It’s not easy to make a lasting impact on a state as large as Texas. Judge William Justice, who was 89 when he died in Austin on October 13, did just that. As a federal district judge, he had presided over significant cases until shortly before his death. The impact of his decisions over more than four decades made him the most admired and the most hated judge in Texas. Here is his story.

Justice was born in l920 in Athens, Texas. His career was charted when his father, a lawyer with a reputation for taking on unpopular cases, made his son a partner at the age of seven. During his childhood, Justice endured a series of illnesses including chronic whooping cough. He said in later years that experience might have made him more compassionate toward the unfortunate. He also recalled seeing the hungry, jobless men hanging from boxcars during the Great Depression. Justice

received his undergraduate and law degrees from The University of Texas and served in the United States Army during WWII. In l946, he returned to Texas and joined his father in practicing law in Athens. He served as City Attorney for eight years before

being selected by President John F. Kennedy to serve as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Texas. In l968, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him to the federal bench in the Eastern District of Texas.

It became clear in the early ‘70s that Judge Justice would issue controversial decisions that would make vast changes in the state of Texas. In November of l970, l7 years after the Supreme Court’s landmark desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education, Judge Justice ordered the Texas Education Agency to begin desegregating Texas public schools. At that time, many allblack schools in Texas still had outhouses. His order, known as United States v. Texas, affected more than 1,000 school districts and two million students. It brought both praise and anger throughout the state. In this decision, as in many others, he would draw on the precedent of the law of the land. When challenged in the courts, his order was upheld by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Two years later in l972, a Texas prison inmate, David Ruiz, filed a fifteen page handwritten letter, alleging that he was confined under unconstitutional conditions, harassed by public officials, given poor medical care and kept in unlawful solitary confinement. Judge Justice took an active role in following through. He consolidated seven other inmates’ letters with civil rights complaints with that of Ruiz, appointed a lawyer from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to handle the case, and asked the federal Justice Department to join with the inmates as a friend of the court. This class action suit, Ruiz v. Estelle, became a trial that lasted a year with 349 witnesses testifying. The state’s defense was that Texas had the best penal system in the country. However, testimony revealed that there were two doctors for every 17,000 prisoners, 2,000 inmates slept on the floors, and inmate trustees ran the cell blocks through force and intimidation. The trial ended when Judge Justice in a l88 page ruling, ordered a complete overhaul of the Texas prison system. Changing major institutions does not happen quickly, and in l987, Justice held the state in contempt because there had been very few measurable changes made. It was not until 2002, after the state had spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build and improve prisons, that Judge Justice lifted federal oversight from the Texas penal system.

In l978, Judge Justice struck down a state law that allowed school districts to charge $1,000 tuition for every child of illegal immigrants. He said in later years that his ruling in Doe v. Plyer was his most important decision. “Without that education, they would have been just a burden on the rest of us. They had the right to an education on the same basis as children of citizens.” The ruling, upheld by the Supreme Court (5 to 4) in l982 guaranteed millions of children throughout the nation the right to free education through grade 12. In an interview with The Star Telegram in l998, Judge Justice said, “I found no case, no statute that covered the point of law that I had to decide. So I guess I made my own little contribution.”

Throughout his 40 years, Judge Justice was admired and hated. He and his wife suffered social ostracism in their church and community. Death threats and hate mail arrived. Bumper stickers demanded his impeachment. There was deep passion among his supporters and adversaries. He was praised by columnist Molly Ivins in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, who wrote in l998 that Judge Justice had lived up to his name and “brought the United States Constitution to Texas.” The same year, Lino Graglia, a constitutional law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said, “He has wreaked more havoc and misery and injury to the people of Texas than any man in the last 25 years.” During the school desegregation furor at the beginning of his career, he was asked if he wanted armed guards for protection. He declined and instead signed up for tae kwon do, the Korean martial art that provides self-defense.

Frank Kemerer, who wrote “William Wayne Justice: A Judicial Biography,” described Justice as a soft-spoken gentlemanly man. “He was never a person who would dominate the conversation when he would go to lunch with his clerks.” After his death, Kemerer summed up the core beliefs of the judge who safeguarded the rights of minorities, the poor, the mentally retarded and the powerless. “He had a transcendent value, which was to advance human dignity and provide a measure of basic fairness.” The lieutenant governor of Texas, Bill Hobby, was succinct, “Judge Justice dragged Texas into the 20th century. God bless him. He was very unpopular,

but he was doing the right thing.”

Joyce S. Anderson is the author of “Courage in High Heels,” “Flaw in the Tapestry,” “If Winter Comes” and “The Mermaids Singing.” She can be reached at JSAWrite@aol.com.