by Wendy Davis
I’ve thought about that many times in my public and my private life, how we become who we are and how understanding the experiences that have formed others helps us find common ground with them. And I have drawn upon the lessons I learned in that class many times in my public-service career.
I’ve never forgotten what the Warren Court class taught me: to really think about my own perspectives and to question where they come from and whether they are objectively fair or just the product of a personal experience clouding objective decision making. I’ve also learned to trust my voice, to trust the myriad experiences that shaped who I am, that equipped me with the fire in my belly to stand strong for the things I believe in, for the values I hold dear.
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Long before my tenure on the Fort Worth City Council, my first real experience with public service came during my second year of law school, when I worked as an intern for the Legal Services Center in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood. The center did all manner of work, from civil to criminal, for its low-income clients unable to pay private lawyers. We were mentored in our work by several attorneys who were committed to providing needed legal services to the poor. I was assigned to the civil side, helping clients who’d been diagnosed with HIV or AIDS. It was 1991, and back then the diagnosis meant that people suffering from the disease needed to get their affairs in order. Living wills, powers of attorney, estate planning—these were my routine tasks.
But sometimes the tasks were more urgent and the stakes higher. I recall vividly my first day in a courtroom, arguing before a judge on behalf of my client, whose partner of many years had died of AIDS. The decedent’s family was fighting against the wishes that their son had expressed in his will—he wanted to be cremated and for his remains to be kept by his partner, the love of his life. He wanted his modest estate of belongings to be given to his partner as well. His family wanted him buried in their family burial plot in another state, far from Massachusetts. I had come to work that day with no expectation that I would be standing in a courtroom that afternoon. And I was terrified. Thankfully, Patti lived close to the courthouse, and I was able to run by her place and assemble an outfit appropriate for appearing before a judge. And there I was, an intern, trying to win on an issue that was deeply personal and important to my client. He had just lost the love of his life. And now he was possibly going to lose him again.
Looking back, I can’t say I’m exactly proud of the tactic I employed to win the hearing for my client, but it worked. It quickly became clear to me that the decedent’s family was ashamed that their son was gay. As soon as I understood that, I made sure to include a statement to that effect in just about every sentence I uttered. Every time I did, I could see the decedent’s parents bristle. And I knew then that we would win. As their awareness grew that their son’s sexuality would be a very public part of the argument I would make before the court, they ultimately decided to withdraw their attempt to block the wishes he had expressed in his will. Keeping him closeted, even after his death, was more important to them than prevailing. I walked out of the courtroom that day a winner. My client was tearful in his gratitude and relief. Yet I couldn’t help but feel some pangs of guilt for the strategy I’d had to use to win.
However, I also first felt what it meant in the legal arena to provide a voice for someone who could no longer express his own. And I was reminded of those times with my grandfather, after his stroke, when he tried so hard to dictate letters to me. I hadn’t been conscious of why I’d chosen that work at the Legal Services Center, but in that moment I saw clearly that I was helping people who were facing severe discrimination and that it was deeply meaningful work. For them, their final voice could be expressed only through the signing of a last will and testament. For me, giving expression to that voice would come in the form of fighting to make sure their wishes were honored.
During my internship at the center, I had many clients who would come to mean a great deal to me, but one of the most memorable was a quiet, shy, but emotionally strong woman from Haiti who was dying of AIDS. She lived in the projects in South Boston, and she desperately needed someone to help her obtain access to adequate health care. Working through her immigration issues in order to achieve that access was a great challenge, to say the least. While I represented her, I spent a great deal of time with her, always going to her apartment for our meetings because she was too frail to come to the center. I’d pick her up and take her to the only clinic we could find, and I’d take her to appointments with the immigration officials who were working with me to help her obtain the legal status she needed for better health care.
She died late in my internship year, which devastated me. She died completely alone. No family to memorialize her. No friends. I was all she had, and my co-workers and I held a brief “ceremony” in her honor, the Polaroid that she’d given me of herself on prominent display as we each said a few words to honor her life and loss. I remember thinking as she was dying that I was one of the only people in the world she had any connection with. It was very powerful to realize that and to fully understand the sacredness of that role. The center was the place where I found an understanding of what it means to be a public servant. To put others before self. And to be reminded of my tremendous blessings relative to the struggles of so many.
Despite the deep connection I had to the work I did there, or perhaps because of it—it certainly was profoundly difficult to work with people who were so ill, knowing you couldn’t take away their illness or their pain and that the best you could do was to try to ease their minds and provide comfort in any way you could—it wasn’t the kind of work I planned on doing as a career. Since starting law school I believed that I would become a high-powered litigator. That I’d earn a fine paycheck, wear nice clothes, and carry a briefcase. The work in the Legal Services Center was emotionally wrenching and not in keeping with the vision I’d set for myself.
