As Texas Chief Justice Nathan Hecht prepares to retire, he reflects on the Supreme Court he helped change

Chief Justice Nathan Hecht delivers his State of the Judiciary speech at the Texas Supreme Court in Austin on April 5, 2023. (Credit: Leila Saidane/The Texas Tribune)

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When Nathan Hecht ran for the Texas Supreme Court in 1988, no Republican had ever been elected to the state’s highest civil court. His election foreshadowed a coming transformation of the court, civil legal procedure and Texas itself.

Hecht is the longest tenured Supreme Court justice in Texas history. He won six reelections and led the court as chief justice for more than a decade. He heard more than 2,700 oral arguments, authored 7,000 pages of opinions, and retires now not because he’s had enough, but because state law requires him to.

Late on a Friday afternoon, just two weeks before he hung up his robe, he was still in his office, his mind mired in the work that was left to be done.

“This is always a really busy time for us, because the opinions are mounting up to be talked about,” he said. “It’ll be busy next week.”

Hecht began as a dissenter on a divided court, his conservative positions on abortion, school finance and property rights putting him at odds with the Democratic majority and some moderate Republicans. But as Texas Republicans began dominating up and down the ballot, his minority voice became mainstream on one of the country’s most conservative high courts.

In his administration of the court, Hecht has been a fierce advocate for the poor, pushing for more Legal Aid funding, bail reform and lowering the barriers to accessing the justice system.

"If justice were food, too many would be starving," Hecht told lawmakers in 2017. "If it were housing, too many would be homeless. If it were medicine, too many would be sick.”

Hecht’s departure leaves a vacancy that Gov. Greg Abbott, a former justice himself, will get to fill. He may elevate a current justice or appoint someone new directly to the chief justice role. Whoever ends up in the top spot will have to run for reelection in 2026.

In his typical understated manner, so at odds with the bombast of the other branches of government, Hecht told The Texas Tribune that serving on the court has been the honor of his life.

“I have gotten to participate not only in a lot of decisions shaping the jurisprudence of the state, but also in trying to improve the administration of the court system so that it works better and fosters public trust and confidence,” he said.

“So I feel good about the past,” he said. “And I feel good about the future.”

A ‘sea change’

Born in Clovis, New Mexico, Hecht studied philosophy at Yale before getting his law degree from Southern Methodist University. He clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and returned to Texas, where his reputation preceded him.

As a young lawyer, Tom Phillips, a former chief justice and now a partner at Baker Botts, reached out to a Dallas law firm that had promised to hire him the next chance they got.

“I called them a few months later and said, ‘So I assume you never got a vacancy,’” Phillips recalls. “And they said, ‘Well, we did, but we had a chance to hire Nathan Hecht, so you’ll understand why we went ahead and did that.’”

From left, pictured are Texas Supreme Court Justices Craig Enoch, John Cornyn, Nathan Hecht, Raul Gonzalez, Tom Philips and Jack Hightower in the Texas House chamber in 1993. (Credit: Bob Daemmrich)

Hecht was appointed to the district court in 1981 and quickly made a name for himself, pushing the court to modernize their stenography practices and taking the unusual step of writing opinions as a trial judge. He was elected to the court of appeals in 1986, and ran for Texas Supreme Court two years later.

This race came at a low point for Texas’ judiciary, after a string of scandals, ethics investigations, eyebrow-raising rulings and national news coverage made several sitting Supreme Court justices household names — and not in a good way.

Seeing an opportunity, Hecht challenged one of the incumbents, a Democrat who’d been called out in a damning 60 Minutes segment for friendly relationships with lawyers who both funded his campaigns and argued before the court.

Hecht teamed up with Phillips and Eugene Cook, two Republicans who had recently been appointed to the court, and asked voters to “Clean the Slate in ‘88,” separating themselves from the Democrats by promising to only accept small donations.

“Party politics were changing in the state at the same time, but the broader issue on our court at the time was to ensure that judges were following the law,” Hecht said. “That was a driving issue.”

