It’s easily forgotten when considering the legacy of the longest-serving judge in Texas history, but Nathan Hecht lost his first race for the Texas Supreme Court.
In 1986, he went down in the Republican primary to Charles Ben Howell, who then lost in the general election in the first of Howell’s five unsuccessful runs for the Supreme Court.
But Hecht was no Howell.
He quickly recovered, winning in a 1988 election that portended Republican political dominance. Voters have kept him in office an additional six times, including as chief justice in 2014 and 2020.
Now as mandatory retirement forces him off the court after 35 years, Hecht has shaped the state’s modern jurisprudence more than any other individual. Business interests and other supporters say he has brought fairness, efficiency and predictability to the civil legal system.
He guided the Third Branch through a tumultuous 2020 when the gears of justice were stopped by a deadly pandemic. Hecht marshaled state resources to quickly sign up 1,000 judges to learn how to use Zoom for hearings. Another crisis soon loomed when a Russian ransomware attack left the intermediate appellate courts offline for two months.
This year he oversaw the writing of rules for the startup of a legislatively mandated system of specialized business courts that took effect Sept. 1. Creation of 10 trial courts and an intermediate appellate court was a massive undertaking that has gone smoothly, despite the lack of dedicated courtroom space.
For Wallace Jefferson, an appellate attorney who joined the court in 2001 and served as chief justice from 2004 to 2013, finding out where Hecht stood on an issue was critical to evaluating an appeal.
“What has he written on this? How can we appeal to him?” said Jefferson, a partner at Alexander Dubose Jefferson. “From deciding what cases to bring and how to plead them and how to preserve a question for the appellate court to making arguments in any court of appeals to trying to persuade the Supreme Court of Texas to take the case to weighing the case.
“For much of that Nathan Hecht was on your mind, and I just think that shows the powerful influence. It wasn’t just because of his name, but it was because of his influence and the way he wrote and the way he analyzed.”
Dallas appellate specialist Ben Mesches said Hecht has wielded influence in many areas, including on procedural rules, class action certifications, contract interpretation and pretrial proceedings.
“Many of his early dissents ultimately became the majority view of the court,” said Mesches, a Haynes Boone partner. “It’s difficult to imagine any other judge who has had quite the impact on the court as Chief Justice Hecht.”
Notably, Hecht has become a state and national leader of efforts to provide free civil legal assistance to low-income individuals and veterans. He helped secure ongoing funding from state lawmakers for legal aid programs and is promoting rule changes that would allow licensed legal paraprofessionals to provide certain legal services.
“In my view, that is an incredible part of Nathan’s legacy. He’s had a profound effect on the financial resources that we have in Texas now,” said Deborah Hankinson, chair of the Texas Access to Justice Foundation and a Dallas arbitrator who served on the court with Hecht from 1997 to 2002.
The 75-year-old New Mexico native attributes his commitment to improving legal aid to lessons about justice and mercy he learned from his parents while growing up on his family’s farm. The five years he spent as a district court judge in Dallas County during the early 1980s gave him a firsthand look at how a lawsuit can profoundly affect a person’s life.
In a recent interview with The Texas Lawbook, Hecht said he’s willing to rock the boat with creative ideas such as allowing nonattorney paraprofessionals to provide limited civil legal services to low-income Texans because 90 percent of needed legal services go unmet. The proposal, announced by the court in August, has faced pushback from some attorneys and legislators, who questioned Hecht at a recent House hearing about whether the court has authority to license paraprofessionals and court-access assistants.
The court on Nov. 4 delayed a timeline for adoption of the rules by Dec. 1 to allow more time for public comments.
“I think it will be accepted,” Hecht said. “It’s not a threat to the profession. It’s not a threat to people’s law practice. I get the arguments that you ought to have a law license, but when you’ve got as many people in this country as we do who desperately need civil legal services and they cannot get them at all, you’ve got to do as much as you can.”