At the end of that next year, when I left the center for the last time, two of the supervising lawyers I worked with sat me down for my exit interview.
“We’ve got you,” they’d said, meaning they felt as though they had brought me into the arena of public service as the career path I would follow.
I smiled at them but shook my head no. “I loved my time here, but I’m off to practice law soon, for a big firm, getting paid to do work for paying clients.”
Years later I would come to understand that they saw in me what I had not yet seen for myself. They had indeed “gotten” me. I just didn’t realize it yet.
It wouldn’t take me very long practicing law before I decided that it wasn’t at all what I’d hoped it would be. I went to work for a fairly large Dallas-based firm, in their Fort Worth office, assigned to the “specialized litigation section,” which sounded intriguing but in reality was not. Working as one lawyer of many on really big antitrust cases that take years from start to finish felt meaningless to me. Rather than having the capacity to stand back each day with the satisfaction of saying to myself, I did good in the world today, I found myself sifting through mounds and mounds of discovery materials looking for a lead to crack open a case or traveling to city after city taking what felt like the same deposition over and over again. The paychecks were nice. But the work offered little in the way of personal reward. Fortunately, prior to entering work in the private arena, my first year out of law school offered me another tremendous learning experience and made another profound impact on shaping the adult I was still to become.
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Besides my father and Jeff, perhaps no other person has had a greater impact shaping me than Judge Jerry Buchmeyer. He was a United States judge for the Northern District of Texas in Dallas for whom I was lucky enough to clerk the year after I graduated law school. He possessed a wisdom and a sense of justice and fairness that suited him perfectly for his judicial role. Whenever I think of Judge Buchmeyer, who passed away in 2009, I can’t help but smile. He was
soft-spoken, with a keen sense of humor; to spend time with him was a real joy. A modern-day Solomon, he was the essence of what every judge should be.
I’d learned quite a bit about Judge Buchmeyer in law school during a mock trial that involved applying constitutional equal protection to a lesbian police officer who’d been fired from her job after her employer learned that she was homosexual. Back then, in the early 1990s, there was no real protection for people who’d been discriminated against based on sexual orientation. But Judge Buchmeyer, as I was later to learn, true to form for him, had written a landmark opinion in Baker v. Wade (1982) striking down Texas’s sodomy law, which would have the effect of decriminalizing homosexuality. Buchmeyer’s decision was published in 1984 and it stood for just three years before the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit overturned his decision. I was quickly intrigued by this judge from Dallas who’d done something so bold. And as I began reading about him, I discovered that he was also incredibly funny and that he would assemble humorous vignettes from courtroom settings or depositions to be published each month in the Texas Bar Journal. His column, called “et cetera,” was widely read, and Judge Buchmeyer was therefore widely known in Texas legal circles, not only as a fair and good judge but as someone possessing a profound wit.
I’d clerked with about six different law firms during the summers of my law-school years—in the early 1990s there was no shortage of firms vying for students, particularly those from the top law schools. It was a seller’s market for students at schools like HLS, and we were courted fairly heavily by the firms we clerked for. I accepted an offer to go to work for a Fort Worth firm, but first I wanted to take a deferral year and work as a judicial clerk. I applied for several judicial clerkships and was invited to interview for three of them, two in Dallas and one in Fort Worth. One of my Dallas interviews was with Judge Buchmeyer. And it was the clerkship I wanted most of all. Even the recruitment notice he’d placed in the huge HLS jobs book (as I said, it was a sellers’ market back then) to entice students to apply for the position was unusual and intriguing. After listing the qualities one might expect a judge to say he wanted in a clerk, Judge Buchmeyer had written that he was looking for someone who “collects kitsch.” Collects kitsch?! Ha! If I hadn’t already been smitten, now I most certainly was. Even in that recruitment notice he was demonstrating the tongue-in-cheek nature he brought to everything he did.
But his quirky humor belied his brilliance. Buchmeyer had graduated from U.T. Law School in 1957 with the highest GPA in the school’s history—an honor he held for fifteen years. When President Jimmy Carter appointed Buchmeyer, then forty-six years old, to the federal bench in Dallas in 1979, he left a highly paid partnership as an acclaimed litigator in a large Dallas firm to take the lower-paying appointment because he believed in the value of the work he’d be doing there.
Every federal judge receives thousands of applications from young lawyers who want the experience and résumé credential of having done a judicial clerkship. But each judge, unless he or she is the chief, typically hires only two clerks each year. It’s such a competitive field, in fact, that even to be granted an interview is rare. When I showed up to Judge Buchmeyer’s office for my interview, I was more nervous than I’d ever been for any previous job interview. I recall that he spoke so very softly I had to lean quite close to hear the questions he was asking me. A technique, I would come to learn, that he employed to focus people’s attention entirely upon him. Later I would watch him use this technique from the bench to tremendous effect. A few days after our interview, when he called to offer me the job, I jumped sky-high with excitement. Judge Buchmeyer—I was going to work for the great Judge Buchmeyer. What a treat, I told myself. And indeed it was.