Since Phillips and Cook were incumbents, Hecht was the only one who had to take on a sitting Supreme Court justice. And he won.

“It really was a sea change in Texas political history,” Phillips said. “He was the first person ever to do that in a down ballot race, to defeat a Democrat as a Republican.”

Political changes

Republican dominance swept through the Supreme Court as swiftly as it did Texas writ large. The last Democrat would be elected to the court in 1994, just six years after the first Republican. But even among Bush-era Republicans filling the bench, Hecht’s conservatism stood out.

In 2000, he wrote a dissent disagreeing with the majority ruling that allowed teens in Texas to get abortions with a judge’s approval if their parents wouldn’t consent, and a few years earlier, ruled in favor of wealthy school districts that wanted to use local taxes to supplement state funds. His pro-business bent stood out next to the court’s history of approving high dollar payouts for plaintiffs.

Alex Winslow, the executive director of Texas Watch, a consumer advocacy group, told the New York Times in 2005 that Hecht was “the godfather of the conservative judicial movement in Texas."

"Extremist would be an appropriate description,” Winslow said. “He's the philosophical leader of the right-wing fringe."

The only other justice who regularly staked out such a conservative position, according to the New York Times, was Priscilla Owen, who President George W. Bush appointed to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2005. Hecht and Owen, who now goes by her maiden name, Richmond, wed in 2022.

Wallace Jefferson, Hecht’s predecessor as chief justice, said Hecht’s sharp intellect and philosophical approach to the law improved the court’s opinions, even when he ultimately didn’t side with the majority.

“He was a formidable adversary,” said Jefferson, now a partner at Alexander Dubose & Jefferson. “You knew that you would have to bring your best approach and analysis to overcome Nathan’s approach and analysis … You had to come prepared and Nathan set the standard for that.”

Hecht briefly became a national figure in 2005 when he helped Bush’s efforts to confirm Harriet Miers to the U.S. Supreme Court. As her longtime friend, Hecht gave more than 120 interviews to bolster Miers’ conservative credentials, jokingly calling himself the “PR office for the White House,” Texas Monthly reported at the time.

This advocacy work raised ethical questions that Hecht fought for years, starting with a reprimand from the State Commission on Judicial Conduct. Hecht got that overturned. The Texas Ethics Commission then fined him $29,000 for not reporting the discount he got on the legal fees he paid challenging the reprimand. He appealed that fine and the case stretched until 2016, when he ultimately paid $1,000.

Hecht has largely stayed out of the limelight in the decades since, letting his opinions speak for themselves and wading into the political fray mostly to advocate for court reforms. While Democrats have tried to pin unpopular COVID and abortion rulings on the justices in recent elections, Republicans continue to easily win these down-ballot races.

Hecht is aware of the perception this one-party dominance creates, and has advocated for Texas to turn away from partisan judicial elections. In his 2023 state of the judiciary address, Hecht warned that growing political divisions were threatening the “judicial independence essential to the rule of law,” pointing to comments by both Democratic politicians and former President Donald Trump.

But in an interview, Hecht stressed that most of the cases the Texas Supreme Court considers never make headlines, and are far from the politics that dominate Austin and Washington.

“There's no Republican side to an oil and gas case. There's no Democrat side to a custody hearing,” he said. “That's the bread and butter of what we do, and that's not partisan.”

Hecht’s reforms

Unlike its federal counterpart, the Texas Supreme Court is often a temporary port of call on a judge’s journey. Many, like Abbott, Sen. John Cornyn and U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, leave for higher office. Others, like Owen and 5th Circuit Judge Don Willett, leave for higher courts. Most, like Phillips, leave for higher pay in private practice.

But Hecht stayed.

“I didn’t plan it like this,” Hecht said. “I just kept getting re-elected.”

Hecht had been considering retirement in 2013, when Jefferson, the chief justice who replaced Phillips, announced he would be stepping down.

“He wanted me to consider being his successor,” Hecht said. “So I did, and here I am. I didn’t say, ‘Let's spend 43 years on the bench,’ but one thing led to another.”