Republican Trailblazer
Hecht came of age as a judicial candidate during the heyday of Texas’ renowned plaintiffs’ lawyers, whose huge wins before juries were increasingly irritating the business community. When a Harris County jury in 1985 awarded Pennzoil $10.5 billion in its lawsuit against Texaco for its actions in Pennzoil’s failed merger with Getty Oil, the national press took note of a verdict billed as the largest damage award in the history of corporate litigation.
In the fall of 1987, Gov. Bill Clements, the first Republican governor since Reconstruction, appointed Hecht’s fellow district judge, Tom Phillips, as Supreme Court chief justice to replace John Hill, who had resigned to work for an end to partisan judicial elections.
Phillips took office in the aftermath of national news reports questioning the ethics of large campaign contributions made by lawyers on both sides in the Pennzoil case. A widely viewed 60 Minutes segment by correspondent Mike Wallace showed legal victor Joe Jamail, wired for sound and drink in hand, shmoozing with Democratic justices at a judicial conference and noted his large campaign contributions, perfectly legal at the time, to justices who would decide the appeal. Both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal editorialized against the Texas system for selecting justices.
The Supreme Court eventually upheld Pennzoil’s win, leading to Texaco’s $3 billion settlement.
Hecht said he saw the appointment of Phillips as “the greatest thing in the world” and eagerly offered to help Phillips raise money and campaign in the 1988 election.
“And [Phillips] said, ‘No, I mean you need to come on the court, too.’ I said it was impossible. No Republican had ever been elected to the Supreme Court in history,” recalled Hecht.
But faced with a strong primary challenge to retain his seat on the Fifth Court of Appeals, Hecht decided to try again for the Supreme Court and filed to run against incumbent Justice William Kilgarlin, who was featured in the 60 Minutes report.
In a recent interview, Phillips said the widely watched broadcast and the Pennzoil-Texaco case created national attention on the judicial campaigns.
“It played a decisive role for both Nathan and me in that our opponents were prominently mentioned on that show. And, of course, we weren’t mentioned because we weren’t there,” Phillips said.
Phillips placed a voluntary limit on the size of campaign donations, and others, including Hecht, followed suit. In 1995, the Legislature enacted limits as part of the Judicial Campaign Fairness Act.
Running under a joint “Clean the Slate in ‘88” platform, Phillips, Hecht and Eugene Cook became the first Republicans elected to the Supreme Court. Voters also elected Democrats Lloyd Doggett and Jack Hightower.
It was the beginning of a Republican dominance that would see the last Democrat elected to the court in 1994.
Business Friendly Court
Phillips left the court in 2004 to return to private practice at Baker Botts, but Hecht would remain. In 2013, Gov. Rick Perry named him to replace Jefferson, who also left to resume a lucrative law practice.
Now the longest serving Supreme Court jurist leaves office at the end of the year. He turned 75 in August and the state constitution mandates his retirement. Voters last year rejected an amendment that would have raised the judicial retirement age to 79.
He will leave a court that is stronger and more predictable than he found it, a nine-member body that frequently speaks with one voice, compared to the bitterly divided opinions of earlier decades. Since Hecht became chief justice, the court has boosted its efficiency by deciding all submitted cases by the end of each term.
Critics say his brand of conservative, corporate friendly rulings have failed everyday Texans who were injured or killed in accidents or by defective products. Several trial lawyers contacted for this profile declined to speak, with one saying he was following his mother’s admonition to keep quiet if you couldn’t say anything nice.
The court has overturned numerous large jury awards for plaintiffs in personal injury and wrongful death cases. It has proven increasingly reluctant to overturn statutes, including a controversial ruling earlier this year that rejected claims from several women who had difficulty accessing emergency healthcare during complicated pregnancies under Texas’ near-total abortion ban.
Hecht pushes back on the notion that the court during his tenure has made it more difficult to sue businesses.
“Well, I don’t know that we have. The Legislature has, it’s true,” he said. “The Legislature has been very active in medical malpractice, and it started back in the late ‘80s. The big changes were in 2003, and we didn’t have anything to do with that.”
