Nathan Hecht, retired chief justice of the Supreme Court of Texas, will join NYU School of Law as a Distinguished Judicial Fellow for the 2025-26 academic year, Dean Troy McKenzie ’00 announced on March 13. He will be affiliated with the Center on Civil Justice.
“Chief Justice Hecht is one of the most respected jurists in the United States,” McKenzie said. “Throughout his tenure, [he] championed efforts to expand access to justice, ensuring that Texans of limited means can obtain essential civil legal services. He also played a key role in modernizing Texas’s rules of judicial administration, practice, and procedure.… We look forward to welcoming Chief Justice Hecht to our community.”
Hecht served on the Supreme Court of Texas for 36 years—longer than any other justice in the court’s history—before retiring as chief justice on December 31, 2024. First elected to the court as a justice in 1988, he was re-elected four times and then twice as chief justice, in 2014 and 2020. Hecht earlier served on the Texas Court of Appeals and the District Court of Dallas County. Nationally, he served on the Advisory Committee on Civil Rules of the Judicial Conference of the United States and was the longest-serving president of the Conference of Chief Justices.
Before joining the bench, Hecht worked as a partner at Locke Purnell Boren Laney & Neely in Dallas, clerked for Judge Roger Robb of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and served as a lieutenant in the US Navy Reserve’s Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) Corps. Hecht earned a BA in philosophy from Yale University and a JD from Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law.
Hecht is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a council member and life member of the American Law Institute, and a member of the Texas Philosophical Society. He delivered the Institute of Judicial Administration’s annual Brennan Lecture on State Courts and Social Justice at NYU Law in 2019.
Posted March 13, 2025