Nathan Hecht is sworn into office by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in the House Chamber on Nov. 11, 2013. Hecht's sister Helen is holding the Sam Houston Bible. (Credit: Bob Daemmrich)

In 2013, Hecht was sworn in as chief justice by then-U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, another great dissenter whose views later became the majority.

While the Texas Supreme Court’s political makeup has changed largely without Hecht’s input, the inner workings of the court have been under his purview. And that, many court watchers say, is where his greatest legacy lies.

Hecht ushered in an era of modernization, both to the technology and the rules that govern justice in Texas. He led a push to simplify the appellate rules, removing many of the trapdoors and procedural quirks that led to important cases being decided on technicalities. The court scaled back how long cases could drag on by limiting discovery, including how long a deposition can go. And he ensured every case was decided before the term ended, like the U.S. Supreme Court.

“I think people generally don't understand the impact the rules can have on the equitable resolution of disputes, but they're enormous,” Jefferson said. “Nathan recognized that at an early juncture in his career.”

Hecht pushed Texas to adopt e-filing before many other states, which proved prescient when COVID hit. Hecht, who was then president of the national Conference of Chief Justices, was able to help advise other states as they took their systems online.

Hecht also dedicated himself to improving poor Texan’s access to the justice system, pushing the Legislature to appropriate more funding for Legal Aid and reducing the barriers to getting meaningful legal resolutions. He helped usher through a rule change that would allow paraprofessionals to handle some legal matters like estate planning, uncontested divorces and consumer debt cases, without a lawyer’s supervision.

“Some people call it the justice gap. I call it the justice chasm,” Hecht said. “Because it’s just a huge gulf between the people that need legal help and the ability to provide it.”

Hecht said he’s glad this has been taken up as a bipartisan issue, and he’s hopeful that the same attention will be paid even after he leaves the court.

“No judge wants to give his life's energy to a work that mocks the justice that he's trying to provide,” he said. “For the judiciary, this is an important issue, because when the promise of equal justice under law is denied because you're too poor, there's no such thing as equal justice under the law.”

What comes next

Despite the sudden departure of their longtime leader, the Texas Supreme Court will return in January to finish out its term, which ends in April.

Among the typical parsing of medical malpractice provisions, oil and gas leases, divorce settlements and sovereign immunity protections, the high court has a number of more attention-grabbing cases on its docket this year.

Earlier this year, the court heard oral arguments about the Department of Family and Protective Services’ oversight of immigration detention facilities, and in mid-January, they’ll consider Attorney General Ken Paxton’s efforts to subpoena Annunciation House, an El Paso nonprofit that serves migrants. They’ll also hear arguments over Southern Methodist University’s efforts to cut ties with the regional governing body of the United Methodist Church.

Other cases will be added to the schedule before April.

Phillips, who has argued numerous cases before the Texas Supreme Court since leaving the bench, said Hecht’s loss will be felt, but he expects the court to continue apace.

“It’s not a situation like it might have been at some point in the past where if one justice left, nobody would know what to do next,” he said. “It’s an extremely qualified court.”

As for Hecht, he’s tried to put off thinking too much about what comes next for him. He still has opinions to write and work to finish. He knows he wants to stay active in efforts to improve court administration nationally and in Texas, and he’s threatened his colleagues with writing a tell-all book, just to keep them on their toes. But beyond that, he’s waiting for the reality of retirement to sink in before he decides on his next steps.

“We’ve got 3,200 judges in Texas, plus adjuncts and associate judges and others,” he said. “I really think it’s such a strong bench, and I am proud to have been a part of it. I look forward to helping where I can.”

Supreme Court of Texas Chief Justice Nathan L. Hecht laughs during a question and answer session after hearing two civil cases at the University of Houston Law Center on Oct. 29, 2024. The court travels twice per year to hold oral arguments in different areas of the state. (Credit: Douglas Sweet Jr. for The Texas Tribune)