When Nathan Hecht ran for the Texas Supreme Court in 1988, no Republican had ever been elected to the state’s highest civil court.
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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.
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. 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.
“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.”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.
“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 is aware of the perception this one-party dominance creates, and has advocated for Texas to turn away from partisan judicial elections. In his, 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.
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. 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.
Texas Courts Nathan Hecht Don Willett George W. Bush Donald Trump Texas State Government John Cornyn Ken Paxton Lloyd Doggett General News TX State Wire Eugene Cook U.S. News Harriet Miers Antonin Scalia Priscilla Owen Elections U.S. Republican Party Tom Phillips Politics Wallace Jefferson Alex Winslow U.S. News
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