Texas Supreme Court advisory

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Monday, July 9, 2007

FORMER CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN HILL DIES
Services set at 1 p.m. Friday in Houston

Former Chief Justice of the Texas Supreme Court John Hill’s death Monday ended a remarkable legal and public service career spanning 60 years. He was 83.

Hill was the only person in Texas state history to serve as secretary of state, attorney general and chief justice. He retired from the Court in 1988 after three years.

Hill also ran twice for governor, the last time losing narrowly in 1979 to Bill Clements.

As chief justice from January 5, 1985, until January 4, 1988, he championed reform of the state’s partisan election of judges, arguing for a system to select judges based on merit.

“Chief Justice Hill served Texas with his heart and the law with his great intellect. His retirement from public service was no retirement at all, because he continued to advocate for a method of judicial selection that would assure trust and confidence in our judiciary,” Chief Justice Wallace B. Jefferson said. “I came to know and respect him as a man of compassion and strength. Texans will miss this distinguished attorney general. The judiciary will miss this towering chief. I will always remember him as a friend and mentor.”

Hill was replaced as chief justice by Thomas R. Phillips, who continued the cause of changing judicial selection in Texas.

“For more than two decades, he has been the leading advocate for judicial reform in Texas, both as a crusading chief justice and as a private advocate for fair and impartial courts,” Phillips said. “He was an eternal optimist, a devoted friend and an inspiring leader whose love for Texas and for the law made a real and lasting difference to our state.”

Hill died Monday morning in a Houston hospital after complications developed during surgery to implant a heart pacemaker. Survivors include his wife, Elizabeth Ann (Bitsy) Hill; three children, Melinda Elizabeth Hill Perrin, John Graham Hill and Harris County state District Judge Martha Hill Jamison; 10 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Services will be at 1 p.m. Friday at St. Luke's United Methodist Church, 3471 Westheimer Road in Houston.

In a surprise news conference in August 1988, Hill decided to end his tenure as chief justice with three years remaining on his six-year term he had won in the November 1984 election. Described on one news report as “emotional,” Hill explained that the partisan election of judges was “creating a perception of impropriety” and said that he planned to devote his time to reforming the judicial system. In his resignation letter to Clements, he called on the governor to create a special panel to propose his successor.

Born October 9, 1923, in Breckenridge, Texas, John Luke Hill Jr. was one of two children in an oil field-following family. He would in later years say that he “could have outdone Abe Lincoln in terms of the smallness of the house in which I was born.”

Hill, a highly successful school debater, once said he knew “from early on” he would be a lawyer, that he loved to argue and try to persuade. He shared a national debate championship at Kilgore Junior College.

After a year at Kilgore Junior College, his father took his son to the University of Texas.  “Now, you just go make a name for yourself down here,” Hill recalled his father’s parting words. “Make us proud of you.”

At UT Hill met his future bride, Bitsy Graham of Olney. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II primarily in the Philippines.

Hill and Bitsy Graham were married in 1946. The following year he graduated from the University of Texas School of Law.

Hill went to work in Houston’s Helm and Jones law firm, making $275 a month “and I was happy to have it,” he reported. The small firm allowed him the opportunity to “work the floor,” going to the courthouse and actually “getting your feet on the floor and standing up and trying a case.” After four years, he helped found Hill, Brown, Kronzer and Abraham, continuing to work primarily as a plaintiff’s attorney and trying hundreds of cases in his first decade of practice.

Gov. John Connally appointed him secretary of state in 1966. He served until 1968. When Connally decided not to run for a fourth term that year, Hill ran for governor as a Democrat in a race that Preston Smith won. In 1972 he ran for attorney general and won. He was re-elected for a full four-year term in 1974 and served until 1979, when he resigned to run for governor the second time.

As attorney general, Hill established regional AG offices around the state, authored and championed the Texas Deceptive Trades Practices Consumer Protection Act, prominently prosecuted polluters, and was the first attorney general in the country to appoint a woman division chief. He was honored in 1975 by Washington Monthly magazine as the outstanding state attorney general in the country.

In his 1984 race for chief justice, Hill was elected to replace retiring Chief Justice Jack Pope. “First and foremost,” Pope said, “he was a great attorney for the plaintiffs. And as judge, he stood for the right principles.”

In May 1986, in a speech to St. Mary’s University Law School graduates in San Antonio, he criticized a system by which judicial candidates relied on “the contributions of the special-interest groups, be it the plaintiffs bar, the defense bar, the business and insurance committee, or others who believe themselves to have a financial stake in a particular candidate’s success or defeat.”

He returned to private practice as a partner at Houston’s Locke Liddell Sapp L.L.P. and in 2005 joined Winstead P.C.

Hill was honored with the Leon Green Award for Outstanding Service to the Legal Profession; the American Judicature Society’s Herbert Hawley Award; the Marc Gold Award for Outstanding Service to the Mentally Retarded; the Karen H. Susman Jurisprudence Award; the Lola Wright Foundation Award for Legal Ethics; distinguished alumnus of the University of Texas; and in 1997 the UT Law School’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

Obituary in the Houston Chronicle