John Hill for the State of Texas

Foreword

Foreword Twenty years after he served as attorney general, John Hill’s legacy remained so singular that he was at the top of my list of resources to contact when I decided to seek election to that office in 1998. Although he was a Democrat and I was hoping to become the first Republican attorney general of Texas since Reconstruction, the luster of competence and dynamism his administration gave to that somewhat dowdy office created a level of respect throughout the legal profession strong enough to easily eclipse political partisanship. I hoped to live up to the standard he set. I wanted to model my administration after his. His advice to me was simple: Play it straight. Do it by the book. Turn aside all the suggestions and requests from people who want you to bend the law, to cut some corners, to help them solve a problem with the state or a litigant. If you ever cave in to that pressure, it’s almost impossible to get back on track. Decide what you believe the law and good public policy dictate, then stick with it—even if it means you lose on the issue. When I won my race and was confronted immediately with the temptations Judge Hill had warned me against, my respect for his core integrity and fairness deepened. As I waded into the broad array of responsibilities of the office, I gained a firsthand appreciation for his decades-old accomplishments . One of those accomplishments involved a process most nonlawyers would term arcane: issuing written interpretations of statutes. It’s the type of law book spadework I would guess might appeal to a law professor but certainly not to a courtroom lawyer like Judge Hill, who was renowned for captivating juries with folksy aphorisms. Yet one of the innovations he is most proud to claim is his elevation of the opinion-writing process to a top priority. He reviewed (and usually returned, often with copious scribbling in the margins, prompting follow-up exchanges) every draft prepared by his staff. His predecessors had selected different staff lawyers to form the committee that wrote an opinion; each opinion was credited to the assistant who drafted it. He replaced that procedure with a standing opinions committee chaired by David Kendall, a veteran generalist from a large (x) Foreword Houston law firm, and he directed that every opinion be signed only by him, his first assistant, and Kendall. He also installed a quasi-judicial approach by publicizing requests to alert all interested groups and by inviting them to file briefs advancing their interpretations. This wide-open approach defied conventional wisdom at the time, which held that opinion requests often were an insider’s game best played with minimal outsider input. The opinions were expected to be more attuned to political than legal considerations. Judge Hill rejected this approach not only because it offended the sense of dignity he believed the attorney general’s office should command but also because he saw those opinions as the heart of his administration’s legacy. He chafed at the thought of future legal researchers dismissing one of his opinions as the work of a political hack. That would have undercut his lifelong devotion to enhancing the profession he had loved from the minute he stepped into his first class at the University of Texas School of Law, where he displayed such mastery of legal cases when called upon by his law professors that he was accused by one of reading from an outline. He graduated near the top of his class, earning membership in the school’s most prestigious honorary society, Chancellors. As a practicing lawyer, he won commendations from the State Bar of Texas for his success in pushing the corporate lawyer–dominated organization to expand its education offerings to include trial advocacy seminars—often organized and taught by John Hill. The opinion-writing reforms he installed became doubly important when the Texas Legislature in 1973 enacted the Open Records Act, which assigned to the attorney general’s office the resolution of disputes involving public access to governmental records. Judge Hill and Kendall interpreted that role to require for every open record request a written decision accompanied by an explanation of the legal reasoning. Because the new law’s first five years of interpretive decisions occurred during Judge Hill’s administration, these 220 rulings created a significant legal foundation that vastly simplified this job for me and his other successors. And, their unfailing thrust...