‘Even-keeled’ litigator set to be confirmed for lifetime post to Houston federal court
Conservative is among 20 Texans picked by Trump
Attorney Charles R. Eskridge III is wonky enough to have matched historical documents with every song in the Broadway musical “Hamilton” for a lecture he gives periodically around the legal community.
He has also amassed the requisite 21st-century courtroom skills to have ascended — fairly unscathed — to the brink of a lifetime seat on the federal bench.
This week, Eskridge, a complex commercial litigator who is active in the conservative Federalist Society, is poised to win Senate confirmation to a judgeship in the Southern District of Texas, which handles the second-busiest criminal docket in the country and a bustling civil caseload reflecting the region’s proximity to the Texas Medical Center, the Port of Houston, the petrochemical industry and the border.
Eskridge’s nomination has not raised the hackles of liberal activists who have packed the halls outside of the Senate Judiciary Committee to oppose more-controversial picks by President Donald Trump. His brief confirmation in June — following a contentious hearing for a circuit nominee — involved a single softball question from U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, the panel’s chairman. The Re
publican-controlled Senate is scheduled to take a key procedural vote on Eskridge and three other nominees Tuesday. He is among 20 Texans whom Trump has tapped for lifetime seats on the bench.
Eskridge, 56, of Memorial, has never served as a judge. If approved, he will occupy the Houston-based seat vacated in December when U.S. District Judge Gray H. Miller took senior status, a form of semiretirement that allows for a lighter caseload. Republican leaders are mounting a vigorous push to place conservative jurists at every level of the judiciary, which legal experts say could be the most enduring legacy of the Trump administration.
The Federalist Society, a Washington D.C.-based advocacy group with local chapters around the country, has played a vital role in this effort. Eskridge was president of the group’s Houston chapter and has been a member for 15 years. The group is devoted to “originalist” interpretations of the Constitution that don’t afford latitude for modern concepts such as marriage equality, affirmative action and reproductive choice. According to its website, the organization believes it is “emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be.”
Leonard Leo, the group’s executive vice president, has been a key judicial adviser to Trump since his campaign days, providing the billionaire businessman with a list of preapproved judicial picks and then aiding in the selection and confirmation of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. In the 2000s, Leo lobbied thenPresident George W. Bush to nominate John Roberts as chief justice and Samuel Alito as associate justice.
‘Always labored hard’
So far, the Trump administration has made 153 lifetime confirmations to the bench, according to an aide to U.S. Sen. John Cornyn.
Lena Zwarensteyn, who runs a program on fairness in the courts at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said a number of Trump’s picks have been worrisome, with nominees staking out extreme positions on reproductive rights and marriage equality or declining to state whether they consider the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision ending school segregation to be a legal precedent.
“They’re simply unqualified — not only because many of them lack trial experience, but because they have such deeply held beliefs or biases or they have led voter suppression efforts,” she said. “There have been so many extreme nominees, and because of the massive amount, many have been confirmed.”
Eskridge told the judiciary committee in June that he had a broad array of practical experience to prepare him for the post.
“I have represented plaintiffs and defendants … corporations and individuals. I always labored hard to figure out what the correct answer under the law is and to work on the litigation to build the facts,” he said.
Eskridge declined an interview request from the Houston Chronicle but provided answers to emailed questions through a spokesman.
As a conservative white man, Eskridge generally fits the bill for a Trump judicial pick, Zwarensteyn said. Her organization does not oppose Eskridge’s nomination, and the American Bar Association unanimously rated him as “well qualified” for the job.
Eskridge has been active in Texas politics, serving on the finance committees of Texas’ two Republican senators, Cornyn and Ted Cruz, who jointly recommended his nomination for the Houston vacancy.
Still, Eskridge is not a cookie-cutter conservative. He began his career clerking for Supreme Court Justice Byron White, a centrist who was appointed by President John F. Kennedy.
He worked pro bono on behalf of Anthony Graves, a former death row inmate who was exonerated after 18 years in prison, to get the prosecutor on the case disbarred for ethical and professional rule violations.
Eskridge has also represented captains of industry, including Lehman Brothers International in Europe in the wake of the financial crisis. Between his work as a founding partner at Houston’s Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP and at Susman Godfrey LLP, where he worked for nearly two decades, he has tried 15 cases, including an international arbitration. He has logged appearances before seven of the federal judges who serve in the Houston courthouse.
Several colleagues say Eskridge is highly qualified for a federal judgeship.
“It’s as if the framers had groomed the perfect judge: an academic scholar with a successful private practice who has represented plaintiffs and defendants in civil and criminal cases,” said attorney David Gerger, who knew Eskridge at Quinn Emanuel and now runs his own boutique white- collar practice.
Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis, a Democrat who worked with Eskridge on a state panel dedicated to the exoneration process, called him “very diligent, thoughtful and sensitive.”
“He has stayed in touch with Anthony Graves and has said that case had a significant impact on his understanding of the trauma a wrongful conviction has on an individual and their loved ones,” Ellis said. “He is a conservative, but I am hopeful his experience with Graves will inspire him to be a good judge in criminal matters.”
Neal Manne, a law partner who recruited Eskridge to Susman Godfrey, said Eskridge can rise above the partisan fray.
“I have the opposite of reverence for Cornyn, Cruz and the Federalist Society,” said Manne, who has been a key player in the case to overhaul Harris County’s bail practices, which a federal judge found to be discriminatory. “I don’t think his approach will be political or ideological. He’s committed to the rule of law, committed to getting it right and will be an absolutely intellectually honest judge.”
Other colleagues described Eskridge as “evenkeeled,” thoughtful and disciplined with “intellectual firepower.”
“He has this uncanny ability to boil things down to their essential element in an understanding and persuasive way,” said Shawn Raymond, another former colleague.
Yvonne Ho met Eskridge as a summer clerk at Susman Godfrey and recruited him to be an adjunct professor at the University of Houston Law Center. He has taught there for 12 years on the federal courts and the origins of the Constitution.
He also has a theatrical bent, said David Beck, who starred in a skit that Eskridge directed for the American Inns of the Court, a bench bar group. Eskridge donned 17th-century garb to play Sir Edward Coke, a barrister and judge who was an early proponent of the rule of law.
The performance featured a song about the Magna Carta that Eskridge penned to the tune of Don McLean’s “American Pie.”
Eskridge served for a decade on the federal judicial committee that interviewed Texas candidates for vacancies before resigning to put his own name in the hat.
Born in Cleveland, Eskridge moved to Houston with his family at age 11. He graduated magna cum laude from Trinity University in San Antonio and was law school valedictorian and editor of the law review at Pepperdine University in southern California, where classmates knew him as “Trey” (because he’s Charles Eskridge III).
After clerking for a California supreme court judge and for the the chief judge of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Eskridge became the first Pepperdine law graduate to clerk at the U.S. Supreme Court.
“It’s freakishly rare to get that sort of opportunity,” said David Meyer, another clerk of the late Justice White, who went on to become dean of Tulane School of Law. “It’s a lighting strike event in your life.”
Meyer and Eskridge both went on to land jobs in the Netherlands on the IranU.S. Claims Tribunal, which resolved legal disputes related to the Iranian revolution.
‘Calming voice’
Eskridge’s wife, Monica, is a graphic designer and he has three children, — a daughter who is an analyst at Bain & Company in Dallas, a daughter in the eighth grade and a son in fifth.
His colleague Chris Porter said what sticks with him about Eskridge is how measured he is even when things get heated in a case.
“He’s that calming voice in the storm,” Porter said.