33rd / 424th District Courts

A site of interest is the Texas Center for Legal Ethics and Professionalism  which has extensive materials on legal ethics and conducts an ethics course.  Online registration for that course can be had at http://www.txethics.org/courses_registration.asp.  The site has the full professional code and all opinions of the Supreme Court Professionalism Committee.

This is written while the case is still ongoing so I must be circumspect in any current comments about it. This "clip" has nothing actually to do with the case at hand, but with the matters of attorney discipline in general.

It is now after 5pm as I sit in the chambers formerly occupied by the Hon. Frank Montalvo who has moved on to a federal bench. The Texas Supreme Court assigns judges from outside the administrative region where the discipline case is to be heard and this is the second one to which I been assigned since 1997. And thus I find myself in San Antonio hearing this discipline case.

Being the only district judge in an area can make for a lonely existence in terms of relationships. At best, no relationship is perfect whether it's with your spouse, your best friend or a casual or business acquaintance. But almost every relationship the judge had before election, or would like to cultivate afterwards, is problematical.

The judge is required to not only be fair and impartial but always to also appear to be so. And if he is seen at lunch too often with one attorney, or never with another, then at least some number of people begin to perceive bias for or against an attorney. And when the judge has come from the community, as all judges in rural districts do (at least for the county of the judge's residence), then all of the relationships that were built up over the years often suffer.