Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock was first appointed to the Supreme Court of Texas in January 2018 by...
In 1999, Rocky Dhir did the unthinkable: He became a lawyer. In 2021, he did the unforgivable:...
Every major life decision kept Hisham in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. He practices in Irving as Employment...
| Published: | September 24, 2025 |
| Podcast: | State Bar of Texas Podcast |
| Category: | Early Career & Young Lawyers , Early Career and Law School , News & Current Events |
Introducing a new series of TYLA’s Young Gunners podcast, spotlighting all nine justices of the Supreme Court of Texas! In these special episodes, TYLA President Hisham Masri, TYLA Immediate Past President Laura Pratt, and TYLA President-Elect Alyson Martinez speak with the SCOTX bench about their respective path to the high court, judicial philosophy, and advice for young attorneys navigating the legal profession.
We kick off this series with an interview with Justice Jimmy Blacklock, who was elevated to chief justice on January 6, 2025. In this episode, Chief Justice Blacklock shares how the principles of fatherhood and his deep-rooted faith have influenced not only his path to the judiciary but also the way he approaches leadership, decision-making, and the responsibilities of public office. Tune in for a thoughtful exploration of character, calling, and the intersection of personal conviction with professional duty.
You can access this episode and our other episodes here: https://tyla.org/resource/young-gunners-podcast/
Special thanks to our sponsor State Bar of Texas.
Rocky Dhir:
Hi, and welcome to the State Bar of Texas podcast. Today we’re bringing you something a little different. A conversation we knew was just too good not to share with our amazing listeners. This episode originally aired on the Texas Young Lawyers Association’s Young Gunners Podcast. In it host Hisham Masri sits down with Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock of the Supreme Court of Texas for an insightful conversation that offers a closer look at one of the legal minds helping to shape our great state. Whether you’re hearing it for the first time here on the State Bar of Texas podcast or you listened on the Young Gunners Podcast, we’re glad you’re here. So sit back, relax, and we hope you enjoyed this special crossover episode featuring a conversation with Hasham Masri and Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock.
Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock:
Welcome to the Young Gutters Podcast. I’m your host,Hisham Masri, and I have the privilege of serving as a 20 24, 20 25 President of the Texas Young Lawyers Association. This podcast is about getting to know the legal legends who shape our state, and today we’re honored to have Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock of the Texas Supreme Court join us. Chief Justice Blacklock has served in the Texas Supreme Court since 2018 and was appointed as the 28 Chief Justice in January, 2025 for taking the branch. He was general counsel to Governor Greg Abbott and worked in both the Texas Attorney General’s office in the US Department of Justice. Over the years, he’s handled cases that touch on some of the most fundamental constitutional issues, federalism, religious liberty, and the separation of Powers. Blacklock. Welcome and thanks for taking the time to chat with us today.
Speaker 3:
Thank you so much for having me. It’s my pleasure to be with you.
Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock:
Yeah, when we appreciate it. It’s a valuable opportunity for the listeners across this state. And so you’ve had quite the career clerkships, private practice, government service, and now leading the Texas Supreme Court. What first sparked your interest in the law and did you always envision yourself on the bench?
Speaker 3:
Well, I think my interest in the law started young. My dad was a lawyer and so he would talk about the things that he did and the things that he thought about and what it meant to be a lawyer, and that’s a part of my early memory of my family and my own thinking about what a professional life might be like. And so law school always felt like a viable option for me. I didn’t really decide for sure to do it until I was a senior at ut and it presented itself as the best option for me after college, and it’s led to many, many blessings in my life that I couldn’t have imagined when I set off down that path.
Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock:
And I know that your wife is a lawyer as well. Do your children look up to both of y’all as attorneys and have desires to join the practice?
Speaker 3:
Well, I don’t know if they have desires to join the practice yet. They are 13, 12, and nine right now. We have three girls and we’d be happy for them to be lawyers, but we’d be happy for them, of course, to be all kinds of other things that they may choose to be. And they hear us talk about our jobs and they see, I think both the good, the bad and the ugly of what it is for us to be lawyers and judges. And I hope that they’ll have a well-informed understanding of the life that they’re choosing when they get to the point of making those kind of decisions.
Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock:
And it actually really served as the inspiration for this podcast series is that perhaps if you were talking to your daughter and you wanted to tell her how to become a lawyer or how to join the court one day, and we’re hoping that this podcast series and this interview really can help serve as an inspiration for the lawyers of Texas so that they can make those same types of moves. And so let’s talk a little bit about your career path and your personal journey. You’ve worked on some incredible places, including clerking on the Fifth Circuit, serving the US Department of Justice and handling constitutional litigation at the Texas Attorney General’s office. That’s a broad range of experiences. And looking back, which of those roles do you think shaped you most as a lawyer?
Speaker 3:
Well, everything about my background, both professionally and personally shaped me into the person that I am and judges are people and we bring all of our experiences and backgrounds and ways of thinking to these jobs. And so I would hesitate to pick one aspect of my background that shaped me other than what stands out in my mind is where we started is my family and the way my parents raised me. And that’s the biggest influence on who I am and what I do now. And that’s a far bigger and deeper influence on me than any aspect of my professional life. But the thing about becoming a judge is that it’s not up to you. That’s a good thing. It’s up to the governor if there’s an appointment. It’s up to the voters if there’s an election. But it’s never just up to you to say, I want to be a judge. People have to look at you and say, I think you should be a judge.
I didn’t set out in pursuit of this, but there came a time of after a while where I realized that it was the kind of thing that people might see as an option for me and the kind of thing that might become an option. Me, again, not being able to control whether it ultimately does. And anyone who thinks about becoming a judge needs to start with that baseline understanding that you cannot make it happen for yourself. You have to be chosen for it through some mechanism beyond your control. But I realized at some point maybe a few years before I was first appointed, that it was the kind of thing that might happen for me or to me depending on how you want to look at it. And then it did, and it’s been a blessing. I’m very, very honored and fortunate to be in this position.
Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock:
And we’re glad to have you as well, both in your role as justice and now as chief justice of the court. And so moving on, when you were at the Texas Attorney General’s office, you worked on cases involving religious liberty, federalism, and the separation of powers, some really weighty constitutional issues. How did handling those cases influence your judicial philosophy?
Speaker 3:
Well, those are the kind of cases that got me excited
To go to work and to learn more about the law and to take the deep dive into these issues and into these cases that you have to take to handle them at a high level. And I started off at a law firm and got a lot of good experience there and met a lot of great people there and could have continued down that path. And for many people, that’s the right path for me. I was looking for a way to work on issues like those you described and other things that there wasn’t a lot of at the law firm. And it was suggested to me that the Attorney General’s office was a place where I might be able to do that. But what actually happened is that I was working in Houston at the time and my wife was there too, and she got a job in Austin. So I was at one law firm, she was at another, she got an in-house job in Austin,
Which she couldn’t pass up. It was a great job for her and for our family. And so we had to move to Austin, which meant I needed to get my act together and find a job in Austin. And I found the job at the attorney general’s office in the Solicitor General’s office doing appeals. And so the timing of all of that was because of her. That’s incredible. And because of my family’s situation. And then in push forward by that impetus, I found that job. And from day one, it felt different for me and it was probably a 60 or 70% pay cut, but it was at least a 160 or 70% expansion of my passion for what I was doing. And different people find that passion in different places, and a lot of my colleagues at the law firm had that passion about what they were doing. And my hope for everybody in our profession is that they find a place and a kind of work where they really feel good about investing themselves deeply in it because you do have to invest yourself deeply in your cases and in your clients’ interests in order to be a good lawyer. And some people find it easier to do that than others depending on where they are in their career.
Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock:
And I think it truly, it speaks to the service minded of individuals like yourself to justice and members of our judiciary that were thinking about the things that are important about serving the public and doing the most good. And I like to think that everyone ends up in where they’re supposed to be. I know you’re a man of faith, and so I am similar in that I think you are where you belong and where God means to you to be. And so the move from Houston to Austin, perhaps there’s a little bit of divine goodwill there, right? Amen. Yeah. And your wife getting the job here, that’s a fantastic opportunity and that brings you to the core and eventually puts you here. And so I think there is a little bit of that and everything that happens,
Speaker 3:
And I’ll say I had no idea what that path was going to lead to. And so I took a low level job at the attorney general’s office. I ended up being able to rise within that organization under Attorney General Abbott’s direction, and then he moved me over to the governor’s office as his general counsel and then decided to appoint me to the court. But I had no idea that that kind of a thing was going to open up when I took that job. And you won’t know. You’re not going to know. You’re not going to be able to plan out your path with precision. All you can do is look for a place where you can do work that energizes you and that makes you feel good about what you’re doing, look for people who you want to work with, and then to the extent that you’re able invest yourself in your work and work hard and give it your very best. And that will bear fruit of one kind or another. Right? Whether it’s the career path that I’ve had or whether it’s the financial ability to take care of your family or whether it’s just the satisfaction of knowing that you advance justice by helping your client. Hard work is the path to success no matter where you’re coming from.
Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock:
That’s right. I absolutely agree. I believe it’s hard work. And I think similar what you’re saying is that it’s about saying yes, and you’ve said yes so many different times. Yes. To moving here, to taking those opportunities, to moving to the governor’s office and yes, to sitting in these chambers
Speaker 3:
And yes to this interview.
Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock:
Yes to this interview. That’s right. And we so appreciate that. Yes. So a big theme of this podcast is mentorship because none of us get to where we are alone. Were there any people along the way, mentors, colleagues who played a big role in shaping your career?
Speaker 3:
So again, my parents are the very top of that list, and if I didn’t mention them, number one on that topic, I’d be off track. I clerked for Judge Jerry Smith on the Fifth Circuit in Houston, and he was is an extraordinary judge, an extraordinary boss, a wonderful man who treated me very, very well, even when I didn’t deserve it during the year that I worked for him. And that clerkship was an extraordinary opportunity for me to see litigation from a judge’s perspective, from a neutral perspective and to think about the way judges approach cases to help him approach the cases that were before him, but also just to learn from him and to see the way that his mind worked and the questions that he asked. And it was a great year, and he’s the mentor that I would point to number one on a professional level in terms of somebody who showed me how to do this well and got me off on the right track.
Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock:
What a good mentor to have along the way and especially so early on in your career where they could have that type of profound effect throughout the entirety of it. So in January, 2025, you became the chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court. What was that transition like and how does leading the court compare to serving as a justice versus chief?
Speaker 3:
Well, I’ve just been chief for two months, and so I’ll have to let you know later what the transition has been like. I’m still very much in the transition period. The outgoing Chief Justice Nathan Hecht had been Chief Justice for about 12 years. He’d been on the Supreme Court for 36 years. He first became a district judge in Dallas when I was 1-year-old in 1981. I won’t mention how old I was. I had the honor of serving with him on this court for seven years under his leadership as Chief Justice. And he has left, fortunately for me, he has left this court in very, very good shape. And so I don’t feel like I have a lot to do other than just to keep things running on the good track that he set them on. And of course, they’re little things here and there that anybody who took this job would think about doing a little bit differently from their predecessor. But his service to the state and to the court is a blessing to all Texans, but in particular is a blessing to his colleagues on the court and then to me as his successor as the Chief justice. So I’m not trying to fill his shoes. I don’t think that’s a reasonable thing to aspire to, but I am trying to want to leave this place and this job at least as good as I found it, which is the example that he set in a big
Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock:
Way. And it goes without saying congratulations on your role as Chief Justice. And I know that we appreciate everything that Chief Justice Hecht did for Texas and for the members of our judiciary as well. And so now that you’ve been on the Texas Supreme Court for over six years, what’s been the most, I guess, surprising or unexpected part of this job?
Speaker 3:
Well, I’ll answer that with respect to Chief Justice. I had no idea all of the many things that Chief Justice Hecht was doing to keep this ship afloat. So the most important aspect of our job is deciding cases and writing opinions. And in that regard, the chief justice is one of nine votes and does not have any particular influence over the rest of the court and doesn’t have any more than one vote on whatever stage of the case wein. But there’s an administrative side to the court’s responsibilities. So the Constitution statutes passed by the legislature rules that the court has made over time obligate the court to oversee the judicial branch in some respects and also to engage in all manner of administrative responsibilities with respect to the judicial system, transferring judges between cases, interacting with the state bar, just keeping an eye on all kinds of administrative tasks that are required to keep the judicial branch running efficiently.
I was vaguely aware of much of what he was doing, and when Chief Justice Hecht had anything on his plate as the chief justice that was difficult or controversial, then he would bring it to the rest of the court and we would help him think through it. But there was a lot of day-to-day stuff that he was handling with the staff at the court and with other judges around the state. And I was blissfully unaware of much of that, a lot of work. Now it belongs to me congratulations, and it’s an honor to be able to do it. But all of those responsibilities are now in addition to what was already a full-time job deciding cases, writing opinions, running for office every few years. That was plenty to do. The chief Justice role adds to that plate, but Chief Justice Hegg did it very well. I’m in an initial period here I think of just trying to get my hands and my head around what all I need to be doing and thinking about. So I’m very, very busy right now. And then down the road, I hope to be able to manage my workload into a place where it’s a little bit less hectic than it has been over the last couple of months as I’ve tried to just get used to all of this.
Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock:
I know at least for me, when it is very busy at work, as I’m sure it is for you right now, it feels like the family takes a little bit of a laboring more and helping kind of pick up my slack. The same with your household. Absolutely.
Speaker 3:
Absolutely. My wife is a practicing lawyer and our girls are in school, and the last couple of months have been a time in our family’s life when my wife has stepped up and held things together as I’ve had to focus very intensely on my new job here at the court. And as I said, I think I’ll be able to find a little bit more of an equilibrium here soon, but we all know whether you’ve got a big trial coming up or a big appeal, you’re going to argue or a deal that’s got to close, or I used to work at the Capitol and there’s a legislative session wrapping up. There are times in our careers where if we want to do things well, we have no choice but to just drop almost everything else and focus intensely on what we’re doing. But if you don’t have family and people in your life who can support you during those moments, then it’s very, very difficult. And I do have that with my wife and other people in our life who make it possible for me to do this job, and I’m very grateful to them.
Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock:
Yeah, I like to think of it as a pendulum. Sometimes I’m a great dad and some days I’m a great lawyer. I oftentimes can’t be great at both all the time. I do my best not to miss any kids’ events as I’m sure you do. But you’re right. If you’ve got something big happening at work or in a different part of your life, it’s about that communication and making sure you’ve got that support network in every substantive area. So I completely agree,
Speaker 3:
And I want to say we all find ourselves in places where if we have families, especially if we have children and we’re in jobs like this, you find yourself in places where you have to step back and ask yourself whether you’re really fulfilling your obligations as a father or a mother or a son or daughter or whatever your familial obligations are. And I want to encourage people, lawyers, especially if you step back and on reflection your answers to that question is that perhaps you are not fulfilling those obligations in the way that you should because you’re putting professional obligations first. I encourage people to think hard about whether that’s the case for them. I mean, lawyers are under a lot of pressure. Our work can be very difficult and very time consuming. At the end of the day, there’s no more important obligation to me than my family and my wife and my children, and if they need me, that’s more important to me than being the chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court.
Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock:
And I think fortunately that the profession allows you to do both, we’re always searching for that golden egg. That’s the coveted work-life balance. But I think that everything I’ve seen in your service to the court, that it’s achievable to be great at all things, so
Speaker 3:
Well, you’re very kind, but I assure you, I do not feel that I’m great at all things. And if you knew everything about me, you would agree not all of which will be revealed in this interview. We can do things off the record as well.
Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock:
No, just kidding. Well, I’d like to talk more about what the types of cases the court hears. And so I know the court hears cases that impact millions of Texans and set legal precedent for years to come when a particularly tough case comes for you, how do you approach those difficult legal decisions?
Speaker 3:
Well, I go back to hard work. There’s no substitute for digging deeply into the briefing, digging deeply into the cases that the parties are citing. I think it’s very important, particularly at the Supreme Court level, but for any appellate court to seek to understand the landscape of the law surrounding the issue that you are working on, we have to think about a little bit more than just addressing the particular dispute that’s teed up by the briefing. Of course, that’s the core of our job, but the parties aren’t necessarily going to see all of the angles at all of the ways that what they’re arguing might affect this area of the law or what collateral consequences it might have somewhere else. And we want to be able to rely on the parties to present all of those considerations to us, and we expect them to do that, particularly at the Supreme Court level. But we have an obligation, I think, to see those angles ourselves and to think deeply about what we’re doing and to be careful with what we say in these opinions which are going to be poured over and scrutinized and dissected and cited Ed by sentence. It’s that’s a big responsibility. And it’s important that we approach our jobs with the knowledge that what we write is going to be dissected and used and micro analyzed in the way that it is.
Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock:
I know during your state of the judiciary, you talked a little bit about your judicial philosophy, about the importance of the rule of law and the importance that in particular as justices on the Texas Supreme Court, that y’all’s role in interpreting the law and the way that it’s interpreted, does that at all influence the way that you approach these difficult legal decisions?
