From migrant worker to appellate judge, Yañez takes on next big challenge

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EDINBURG -- Sitting under shade trees in the vegetable fields of Illinois, a teenage Linda Yañez devoured the classics.

Books took her to cultures oceans away from her hometown of Rio Hondo and introduced her to ideas foreign to many of her fellow migrant farmworkers.

Four decades later, the 59-year-old appellate judge and candidate for the Texas Supreme Court compares her work now to those summer afternoons spent reading and interpreting tales of lives so different from her own.

"Every case is a life conflict," she said. "We can all read the same thing and read something different into it."

The path that led Yañez from life in rural Cameron County to her current position as the senior justice on the 13th Court of Appeals in Edinburg is as unlikely as it is circuitous.

Before she became a lawyer, she worked as a farmworker, a teacher, a community activist and a political campaigner.

Her resume reads like a list of firsts. In 1993, she became the first Hispanic woman to hold an appellate judgeship in Texas. Before that, she was the first female lawyer at her law firm.

And in a story often recited on the campaign trail, her status as a pregnant woman taking the bar exam in Chicago was so foreign to many of her fellow students that they requested she take the test in a separate room for fear that she might go into labor and cause a distraction.

Should she win her race for the Supreme Court's Place 8 come November, she would become the first Latina to serve on the state's highest bench and the first Democratic candidate elected to statewide office in 14 years.

But first, she faces a tough fight to unseat an equally qualified Republican incumbent - Justice Phil Johnson - and the uphill battle of convincing a typically red state to break up the all-Republican court.

"The reason that we have multi-member appellate courts is that there is supposed to be a debate among justices," she said. "We don't have that currently because all nine members are from the same political party."

CONFIDENT INCUMBENT

Yañez and her Republican opponent Johnson agree that commitment to principals and legal precedent should play a role in judicial decisions. But that's where their similarities end.

Johnson bridles at the suggestion that he's part of a consistently pro-business court suffering from a backlog of cases - some of which were first argued before the justices four years ago.

That perception is bolstered by a 2007 law review study that has been cited frequently in all three Supreme Court races this year. University of Texas Law School professor David Anderson found that corporate defendants won 87 percent of the cases the court handled in 2004 and 2005.

Johnson, however, argues that comparing wins and losses shouldn't be as easy as tallying score at a baseball game.

"It's easy to criticize the umpire," he said. "But every case is different, and it's hard to say we're pro-business or not without looking at the merits of individual cases."

As a 63-year-old former Air Force pilot with an easy Texas drawl, Johnson is not a man to flinch in the face of criticism.

After a one-year stint in Vietnam, Johnson returned to Lubbock and became an attorney, handling a string of family law cases before winning election in 1998 to the 7th Court of Appeals in Amarillo.

Gov. Rick Perry appointed him to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court in 2005 in the midst of a large-scale turnover on the court. Johnson cites the frequent introduction of new justices as just one of the reasons for the court's backlog.

"It's important in the law to have continuity," he said. "When you have a lot of change - especially at the High Court - it's unsettling."

IMPROBABLE CHALLENGER

The genesis of Yañez's legal career came more improbably.

She began what she thought would be a lifelong career in teaching after graduating in 1970 from Pan American College, a predecessor to the University of Texas-Pan American. Working with migrant students in Weslaco, she saw many of the same injustices she experienced as a teen playing out in the lives of her students.

At the time, school districts routinely barred children of illegal immigrants who were not citizens themselves from attending school and receiving an education.

But while working for Democrat George McGovern's 1972 presidential campaign, a mentor presented an unusual proposal. David Hall, now the head of Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, suggested she consider changing careers.

It took some convincing, but within four years Yañez had earned her law degree and was doing legal advocacy work for migrants in Chicago and back in the Rio Grande Valley.

"It sounds really corny," she said. "But I really did have a purpose. I wanted to come back and represent the people that I came from."

As legal aid attorney, she took on the state's practice of denying education to illegal immigrant students and won.

Then, after several more years of private practice work, her life took another unpredictable turn. Democratic Gov. Ann Richards appointed her to fill a vacancy on the 13th Court of Appeals.

"It literally came out of nowhere," Yañez said. "While it was going on, I never even realized we had never had a Latina at the appellate level."

RETURN TO ROOTS

These days, however, the 13th Court looks like it was shaped in her image. Five of the six justices are Hispanic women, some of whom cite Yañez as an inspiration to their own judicial ambitions.

"To watch her and see her as the first Hispanic female was critical," Justice Gina Benavides told The Monitor last year. "You have to know it can be done and that the opportunity is there."

That hardly means, though, that they always act in unison, Yañez said.

Republicans running for the Supreme Court have long fought off Democratic challengers by arguing that candidates too far to the left could threaten the justices' ability to have productive discussions and decide cases quickly.

Yañez, however, points to her years on the 13th Court as an indication of her role as a coalition builder.

All of Texas' appellate courts are comprised of multiple justices who debate the merits of the cases before them before making a final ruling on the case.

In her current term, Yañez said, she has written five opinions in which she started arguing from the minority but eventually convinced others of her point of view. Her status as one of the top opinion writers on her court would help the Supreme Court work through its backlog, she says.

Johnson counters that the 13th Court has a significant backlog of its own and that any turnover among the Supreme Court justices would only slow down the process of moving cases along.

In the run-up to the start of early voting Monday, the two top candidates have crisscrossed the state hoping to make a last-minute appeal to voters who rarely think about the state's appellate court system - and who, in many cases, could not name a single sitting justice.

Johnson has juggled his work at the Supreme Court with campaign stops in the state's big cities.

Yañez - who spent most of her campaign funds fending off a tough primary challenge from Galveston state District Judge Susan Criss - has undertaken what she calls a "grassroots" campaign, traveling Texas' back roads to drum up support.

And while the daughter of farmworkers has come miles from her roots picking cotton in Cameron County, in many ways she feels like a migrant worker all over again.

"I'm spending a lot of time in the back of a car," she said. "But that's actually the best part.

"I get to go out and tell people about the Supreme Court and how it affects their lives."

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Jeremy Roebuck covers courts and general assignments for The Monitor. You can reach him at (956) 683-4437.

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NAME: Phil Johnson

PARTY: Republican

AGE: 63

CITY: Lubbock / Austin

EDUCATION: BA, Texas Tech University; JD, Texas Tech University

EXPERIENCE: Texas Supreme Court justice (2005-present); 7th Court of Appeals - Amarillo (1999-2005); attorney for Crenshaw, Dupree & Milam law firm - Lubbock (1975-1998)

FAMILY: Married, five children

NAME: Linda Yañez

PARTY: Democrat

AGE: 59

CITY: Rio Hondo / Edinburg

EDUCATION: BA, University of Texas-Pan American; JD, Texas Southern University; LLM, University of Virginia

EXPERIENCE: 13th Court of Appeals justice (1993-present); clinical instructor at Harvard University Law School; Roering, Oliveira & Fisher law firm partner; National Judicial College faculty, previously attorney for Texas Rural Legal Aid

FAMILY: Two grown daughters

NAME: Drew Shirley

PARTY: Libertarian

AGE: 39

CITY: Austin

EDUCATION: BA, Duke University; MA, University of Texas; JD, University of Texas

EXPERIENCE: Lawyer practicing in Round Rock