The 2003 law limited product liability cases and capped noneconomic damages in medical malpractice cases at $250,000, resulting in many attorneys declining to take cases from average Texans with lower-wage jobs who couldn’t show a lot of economic damages.
Hecht said the Texas Citizens Participation Act in 2011 made suing harder in cases involving constitutional rights or matters of public interest. The court in 2013 followed the Legislature’s direction by adopting procedural rule 91a, which allows a party to seek dismissal of a groundless cause of action.
“We changed the discovery rules in 1999, but they apply to everybody. We put time limits on depositions, but that doesn’t affect one side or the other. Pretty much everybody is affected by that,” Hecht said. “And, you know, the big wars that were going on in ’88 about ‘you’re pro-plaintiff,’ ‘you’re pro-business,’ that’s all gone.”
As the court’s leading writer of procedural rules during his long tenure, Hecht oversaw new appellate rules in 1997 that eliminated technical briefing requirements that regularly tripped up lawyers. “There were all these ways you could lose on appeal that had to do with technicalities about the format of your brief and they didn’t have anything to do with the substance,” said Hecht, adding that there was widespread agreement for the changes.
Phillips, a student of Texas judicial history, said the only competition for Hecht being the most consequential judge in Texas history is John Hemphill. Hemphill is credited with developing Texas jurisprudence by looking to Spanish and Mexican law on community property and homestead exemption during his time as chief justice of the Supreme Court of the Republic of Texas from 1841 to 1846 and of the Supreme Court of Texas for the next 12 years.
“So, Hemphill was very important, but he was only there 18 years. Nathan’s been there twice as long,” said Phillips. “There has been a much larger volume of cases come through the Texas High Court than did in Judge Hemphill’s day.”
Hecht’s work ethic is unparalleled, and he is known to dive deep into legal history, once going all the way back to the Code of Hammurabi in an opinion. He works behind the scenes to improve the court’s work, making suggestions for other justices’ draft opinions as they are circulated.
“It always seemed to me that his goal was the betterment of the court product and not the let’s make Nathan Hecht look like a universal genius and the rest of these people like slobs,” said Phillips. “And that was true from the first day he got there. I mean, even in those tense times, he was out to make everybody look their best.”
From Farmer’s Son to Ivy League
Before he began blazing his trail as a Texas judge, Hecht was a farm kid from Clovis, New Mexico, who thought he would become a scientist. Living off the caliche Caprock Escarpment had become more profitable when his grandfather drilled the first irrigation well in Curry County in the early 1950s, sinking it 425 feet to reach the Ogallala Aquifer.
“When they developed pumps and engines that could do that, it just changed. I mean, the desert bloomed, literally, when I was growing up,” he said. Yield on a wheat crop went from 10 to 100 bushels an acre.
In an article by Beck Redden’s Jacqueline M. Furlow for the Summer 2014 Journal of the Texas Supreme Court Historical Society, Hecht said he was inspired by the son of the town’s pharmacist to attend Yale University. After struggling as a math major and talking with his family’s lawyer, Hecht changed his major to philosophy with a focus on ethics.
His draft number was 102, meaning that he would receive his induction notice soon after graduation, according to the article, so he applied and was accepted into the Navy JAG Corps. The Corps gave him time to attend Southern Methodist University School of Law and to clerk for Judge Roger Robb on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
Hecht handled two criminal cases for the Navy before post-Vietnam cutbacks relieved him of further obligations. He joined the Locke Purnell firm in Dallas where he learned to try cases to a jury, handle appeals and made partner.
One of his favorite cases from that time was a class action he tried with Orrin Harrison in Lubbock over price-fixing by the area’s five liquor dealers.
“They put their price lists in the trunk of one of their employee’s cars and distributed them to everybody every week. And they all got charged the same price,” he said.
It was a textbook example of a class action, where it was easy to split the proceeds based on store receipts. As a justice, Hecht would later guide the Supreme Court to rein in an explosion in class actions through stricter requirements on class certifications.
Setting his sights on becoming a judge, Hecht raised his profile through Dallas Bar activities and pro bono representation. A firm partner encouraged him to apply to Gov. Clements for a vacancy on the district court in 1981, and a week later he was on the bench.
