 730 opinions and heard 2,779 arguments during his tenure, according to court staff’s calculations.
Among the most important cases, in Hecht's opinion, were the court’s rulings in the decades-long Texas public school finance saga. The Texas Supreme Court repeatedly ordered the Legislature to improve the way Texas public schools are financed in order to make the process equitable and best serve the needs of all students and school districts.
The court also made history in more subtle ways with rulings like the 2012 decision in Edwards Aquifer v. Day. The court ruled landowners have rights over the groundwater running underneath their property and should be appropriately compensated if the state takes it for public use, which Rottinghaus said established the legal framework for water policy in Texas.
Hecht also said the high court’s decision in TransAmerican Natural Gas Corp. v. Powell in 1991 was important as a move to cut down on excessive sanctions against lawyers that consumed too much time in trials.
“Everything that we do in Texas is in part governed by decisions that Nathan Hecht has been a part of,” former Chief Justice Jefferson told KERA News.
The high court doesn’t just decide cases. With the help of law clerks and committees working behind the scenes, justices set guidelines for the way civil law is practiced in Texas. The court also has administrative control over the state bar, has the sole power to license attorneys in Texas and appoints the board that administers the Texas bar exam.
In all those roles, Jefferson said Hecht demonstrated tremendous intellect and work ethic. Hecht was always thoroughly prepared ahead of oral arguments. And although he’s humble, Jefferson said Hecht could hold his own in the conference room with other justices.
“You're battling for the ideas and the judgments that you think are best for the case and for the state of Texas,” Jefferson said. “But not everyone necessarily agrees. And so, there's a dynamic at play where the justices are really advocating with, sometimes, and often against each other's positions on the court. And Nathan did that better than anyone that I've seen and that I've come across.”
The subject of scrutiny
Not everyone is happy with the political makeup of the court and how they feel it affects the justices’ decision making.
The American Civil Liberties Union and other civil and LGBTQ+ rights groups condemned the Texas Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the state’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors in June.
Democratic candidates unsuccessfully attempted to oust three justices up for election in November because of two recent decisions that doubled down on the state’s strict abortion bans.
Austin attorney Lisa Hobbs considered working under Hecht as the court’s rules attorney. She credits Hecht with helping create a more productive process for the court to consider potential rule changes and for developing a more trusting relationship between the Legislature and the Texas Supreme Court.
Although Hobbs considers Hecht a mentor, she said their politics didn’t always align — and she knew of Hecht and the court’s negative reputation when it came to tort reform. Under Hecht, some court watchers say the bench has become too concerned with creating a business-friendly environment.
“I think people would comment that he is inclined to make companies feel more comfortable coming to Texas and setting up base in Texas and not being so afraid that our tort system in Texas won't protect them for reasonable decisions that they may make within their business judgment role,” Hobbs said.
KERA News spoke to some attorneys — who declined to comment on the record — who said the same, though more critically.
While Hecht said he hears those criticisms — specifically about tort reform — he doesn’t give them great weight.
“As we used to say, we're not legislators in black robes,” Hecht said. “We're trying to apply the law as it's been given to us. If I saw that that wasn't happening, I'd be very worried. But from my perspective, I think the judges — my colleagues — but the judges in the appellate courts and the trial courts are trying to be fair to everybody.”
And one of the connections Hecht made starting out as a lawyer in Dallas put him in the national spotlight for the worse. Harriet Miers, who was heavily scrutinized for her perceived lack of experience after being named President George W. Bush's 2005 nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, graduated with Hecht from SMU and worked with Hecht at Locke Purnell. The two were reportedly on the path to marriage.
But their close relationship was also the subject of a rebuke by the State Commission on Judicial Conduct in 2006. Hecht had given more than 120 media interviews talking about his relationship with Miers and advocating for her appointment. At the end of a decade-long legal battle over it and the attorney's fees he had to pay, Hecht ultimately agreed to pay the Texas Ethics Commission a $1,000 fine.
Access to justice and other passions
A chief justice is often the face of the court, and Hecht has regularly used his role to speak out about issues in the judiciary and advocate for solutions.
Like his predecessor, Hecht called on the Legislature to raise state judges' salaries in 2019. Shortly after, lawmakers increased the base pay for state judges and revised their salary structure. In his last State of the Judiciary address, Hecht called for the creation of business courts for complex civil matters, and those courts began operating in 2024.
Perhaps the issue closest to Hecht’s heart is the civil justice gap. Unlike in criminal cases, where defendants may have a public defender or a court-appointed attorney, parties in civil proceedings — such as divorce or eviction cases — are usually not entitled to court-appointed legal representation if they can’t afford an attorney on their own.
A 2022 report from the Legal Services Corporation found low-income Americans surveyed the year prior do not get any or enough legal help for 92% of their substantial civil legal issues.
Hecht has consistently asked the Legislature to reserve millions in funding for civil legal aid services across the state, which lawmakers have done in varying amounts in nearly every legislative session.
He told the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary during a hearing in July that the nationwide civil justice gap — or "chasm" — was a burden on the courts and a failure of the American legal system.
“The poor and people of limited means cannot afford lawyers, and so they are denied justice,”Hecht said at the time, “pure and simple.”
Former Chief Justice Bridget McCormack of the Michigan Supreme Court said Hecht was a loud and clear voice bringing awareness to access to justice issues long before he became president of the national Conference of Chief Justices from 2019 to 2021, where the two first crossed paths. Hecht is the only chief justice to be president of CCJ for more than one year — former Chief Justice Mark Cady of Iowa died during his term in 2019.
Around that same time, Hecht was also leading the Texas high court during the COVID-19 pandemic. McCormack and others described Texas as a national leader in conducting virtual hearings and otherwise using technology to adapt the courts.
“The Texas state court system was a place where lots of innovation was supported and lots of collaboration between the bench and the bar to solve big problems was supported,” McCormack said. “And I think that only happens when the chief justice is committed to it.”
The latest access to justice initiative in Texas under Hecht: a proposed change to the State Bar Rules and Rules of Civil Procedure that would allow some non-attorneys in the court system to provide some legal services for low-income individuals. The court describes it as a way to help people who qualify for legal aid and pro bono assistance but are turned away because of the resource and staffing shortages organizations can suffer from.
Aside from the statewide and national progress that’s been made on closing the justice gap, Hecht said he’s most proud of the bipartisanship on display over the issue, considering the idea of legal aid has often been criticized as a liberal approach.
“People have come to realize that, no, this is good government,” Hecht said. “It's fairness. It's the right thing to do. It doesn't favor one side or the other. It's not political.”
'Wait to decide until you're on the other side'
It will be up to the governor to choose Hecht’s replacement, who doesn’t need to be a current justice on the court or even someone with experience as a judge.
Among the qualities current and former chief justices say the next Texas chief will need: humility, diligence, fairness, being a good listener and a team player.
As for Hecht’s next steps, he said he’ll continue working to expand access to justice. And he’ll finally get some time to return to the piano.
“Then after that, I'm not sure,” he said. “I expect to be active. But everybody has said, ‘wait to decide until you're on the other side.’ So that's what I'm doing.”
Got a tip? Email Toluwani Osibamowo at tosibamowo@kera.org. You can follow Toluwani on X @tosibamowo.
Copyright 2024 KERA