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chapter two Legislation, Litigation, and Judicial Economy among the methods for judicial selection, Benjamin Franklin declared during the Constitutional Convention of 1787, was “the Scottish practice,” under which the “nomination proceeded from the Lawyers, who always selected the ablest of the profession in order to get rid of him, and share his practice among themselves.”1 The vice president’s motives were distinguishable from the venality that Franklin had suggested 172 years earlier, but Lyndon B. Johnson clearly had taken a personal as well as a professional interest in the choice of U.S. District Judge James Allred’s successor in the Southern District of Texas. Reynaldo G. Garza offered his patron little in terms of reciprocal financial reward or continued political service. Garza had been named to the federal district court simply for demonstrating early political savvy and showing long-lived personal loyalty to Johnson. The judicial appointment was not a matter of what Johnson’s friend could do for him. It was what Johnson could do for his friend.2 Garza’s personal ties to Johnson had put him in the running for the federal bench in ways that his political and professional pedigree could not, because his stature in Texas was, like his ethnicity, a significant departure from the norm for a judge in the Southern District. Garza’s brother judges had all been born in small towns, but each had eventually established ties in Houston, the largest city in the Southern District of Texas. Like several of the other judges, Garza had attended the University of Texas (ut) law school in Austin, and he had become a prominent lawyer with political connections. Unlike the others, however, he had returned to his hometown, apparently very far from the levers of power and influence. As a result of that decision, which was perhaps linked with his ethnic identity, Garza’s legal and political career paled next to those of the late Judge James Allred, who had been governor of Texas, and Judge Ben Connally, who was a senator’s son. Allen Burroughs Hannay, by contrast with Garza, was a small-town boy who had seemed destined by birth for the federal bar and bench. Hannay, the son of a U.S. attorney, was born in Hempstead, Texas, on 14 February 1892. He attended 50 legislation and judicial economy 51 Texas A&M University and then the ut law school, where he earned his LL.B. in 1913. Hannay was a judge in Waller County from 1915 until 1917, when he resigned the bench to enlist in the U.S. Army during World War I. He trained pilots during the war. Hannay, it seems, was a man of many talents. In addition to practicing law, serving as a judge, and training pilots, he played baseball professionally, for the old Houston Buffs. Hannay resumed his state judicial career in 1930 and was judge of the 113th District Court for a dozen years. President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Hannay to replace Judge Allred in the Southern District in 1942.3 By reason of his long service, Hannay was the chief judge of the Southern District when Garza joined the court in 1961.4 The Southern District’s fourth judge, Joe McDonald Ingraham, was born in Pawnee County, Oklahoma, on 5 July 1903. He earned his LL.B at the National University Law School (now George Washington University) in Washington, D.C. Ingraham entered solo practice in his native Oklahoma, although only for a few months in the winter of 1927 and 1928. He moved steadily up the legal career ladder the farther south he traveled. Ingraham worked as an attorney with a small Fort Worth firm for seven years and then migrated to Houston, where he practiced solo for six months before landing at Baker, Botts. He specialized in oil and gas law for that prestigious firm from 1935 until 1942. Like Judge Connally, Ingraham served in the U.S. Army Air Forces and reached the rank of lieutenant colonel during World War II. He returned to Houston in 1946 and spent one more year at Baker, Botts before reentering solo legal practice. Ingraham became a leader in the Harris County Republican Party and gained his position on the federal bench in 1954, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed him to fill the vacancy left by Judge Kennerly upon his retirement.5 Judge Ingraham was the first Republican ever to serve on the Southern District court since its 1902 founding. That...

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