He was a Texas judicial giant, and will be greatly missed.
The William Wayne Justice Center for Public Interest Law at the University of Texas School of Law will carry forward his legacy. The Law School has posted, "In Memoriam: The Honorable William Wayne Justice, 1920–2009."
"Federal judge who shattered old Texas dies at 89," is by AP writer April Castro, via the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
U.S. District Judge William Wayne Justice, whose rulings shattered
old Texas by changing the way the state educated children, treated
prisoners and housed its poorest and most vulnerable citizens, has
died. He was 89.
His law clerk, Kelly Davis, said the judge died Tuesday in Austin.
The
soft-spoken jurist spent three often tumultuous decades on the bench
following his appointment by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968. To
some, Justice was a judicial renegade who disregarded the public's will
by imposing his own concepts on a conservative state.
But his
decisions are widely credited for creating a modern Texas. They forced
the state to dramatically expand and improve its prison and juvenile
justice systems, and to dismantle racial barriers in public housing and
education. He opened public schools to the children of illegal
immigrants and provided bilingual education in rulings that were later
used as the foundation of national policy.
"I'm basically a very
shy, retiring person, but fate has put me in a situation where I've
been in the midst of controversy," he wrote in his 1991 book, "William
Wayne Justice, A Judicial Biography."
After only two years on the
bench, he ordered the state in 1970 to eliminate racial segregation in
public schools after many districts ignored desegregation federal
policies. That ruling, U.S. v. Texas, affected more than 1,000 school
districts and 2 million students statewide.
Justice ordered Texas
to provide free public education for illegal immigrants and their
children following a class action lawsuit filed in September 1977. The
suit accused East Texas' Smith County of excluding children of Mexican
decent from public schools because they couldn't show legal U.S.
residency. Appeals led to a landmark 1982 Supreme Court ruling that
extended the right nationwide.
Justice took control of the Texas
prison system after a 1972 lawsuit filed by inmate David Ruiz alleged
overcrowding and inhumane conditions. After a nearly year-long trial in
1980, Justice issued a sweeping 188-page ruling that said Texas prisons
were overcrowded, understaffed and offered inadequate medical care.
Justice also found that prison officials tolerated rampant violence
among inmates, guards and inmates who worked as guards under a
generations-old system known as building tenders.
He ordered
changes and appointed a special master to make sure they were
implemented. Justice found the state in contempt in 1987. Voters later
that year approved a half-billion dollars in bond for prison
construction, the first step in an unprecedented building program that
today includes more than 100 prisons housing some 154,000 inmates.
Justice ended federal oversight of the system in 2002.
That
same year, Justice rebuked the administration of then-Texas Gov. George
W. Bush for failing to provide health care to children who already
qualified for Medicaid.
"Judge Justice dies at 89," by Denise Gamino is at the Austin American-Statesman.
His destiny was all in a name.
"Judge Justice."
William Wayne Justice was a giant in Texas history, the foreman of
an audacious legal assembly line that churned out bulging packages of
civil rights, equal justice and opportunities for the least among us.
Justice, a soft-spoken federal judge who roared in his class action
rulings on human rights over the past 41 years, died Tuesday in Austin.
He was 89 and was still serving as a U.S. district judge in Austin, although illness had kept him out of the office for months.
A memorial service is scheduled for Monday at 10 a.m. at St. David's
Episcopal Church in downtown Austin. A public reception will follow.
Private burial will take place in the judge's East Texas hometown of
Athens.
The judge also will be honored later with a monument at the Texas State
Cemetery. The dedication of that cenotaph, which has not yet been
scheduled, will be open to the public.
Justice was a legend in his own time. The very mention of his
made-for-Hollywood name could turn state officials and conservative
taxpayers red with anger but melt the hearts of reform advocates
fighting to better the lives of overlooked people who had no clout.
People either thought "Judge Justice" was an oxymoron or simply redundant.
But today, most agree that William Wayne Justice shoved Texas, against its will, into the mainstream of society.
His legal compassion forever changed the lives of millions of
schoolchildren, prisoners, minorities, immigrants and people with
disabilities in Texas. He ordered the integration of public schools and
public housing. He outlawed crowding, beatings and inhumane medical
care in prisons and youth lockups. He ordered that community homes be
provided to people with mental disabilities who were living in large
institutions. He expanded voting opportunities.
