Former Texas Supreme Court Justice Hecht Addresses Judicial Independence at UH Law Sondock Lecture

April 24, 2026 - Complaints about the judiciary aren’t new. Nathan L. Hecht, 27th chief justice of the Supreme Court of Texas, cited examples dating back to the era of Thomas Jefferson as he delivered the 2026 Justice Ruby Kless Sondock Jurist-in-Residence Lectureship in Legal Ethics at the University of Houston Law Center.

But, Hecht warned, that doesn’t mean today’s criticism of judicial decisions – from the highest levels of government to the person caught up in an eviction case – aren’t a serious concern. He outlined several steps that judges, the legal system and society at large could take to ensure people believe the courts are impartial.

His fellow judges “have got to scrupulously stay out of politics,” said Hecht, who retired from the bench in 2024 and is now a partner at Jackson Walker in Austin. “Independence, we’ve got to earn it, to prove judges can be accountable to the rule of law.”

In that, “Justice Sondock is a model for us all. It’s a privilege for me to be here in her name.”

Sondock is a pioneering lawyer and jurist who graduated as valedictorian and one of just five women in the UH law school class of 1962. She became the first female state district court judge in Harris County when she was appointed to the bench in 1977 and was appointed to the state Supreme Court in 1982.

Sondock was in the audience for this year’s lecture, which was held just a week before her 100th birthday. Dean Leonard M. Baynes led a champagne toast to the trailblazing jurist as a montage of photos spanning her career played on the screen. “For being a mentor to so many of us, we salute Ruby Sondock,” Baynes said.

Hecht offered no easy answers during his lecture, “Whose Side Are You on Judge, Ours or Theirs? Judicial Independence in a Riven Civitas.”

Judges in Texas are elected on partisan ballots, he said, calling it a deeply flawed system “because it injects partisan politics into judicial decision making, where it has no business.”

While judges elected under that system aren’t inherently partisan, he said it increases the possibility that people will perceive court decisions as driven by politics rather than the law. “It cannot be perceived as who is on who’s side and still be justice,” he said. “What we want is for everyone to walk out of the court saying, Thank God for American justice.”

He reminded the audience – about 50 people attended in person, with another 200 tuning in online – that complaints about the judiciary go back to the country’s founding.

“I was reading the president’s many denunciations of the judiciary, going to the extreme of calling for the impeachment of Justice Samuel Chase,” he said. “The person of whom I speak, of course, was Thomas Jefferson. Fooled you, didn’t I?”

Thus began a long line of U.S. presidents unhappy with judicial decisions, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who saw components of the New Deal struck down as unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court, and Barack Obama, who decried the Citizens United decision during a State of the Union address, with members of the court sitting in the audience. That 2010 decision held that restrictions on political spending by corporations and labor unions violate the First Amendment’s free speech protections.

The furor has grown under the second Trump administration, with the president decrying court decisions attempting to limit his efforts to deport people in the United States without legal status. “The president denounces them. The left says the judges are standing up for civil liberties. The right says they are all activist judges.”

The Supreme Court decision limiting Trump’s power to enact tariffs provoked a similar split. “The president says the justices who participated in that decision were an embarrassment, that the decision was a disgrace. The left says, thank goodness we finally got rid of those tariffs.”

The criticism comes in hot from not just the president and members of Congress, but from regular citizens, including those with business before a court, and infamously, from social media. “But we have to ask, at what cost do we do that? It ought to be totally out of bounds to threaten judges with physical violence because of a decision they have made,” Hecht said.

He noted that reports of attacks on federal judges are increasing, and law enforcement suggests similar trends in threats against state and local judges. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, in a recent speech at Rice University, called for an end to the violence.

Ending it, Hecht said, will require “reverse pressure, denunciation from the bar associations, the press, community involvement that says, this is going too far. It’s ongoing, and we as stewards of the justice system have to respond to that.”

Judges themselves bear some responsibility for toning down the rhetoric, he said, noting the apoplectic tenor of some judicial opinions. “We should encourage each other on the bench, and as lawyers, we should encourage the bench to hold the rhetoric down,” he said. Opinions should focus on the issues.

“On the Texas Supreme Court, we had some sharp opinions, but it wasn’t routine. Now, if someone writes too sharp an opinion, there’s peer pressure to tone it down. There needs to be more of that.”

The justice system also needs to become more user friendly. “People joke that if the courts were a grocery business, we’d be bankrupt because we don’t care what the customers think. It’s our show.” People involved in the system have no choice about when they appear, how long they wait, how much they pay for parking and how long they have to take off work.

“That is becoming intolerable to a society that is used to ordering food on one of these,” he said, brandishing his cell phone, “and having it delivered.”
One solution would be to tailor court procedures to meet the needs of the participants. “Of the 20 million civil cases in this country, they don’t need the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. They don’t need the Texas Rules of Civil Procedure. They need procedures tailored to eviction cases, or debt collection cases,” he said. The goal should be for people to think the outcome is fair, even when they lose.

Part of that is ensuring that more people are represented by legal counsel, an effort Hecht has been involved with for the past 25 years.

Unlike in criminal cases, people who can’t afford a lawyer aren’t guaranteed representation in civil cases. And in at least three-fourths of civil cases, one or both parties do not have a lawyer. “Studies show if you don’t have a lawyer, you’re more likely to lose when you shouldn’t,” Hecht said. “Is that really any surprise?”

Other efforts, from allowing non-lawyers to perform certain legal tasks to the use of artificial intelligence, also have the potential to expand access, he said.