Speaker 3:
Well, sure. I mean, what I mentioned in the speech is that when we look at statutes, we look at the text, we ask, what do these words mean to the ordinary reader of English? We don’t ask what might the thinking behind this have been or what might the purpose of the legislator have been in enacting the statute, the words of the statute themselves have been enacted into the law. Those words are the law. And so our job is to understand and explain what those words mean, not to understand or explain or effectuate some deeper purpose that we perceive behind the words. And if the way that the statute gets interpreted and implemented by the courts under that textual approach is not what the legislature, what the legislators envisioned when they enacted the statute, then they can come back very soon and change the statute. And that’s a healthy back and forth between the branches of government. And so a high percentage of our cases, I mean, I dunno off the top of my head, but at least half of our cases involve interpretation of a statute and high percentage of our cases turn on a question of what do these words mean? And so that approach to interpreting statutes is constantly coming into play at the court. And it sounds easier than it is
Justices judges who all share that general approach to how we should read statutes disagree in good faith all the time about what this or that provision of a piece of legislation means. And it’s important that this is something I think we do very well at this court. And it’s part of the culture that Chief Justice Hecht fostered and that I want to continue to foster. It’s just one in which we disagree very respectively and constructively, but vigorously with each other in good faith about good faith disagreements over what the law means.
Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock:
And you’ve read my mind, I think you’re right, is that one of the things that makes the Texas Supreme Court unique is how collaborative it is with nine justices. You all have to work together even when you don’t always agree. So how do you and your colleagues navigate different perspectives to reach decisions?
Speaker 3:
Well, we talk about it. We talk about it. And that’s a big part of this job. When I was practicing before this court and other courts of appeals, I think I had a little bit of a misperception of how multi-member courts operate, and not a complete misperception, but I’ll describe kind of what I imagined was happening. And that is that whether nine justices on the court, and so each of those nine is going to go to his or her chambers and figure out the case and decide for himself or herself what the position is. This is what I think. And then you ask the next, this is what they think and they think there might be nine different views. There’s sort of nine silos, and then you’re just going to count heads. How many of the silos have landed in your column? Are you saying that’s not how it works? Well, that is in part how it works in that we all do prepare for argument and digest these cases individually, separately. But then once we come to conference, once it’s time to actually cast those votes. And then especially when there’s disagreement on the court and the votes are cast differently, then we talk about it and people are convinced of another person’s position, people’s votes can change.
The court is, I think everybody on the court is interested in what an opposing justice thinks when they find out that there is an opposing justice in a case. You want to know what they think, you want to know whether you’ve missed something or whether they have a way of looking at this that you should have considered. And sometimes the votes just are what they are, and there’s no movement. But frequently as cases are discussed and as drafts of opinions are exchanged, people come to see cases differently and come to be convinced of things that they didn’t start out thinking about a case. And that’s something that I think our court does pretty well. We all respect each other, we all genuinely want to know what the right answer is. And we all try to approach cases that way as opposed to, this is my position and I’m just going to win.
Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock:
Does the oral arguments that come before the court have that same type of impact on the justices on your positions if you walked into the Courtroom with a certain frame of mind? Do the oral arguments often change those perceptions?
Speaker 3:
I wouldn’t say oral argument often changes my view of a case, but it always can before oral argument. I’ve read the papers. I have in some cases reached a pretty firm view of the case. And in other cases my view is far more preliminary, but I’ve always got some leaning going into oral argument, and I’m open to the argument affecting my thinking about the case. And there’s some cases where that’s more true than in other cases. But I think oral argument is a very, very useful tool for the court to make sure that it’s understanding cases correctly. And I always go into argument, willing to listen and ready to change my view if I need to.
Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock:
What valuable feedback for Texas lawyers to hear directly from the court how you always those decisions and getting that peek behind the current. And so we really appreciate that insight.
Speaker 3:
Well, the reality is you don’t always have a chance to sway a justice at oral argument. I mean, the papers speak for themselves, and the law may speak for itself, and there may be nothing you can do, but you should absolutely approach any argument at any hearing with the good faith belief that you can convince the judge of your position and in many cases you can.
Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock:
And so you’ve now served in this role for several years. So looking back, is there anything you wish you had known sooner about serving as a justice on the Texas Supreme Court?
Speaker 3:
I don’t think so. No. I mean, what comes to my mind is the political stuff running for office, which is not really a part of your job at the court, but is a part of your life once you take on one of these positions. And that’s something that took a little bit of getting used to. I ran in 2018 right after I got appointed, and that was a trial by fire. And then in 2024 when I ran for reelection, it was a whole lot easier just having done it before and having been around a little bit. So that’s something that I think for someone who hadn’t run for office before and hadn’t been a judge before, there’s no way to prepare for that other than to just experience it and force yourself to do it as best you can.