And that was just the tip of the docket.
And:
William Wayne Justice was "perhaps the single most influential agent
for change in 20th-century Texas history," according to his official
biographer, Frank Kemerer, who was a professor at the University of
North Texas for almost 30 years.
"Through a series of momentous judicial decisions, his influence
would sweep across the Texas landscape far beyond the geographic
boundaries of his court and out into the nation," he wrote in "William
Wayne Justice: A Judicial Biography" (University of Texas Press).
Justice was at the top of the list of so-called activist judges who,
as a general group, are often accused by former President George W.
Bush and other legal conservatives of interpreting the U.S.
Constitution too expansively. But Justice took to heart a U.S. Supreme
Court ruling in 1958 that, in essence, the Constitution and its
amendments are "not static" and must draw "meaning from the evolving
standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society."
"I was never underprivileged, but I have human feelings. If you see
someone in distress, well, you want to help them if you can," Justice
told the American-Statesman in 2006. "I hope people remember me for
someone trying to do justice. That's what I've tried to do."
The late Barbara Jordan, the first black woman from the South to
serve in the U.S. Congress when she was elected from Texas in 1972,
once said Justice "helped officials in Texas state government see their
duty clearly."
"William Wayne Justice, Judge Who Remade Texas, Dies at 89," is the title of the New York Times obituary written by Douglas Martin.
Judge Justice had presided over cases in Austin until shortly before his death, having taken senior status there in 1998.
Judge Justice was a small-town lawyer active in Democratic Party politics when President Lyndon B. Johnson
appointed him to the federal bench of the Eastern District of Texas in
1968. Sitting in Tyler, Tex., he came to be called the most powerful
man in Texas by those who agreed with his largely liberal decisions and
the most hated by those who differed.
In a 1998 column in The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Molly Ivins
made what she called the “painfully obvious point” that Judge Justice
had lived up to his name, saying he “brought the United States
Constitution to Texas.”
And:
If Judge Justice seemed high-handed, it was partly because he
believed that the founding fathers had wanted judges to seize and
command the higher ground. Perhaps not surprising, people reacted with
hate mail, death threats, ostracism and bumper stickers demanding his
impeachment.
“The plain fact of the matter is that the majority
is sometimes wrong,” Judge Justice declared in an interview with The
New York Times in 1982.
Frank R. Kemerer, who wrote “William
Wayne Justice: A Judicial Biography” (1991), said in an interview on
Wednesday, “He had a transcendent value, which was to advance human
dignity and provide a measure of basic fairness.”
In many cases
Judge Justice challenged official intransigence by applying the known
law of the land, as he did in 1971 when he told school districts in
East Texas to obey the law by integrating. Even 17 years after the United States Supreme Court
ordered schools to be integrated, it was not unusual for students in
all-black schools to have outhouses rather than indoor restrooms.
Other
cases lacked precedent. In 1978, Judge Justice struck down a Texas law
that let public school districts charge tuition for the children of
illegal immigrants. When the ruling was upheld 5 to 4 by the Supreme Court in 1982, millions of children had the right to a free education.
“There
was absolutely no case law on it,” Judge Justice said in an interview
with The Star-Telegram in 1998. “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.”
To many, Judge Justice defined the concept
of activist judge. In the early 1970s, he had his law clerks — many of
them from top law schools like Harvard and Stanford — sift through
hundreds of inmate letters complaining of cruel and unusual punishment
in Texas prisons. He pulled out eight and consolidated them into a
single action, then appointed a lawyer from the NAACP Legal Defense and
Educational Fund Inc., William Bennett Turner, to handle the case. He
asked the federal Justice Department to join with the inmates as a friend of the court.
The
state defended a prison system with two doctors for every 17,000
prisoners, where 2,000 inmates slept on the floor and where inmate
trustees, known as building tenders, essentially ran the cell blocks
through coercion. It contended that Texas had, in fact, the best penal
system in the nation.
In 1980, after a trial that lasted nearly a
year, Judge Justice ordered major changes in the state’s prison system.
In 1987, he held the state in contempt because the promised progress
had been so meager.
In 2002, after Texas had spent hundreds of
millions of dollars to build and improve prisons, Judge Justice
released the Texas penal system from federal oversight.
