“In my life,” Eric Schuster said, “except for my father and father-in-law, there has been no man I respected more than Judge Joseph W. Hatchett.”
Schuster is an attorney with Funk & Bolton in Baltimore, specializing in financial law and, specifically, creditor rights. In 1983, after he graduated from Emory University School of Law in Atlanta, he scored a clerkship with Hatchett, who at the time sat in Tallahassee on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. (Judges on the 11th Circuit review and rule on cases from Florida, Georgia and Alabama.)
Hatchett was a trailblazing judge. He was the first Black man to sit on Florida’s highest court. According to The New York Times, after President Jimmy Carter nominated Hatchett for the federal bench in 1979, he became “the first Black man to serve on a circuit that covered the Deep South.”