But no, I think this is the kind of job where you have to experience it to understand what it’s like. It’s a very, very interesting job. New cases, new issues all the time, interesting smart colleagues to talk with and to think things through with. It’s also a big responsibility, obviously, and can place a weight on you when decisions are difficult and when things aren’t clear and you’ve got to pick one path or another. And at least for me, I didn’t know what that was going to be like until I got into it and needed to do it myself. And I dunno that I could have really understood that. And then as I mentioned before, the good news at this court is that when I’m in those difficult positions and I need counsel, I have eight colleagues here at the court who want to talk to me and want to help me think through things, and I want to do the same for them. And if we rely on each other and we’re all committed to the same principle that our job is to decide these cases based on the law and based on nothing else, then we will going to be okay at the end of the day.
Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock:
And I agree with that. And so we’ve got a few minutes left. And so I’ve got a interesting question, which is throughout your time on the bench, I’m sure you’ve worked on some truly memorable cases. Is there one that stands out to you as particularly significant? I
Speaker 3:
Hate to hazard an answer to that. I think our opinions need to speak for themselves, and we should hesitate to comment beyond our opinions on any particular case. And so nothing springs to my mind immediately. And what does bring to my mind is just the truism that once you get to the Texas Supreme Court, every case is important and every case is going to have an impact on the law in our state. And every case is, of course, extremely important to the parties involved. And so of course, I, I’m a human being. I’m a lawyer. Some cases are more interesting to me than others, and that would be the case with any judge. But in terms of their importance, we have to, in this job, treat them all as very, very important. And I think that’s the
Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock:
Right approach. And I absolutely agree. So my last question is, for many of our listeners, they’re young lawyers, law students, the idea serving on the Texas Supreme Court might feel like a distant dream. What advice would you give to those who are considering a future in public service or the judiciary?
Speaker 3:
Well, as I said at the beginning, if you’re thinking you might want to be a judge someday, remember that you cannot make that happen yourself. So it’s not necessarily a fair aspiration to put in front of yourself because you are not in control of whether that happens for you. And what you can do is be the kind of lawyer who people will look at someday and think, oh, that person maybe should be a judge, be a lawyer who sees all sides of a case, which makes you a better lawyer. But some lawyers are better than others at understanding the other side’s perspective, understanding the other side’s argument from the other side’s, perspective, truly giving the other side credit for the portions of their position that have merit and not being so focused in on your advocacy for your side that you can’t understand the case from all angles and showing humility and civility, grace in the way that you deal with opposing counsel, be the kind of lawyer who people would want to see up there on the bench, be the kind of person that people would want to see on the bench someday. And if ultimately you end up there, it’ll be because they made a decision, not because you had any control
Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock:
Over it. One thing I’ve always found interesting is that when you’re seeking an appointment for a judiciary position, is that you, I believe you’ve got, and correct me if I’m wrong, you are the subject matter expert on this, is that you need to identify the last five opposing counsels that you had on cases of significance. And so I believe that acting with humility and acting with civility really is very important in this context because it may very well be your opposing counsel who may be having that influence on that appointment. What are your thoughts on that?
Speaker 3:
Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. Well, one of the things I did when I was the governor general counsel, is I helped him decide who to appoint to courts around the state. And this is one of the things that we would ask people about if you want to ask people who have worked with this person who know this person, is this the kind of person who ought to be a judge? And whether it’s on a professional level or a personal level, the answer to that question that’s provided by the people who know that person well and interact with that person on a daily basis is some of the most important input that that decision maker could have.
Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock:
That makes perfect sense. Well, chief Justice Blacklock, this has been a great conversation. I really appreciate your time and insight. Thank you for being here with us today. Thank you so much for having me. And to our listeners, thank you for tuning into the Young Gunners Podcast. Be sure to subscribe and join us for our next episode as we continue our conversations with the justice of the Texas Supreme Court. Until next time,
Rocky Dhir:
Thanks for tuning to this special cross posted episode of the State Bar of Texas podcast. If you’d like to hear more from Ty’s Young Gunners podcast or dive deeper into the legal minds of the Supreme Court of Texas Justices, be sure to subscribe to Young Gunners wherever you get your podcasts. And remember to rate and review us wherever you listen. We enjoy hearing your feedback. That’s all for now, folks. I’m your host, Rocky Deer, signing off for now.
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