Most federal clerkships last a year, and while each judge takes a different approach to the tasks assigned to his or her clerks, a clerk’s primary duties include drafting orders and opinions, preparing bench memos for the judge, and reading and making determinations on procedural filings by the parties in the lawsuits before the court. Typically these duties are in the form of recommendations that the judges would use as a starting point and take a heavy editing pen to before signing their names. But not Judge Buchmeyer. Instead we wrote orders and opinions, and if he agreed with them, he simply signed them. No edits! Which created a sense of responsibility that was pretty overwhelming for a brand-new baby lawyer. He would literally read them and sign them. He never changed a word. With Judge Buchmeyer we would do our research and then just go talk to him about our findings: Here’s what the issue is, here’s what we’re being asked to decide, here’s what my recommendation is. And nine times out of ten, he would agree. Sometimes he would ask you to go do a little more work or challenge you to think about it a bit differently, so the decision, in the end, was always a collective one. But he was deferential to us and had so much respect for our intellectual capacity that it was truly an incredible experience to clerk in his court.
My co-clerk was a woman named Meg who had grown up in a very conservative family—so conservative, in fact, that I was really surprised that Judge Buchmeyer had paired us. In addition to all the other important qualifications they’re looking for, judges try to find two clerks who they think will get along and work well with each other in such an intense environment. Meg and I were clearly opposites, down to the law schools we’d attended—she had gone to Pepperdine Law School, arguably the most conservative law school in the country, while Harvard is considered to be one of the most liberal.
On our very first day, Meg and I were at lunch in one of the tunnel restaurants under the streets of Dallas when she looked me straight in the eye and said, “I don’t think that women who have children have any business being in the workplace.” I was completely stunned. From that moment forward, we disagreed on absolutely everything. In fact, our perspectives were so diametrically opposed that for a while I admit I was truly miserable and wondered why the judge ever would have thought we’d be a good match. But as the year progressed, an amazing thing began to happen: Meg started reconsidering her perspectives on many different issues, and ultimately, toward the end of the year of our clerkship, she came out to herself and to us that she was gay. I realized that Judge Buchmeyer must have seen something in her and somehow understood that underneath all her rhetoric was a person struggling to find her true identity. The clerkship helped her get there, and I often wondered what would have happened if she hadn’t spent that year under the wisdom and guidance of Judge Buchmeyer, and if she hadn’t been exposed to so many of the people to whom we were exposed. Would it have taken her much longer to evolve to where she could allow herself to be truly who she was and have the courage to say it?
One of the first memorable experiences I had during that clerkship was getting to know two men who’d been found guilty of a federal environmental offense, some sort of illegal dumping that their company was engaged in. In addition to their sentence and fine, Judge Buchmeyer had added a public-service component to their sentence: an order to create an environmental learning center for the schoolchildren of the Dallas Independent School District. It was intriguing to watch these two men morph from the shame of a guilty verdict to the pride they took in creating the center. When I met them, the verdict had long since been handed down and the finishing touches were being put on the center. They came to collect the judge one day to show him their progress, and he invited me to come, saying only that he wanted to show me something he thought I’d be interested in seeing. Not long after we pulled away from the courthouse, Judge Buchmeyer turned to me.
“By the way,” he said, “the two gentlemen in the front seat are convicted felons.”
At my reaction, which must have been written very clearly on my face, he began laughing, as did the two gentlemen themselves. They laughed and laughed but never really would tell me the details of their case. Instead they wanted to talk about how excited they were to be opening the center. And as they gave us a tour of the
facility, I could see the impact my wise and good judge had had. Time and time and time again, he knew what he was doing. I can’t imagine a person more aptly suited to be a judge.
Judge Buchmeyer was well known not only for the opinion he’d written decriminalizing homosexuality but also for another progressive opinion on a case brought by a group of African-American women living in housing projects in West Dallas, Walker v. U.S. Dept. of Housing & Urban Development. In 1987 Buchmeyer ruled that the Dallas Housing Authority (DHA) was providing substandard housing for its residents and ordered that most of its almost thirty-five hundred units, built in the 1950s next to a toxic lead smelter, be torn down. But his plan wasn’t just to move the entire population of residents wholesale to another location. It was his belief that keeping low-income families in concentrated communities with only other low-income residents fostered a cycle of generational poverty without giving the children of those communities an awareness and experience of something different and better. So instead of ordering the mass move of all of the residents to a newly built project, Judge Buchmeyer ordered that they be dispersed into housing in middle- and higher-income areas of the city. It was an incredibly controversial decision, and the process, which took years to be put into action, was already under way when I came to work for him.