One of Nine
Following the tumultuous 1988 election, the new justices joined a court that was being pulled in opposite directions by powerful competing groups, the business community and the trial lawyers.
Hecht said the court split on many issues, including whether to recognize a common law tort for the wrongful death of a parent and on free speech issues involving anti-abortion clinic protestors.
“The court was nowhere near as collegial as it now is, but we had to get our work done. So, we worked together to get our work done,” said Hecht.
In 1989, however, the justices spoke with one voice in the Edgewood case, ruling in an opinion by Justice Oscar Mauzy that the state’s system of funding schools through local property taxes was not raising sufficient revenue to meet constitutional requirements.
Over the next three years and two subsequent rulings, the court and Legislature went back and forth on a funding solution that included voter rejection of a plan to create county education districts to levy property taxes at a rate mandated by the state.
Hecht said legislative threats to defund the judiciary over the battle between the government branches were mostly noise.
“But in some states, it was more than noise,” Hecht said. “Kansas had a really difficult time getting through it. And several states did because there was just real resistance in the legislative branch.”
In the 2005 West Orange-Cove case, Hecht authored a 7-1 decision that a cap on local school property taxes effectively created an unconstitutional state property tax because so many districts were taxing at the top rate. Recalling the case, Hecht said disparities in funding that were available to districts “were so great that you knew something had to be done.”
The Legislature again struggled to respond before finally increasing taxes, including restructuring the business franchise tax.
While the school finance cases impacted most Texans, his work on procedural issues changed how litigation was practiced.
Hecht believes that one of his most important opinions came in 1991 after a period of rampant discovery sanctions motions threatened to substantially increase the cost of litigation.
“There was a real concern in the ‘80s and ‘90s that the sanction wars were going to just take over litigation and people weren’t ever going to get to the merits,” Hecht said. “And in TransAmerican v. Powell, we said no, it’s got to be very serious” to merit sanctions.
The opinion was unanimous as the justices agreed the overuse of sanctions was a problem.
“One view might be that too many plaintiffs’ lawyers were being sanctioned. Another view, too many defense lawyers were being sanctioned. But at the end of the day, the problem was sanctions, not what side of the docket you were on,” Hecht said.
More recently, Hecht wrote the 2023 majority opinion for a sharply divided court in a case expected to result in the dismissal of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas from Winter Storm Uri-related liability claims. The court determined that the membership-based nonprofit corporation is a government agency entitled to sovereign immunity. The four dissenting justices said the decision “undermines public trust” by granting sovereign immunity to prevent a private entity from being held accountable for potential responsibility.
Legal Services Champion
Jefferson was chief justice in 2010 when Harriet O’Neill resigned as a justice. She had been the court’s liaison to the Texas Access to Justice Commission, the statewide umbrella organization for legal services to the poor. Jefferson said he approached Hecht about filling that role, telling him, “Nathan, you believe in the rule of law and the fact that it should apply equally to everybody.”
“Well, yes, of course I do,” Hecht responded, and a couple days later he agreed to the role, Jefferson said.
But some stakeholders questioned the assignment.
“The pushback was that his reputation was … very conservative Republican, business-oriented, and not for the little guy, based on his opinions in tort cases, primarily,” Jefferson said. “I thought that was completely wrong. He’s a very religious man, and the idea that we should give back is just part of why he has been a public servant for so long.
“It didn’t take long for the people that were critical of my decision to come back to me and say, ‘You were right, and I was wrong. Thank you for appointing Nathan.’”
Jefferson and Hecht both recalled a seminal moment at the Capitol in 2009 when they made Senate budget writers aware that the court was losing more than $20 million from the IOLTA program due to record low interest rates banks were paying on client funds held in trust by lawyers.
“We didn’t think we had any hope until interest rates came back up,” said Hecht, who was in the audience as Jefferson testified before the Senate Finance Committee.
