Seven Texas lawyers in line for judgeships
Some are known for controversies including over tweets, ‘radical views’
The seven Texas lawyers President Donald Trump has so far proposed to fill 13 vacant federal judgeships in Texas are a varied group, and several have stirred up controversy including one designated for a seat on the New Orleansbased appeals court.
One of the nominees to the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals is Don Ray Willett, a former bull rider with a long resume including his current post as a Texas Supreme Court justice. Willett earned degrees at Baylor University and Duke University and later burnished his conservative bona fides as deputy attorney general to then-Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, adviser to President George W. Bush in the U.S. Justice Department as well as during Bush’s time as governor.
In appointing him to a Texas Supreme Court vacancy in 2005, Abbott said in a statement, “Don Willett’s brilliance, work ethic and integrity are legendary,” and highlighted his “keen analysis and writer’s stroke” in the open records division.
The judge’s social media prowess has earned him the nickname of “Twitter Laureate,” and has drawn accolades as well as controversy, most recently when members of the Senate Judiciary Committee questioned him about tweets that appeared to be mocking a transgender teen athlete.
“Willett has radical views on corporate rights and property rights that would render unconstitutional congressional efforts to protect the public health, the environment, workers’ rights and even civil rights,” said Kyle Barry, senior policy counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Solid conservative
Trump has proposed James Chiun-Yue Ho of Dallas for the second vacancy on the appeals court.
Ho, born in Taiwan, is not as well known nationally but is considered a solid conservative. Ho earned an undergraduate degree at Stanford University and his law degree at University of Chicago in 1999. He worked for the Bush Justice Department, clerked for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, took U.S. Sen.Ted Cruz’s spot as Texas solicitor general and served as a legal adviser to U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, RTexas.
Ho, a partner at the Gibson Dunn & Crutcher firm in Dallas, specializes in appellate and constitutional law.
Trump advanced has five nominations for Texas’ 11 district court vacancies, including two lawyers selected by former President Barack Obama but never got a vote from the full Senate.
Trump tapped Fernando Rodriguez Jr. to take the bench in Corpus Christi, one of the longest standing court vacancies in the country. Rodriguez director the International Justice Mission’s operations in the Dominican Republic, where the group supports government efforts to prosecute those who traffic children to the sex trade.
Rodriguez, a Harlingen native, graduated from Yale in 1991, taught at Houston ISD’s Scarborough Elementary with Teach for America. He earned his UT law degree in 1997 and worked for 12 years at Baker Botts LLP in Dallas, handling patent infringement, trade secrets, contract and deceptive trade practice cases.
He has been working with the mission in Latin America since 2009, first in Bolivia and then in the Dominican Republic.
“Fernando is a man of exceptional integrity and excellent credentials,” said Tim Durst, his former partner at Baker Botts in Dallas. “He’s a very diligent and careful lawyer and his litigation skills run deep.”
The Texas district court nominee who has prompted the most attention nationally is Jeffrey Carl Mateer, whom Trump wants to install in the Eastern District of Texas. Mateer got his education at Dickinson College and at Southern Methodist University School of Law. He oversees litigation as first assistant to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and is still listed as general counsel at First Liberty, a Dallas law firm devoted religious liberty.
Mateer made public statements castigating a transgender child, protecting states’ rights to use conversion therapy for LGBT people and equating same-sex marriage with bestiality. ‘Down the middle’
Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, another attorney at First Liberty, was nominated by Trump to take over a vacant judgeship in the Northern District. He graduated from Abilene Christian University and received his law degree from UT in 2003. Kacsmaryk previously worked as a federal prosecutor in the same north Texas judicial district, handling criminal appeals and terrorism trials. He also worked as an associate in Baker Botts LLP in Dallas in commercial, constitutional, and intellectual property litigation.
Also awaiting a confirmation to a North Texas district court Karen Gren Scholoer, a former state district judge in Dallas County when Democrats swept the elected seats on the local bench. Her speciality at the Carter Scholer Arnett Hamada & Mockler, PLLC, firm is business law, complex tort litigation, and alternative dispute resolution. She received her bachelor’s from Rice University and her law degree from Cornell University.
Scholer received high ratings from retired U.S. District Judge Royal Furgeson, the outgoing dean at University of North Texas Dallas College of Law. “Karen’s kind of what you want in a judge: she’s down the middle, not controversial, has a reputation for being fair and she’s active in the bar supportive of the courts,” he said. ‘Straight shooter’
U.S. Magistrate Walter David Counts III has been tapped for a district court judgeship in the San Antonio-based Western District of Texas. Counts, a graduate of Texas Tech University and St. Mary’s University Law School, was an assistant district attorney in Fort Worth. After working as a federal prosecutor, Counts left to become a judge advocate with the U.S. Army and the Texas National Guard and now manages a heavy docket of criminal cases as a federal magistrate judge in Midland.
Furgeson also lauded Counts as a “straight shooter.”
“He is fair minded, evenhanded, noncontroversial and smart and he knows the rhythms of criminal trials and knows how to handle them in a straightforward way,” the former judge said.
The president had not yet nominated attorneys for the remaining vacancies on federal benches in Texas, including two each in the eastern and northern districts, and one federal court in both the western and southern districts.