Walker, Sarosdy and Goldstein are best picks
Republican voters have a choice to make in one contested primary for the Texas Supreme Court while Democrats have two.
Justice, Supreme Court, Place 4, Republican — Brian Walker
In 2022, a sex abuse case against former Southern Baptist Convention leader Paul Pressler came before the Texas Supreme Court. The justices had to decide whether to allow the lawsuit to move forward even though the statute of limitations had passed.
The details of the case appeared to implicate others around Pressler. Jared Woodfill, who was a law partner with Pressler, testified in a deposition that he paid young men to work out of Pressler’s home despite warnings of predation.
The court’s 5-2 ruling allowed the suit to move forward in a victory for sexual assault survivors who, because of the profound effects of trauma, may not come forward for decades. This week we learned, thanks to the Texas Tribune, that one of the dissenting justices, John Devine worked at Woodfill & Pressler LLP at the time of the alleged abuse but failed to recuse himself.
That’s a big deal: Judges are supposed to recuse themselves if there might be even the appearance of a conflict of interest. By comparison, two other justices recused themselves from the case simply because they had once worked for the firm representing the plaintiff, the former employee who Pressler allegedly molested — which is to say, they’d once worked for a law firm that was just arguing the case, not at the very center of it.
Devine, 65, did not respond to our requests for an interview but has said elsewhere that he was not a partner at Woodfill & Pressler. The Tribune, though, found that he served as an attorney or guardian ad litem on nine cases while the plaintiff was working as Pressler’s personal aide. Devine was even listed as co-counsel on cases with Pressler.
It’s not as if this is Devine’s first brush with controversy. Those who have followed his career since his time as a district court judge in Harris County won’t be surprised by the results of the 2022 Houston Bar Association judicial evaluation. When it came to determining “legal issues impartially and based on thorough and proper application of the law to the record,” nearly half of the responding bar members rated him “needs improvement,” the lowest rating.
Challenger Brian Walker, 46, has served on the 2nd Court of Appeals in Fort Worth for three years. A lifelong Republican and “follower of Jesus Christ,” as his website states, he worked as a civil and criminal lawyer and served nine years as a judicial advocate with the U.S. Air Force Reserves before becoming a judge. To be a conservative jurist, he told the editorial board, means that “we’re supposed to follow the law and follow it narrowly, and do everything we can to be authentic and faithful to the Constitution and to the laws.”
Republicans should vote Walker onto the ballot for the general election.
Justice, Supreme Court, Place 2, Democrat — Randy Sarosdy
Born in Dallas and a graduate of the University of Texas law school, Randy Sarosdy worked for 24 years in Washington D.C. with Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, often defending corporate clients in labor, environmental and intellectual property cases. Those are the sorts of complex civil cases that go before the Texas Supreme Court. He relocated to Austin and, after six more years with Akin Gump, joined the Texas Justice Court Training Center and became a teacher for new judges, including justices of the peace, who are not required to have a law degree.
Sarosdy, 71, also served as the executive director of the Texas Center for the Judiciary. One of the important but underappreciated aspects of the job on the Supreme
Court is leading statewide initiatives that improve the judicial system or increase access to justice. Sarosdy is particularly well suited for that work. His motivation to run, he told us, is to protect fundamental rights under the Texas Constitution. He notes, correctly, that in the wake of recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions, state courts now play a greater role than before around abortion and voting rights.
One concern Democrats may have is that he’ll have to retire after four years, two years before the end of his term, and his successor will be appointed by the governor, unless voters pass a new attempt to amend the state’s age limit for judges set in the constitution.
The other candidate in the Democratic primary, DaSean Jones, has served as a judge in a Harris County felony district court since 2019.
That experience doesn’t translate directly to the Texas Supreme Court, which considers only civil cases. Moreover, when Jones ran for reelection in 2022, this editorial board did not endorse him because he exercised poor judgment in granting personal bonds to defendants charged with violent crimes, including murder. He didn’t meet with us in either 2022 or this year, so we couldn’t get his side of the story.
The best choice for Democrats is clearly Sarosdy.
Justice, Supreme Court, Place 6 — Bonnie Lee Goldstein
Voters have the choice between a deeply qualified justice serving on an intermediate appellate court and a district judge who appears to be drawn to quixotic quests to effect change.
Bonnie Lee Goldstein, 62, has a breadth of experience that’s well suited to serving on the Texas Supreme Court. She has 20 years in the judiciary including 11 as a municipal judge, six as a civil district judge and three on the 5th District Court of Appeals in Dallas. If she wins in the primary, she would face Jane Bland, a well-respected justice. Goldstein told us she believes voters should always have a choice, and she’s certainly the most qualified one.
The other primary candidate is Joe Pool, a district judge in Hays County who has run for Supreme Court three times before in Republican primaries, though he seems to be more of a crusader than a partisan. He didn’t meet with us, but in a response to a Dallas Morning News questionnaire, he writes that he sued to stop the Trump administration from funding the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan on the grounds that it violated the First Amendment ban on the establishment of a state religion. His main priority, though, is less odd: He wants to restore “Texans’ right to a civil jury trial.” He writes that judges elected with political contributions from “well funded juryaverse organizations” have diminished the ability of plaintiffs to get jury trials.
He is right that adding Democrats to the mix on the Supreme Court could change outcomes, even in complex civil cases that don’t seem political. One study has shown that the waves of Democrats elected to intermediate courts in recent years have led to fewer reversals of jury verdicts and judgments favoring plaintiffs. If that’s the goal, we believe Goldstein’s experience would give her a better chance at bringing balance.