Questioning by then-Finance Chair Steve Ogden and Sen. Royce West about the need for replacement funding resulted in the first state appropriation to the court for legal aid programs. Lawmakers have continued the biennial funding, and in 2015 Hecht secured separate funding to help veterans needing a lawyer.
Hecht said he is grateful that legal aid has become a bipartisan cause after being targeted for years by Republican politicians, including former President Ronald Reagan. In July, Hecht testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, focusing his remarks on how the “chasm” of unmet civil legal services is hurting society and the economy.
“The problem with legal aid is nobody knows what it means. Is it an entitlement? Is it a handout? Or what is it?” Hecht said recently.
Telling stories about deserving clients who have been helped is key, and Hecht collects those stories from lawyers doing the work, Hankinson said.
“When no one is looking and he is out traveling the state, if there is a civil legal aid office anywhere near him, he always goes to visit,” she said. “He values the lawyers serving people with tremendous needs. It’s very personal to him.”
On Dec. 2, Hecht will be honored at a luncheon in Austin, where he will be given an award named after Harold Kleinman, the late Dallas lawyer who was the founding chair of the Texas Access to Justice Foundation.
The Wind Down
Hecht is spending this fall like so many others, hearing oral arguments and deciding appeals, attending to administrative duties and using his bully pulpit to advocate at legislative hearings for higher judicial pay.
Like the chief justices who preceded him, Hecht would like to see Texas do away with partisan elections of judges in favor of a less overtly political system. The Nov. 5 election brought yet another partisan shift of courts of appeals in Dallas and Houston, reversing Democratic gains of 2018.
“Maybe I’m biting the hand that feeds me, but I think it’s a terrible way. And I think injecting politics into the system is awful. And partisan politics is especially awful,” Hecht said.
Unlike some judicial colleagues with extensive financial portfolios, Hecht’s 2024 Personal Financial Statement shows no stock, bond or mutual fund holdings. While that has helped him avoid potential conflicts of interest, he said he simply prefers to put his savings in certificates of deposit because that’s what his parents did.
The most serious ethical controversy of Hecht’s career came in response to his public support of longtime friend Harriet Miers during her short-lived 2005 nomination by President George W. Bush to the U.S. Supreme Court. The State Commission on Judicial Conduct sanctioned Hecht for improper use of his office during more than 100 media interviews to promote the nomination in 2006, but Hecht’s won reversal of the admonishment after a Special Court of Review appointed by the Texas Supreme Court found the commission failed to prove Hecht’s public statements “endorsed” Miers.
The fallout continued in 2008 when the Texas Ethics Commission fined Hecht $29,000 for accepting in-kind donations for legal representation that should have been reported as political contributions. He appealed the decision to a district court in Travis County where it languished for nearly seven years before being settled for $1,000.
Hecht said he could have returned to private practice at Locke Lord or another big firm but kept filing for reelection. He said he almost decided not to run in 2012 but learned of Jefferson’s retirement as chief justice.
On the judicial retirement mandate, Hecht said he wasn’t behind the voter-rejected attempt in 2023 to amend the Texas Constitution to allow judges to stay in office past age 75. When he learned about the effort that would have allowed him to remain on the bench through 2025 and beyond from reading a news article, Hecht says his wife, Fifth Circuit Judge Priscilla Richman, declared that she would vote no.
Their 2022 marriage marked the first time in U.S. history when a chief judge of a federal appeals court and a state supreme court chief justice were married. The two served together on the Texas Supreme Court from 1995 to 2005. Richman became chief judge in 2019 and served in that role until October.
After 43 years of judging, hanging up the robes brings a measure of sadness. In a wistful moment at the end of our interview, Hecht mused about what it will feel like come January when he will not have an office or even a parking space at the hub of Texas government.
For now, at least, he is waiting to see how his retirement unfolds.
“People are saying you might want to come with us or do this or do that,” he said. “I welcome the interest but I don’t have any plans.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated some details about Hecht’s chief justice appointment. The error has been corrected.
Publisher’s Note: You are invited to join The Lawbook for a CLE webcast reflecting on Justice Hecht’s historic career on Monday, Dec. 9 at noon. Please register here.