Talk Justice, an LSC Podcast: Texas’ Longest-Serving Supreme Court Justice Nathan Hecht on Improving Access to Justice and the Courts
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WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court of Texas’ 27th Chief Justice, the Honorable Nathan L. Hecht, joins LSC President Ron Flagg to discuss how his time on the bench shaped his perspective on access to justice on the of LSC's “Talk Justice” podcast, released today.
He was first elected to the Texas Supreme Court in 1988, and Governor Rick Perry appointed him as Chief Justice in 2013. Hecht retired from the bench at the end of 2024 as the longest-serving member in the history of the Texas Supreme Court. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and served as President of the national Conference of Chief Justices.
Hecht explains that efforts to improve access to justice were already a priority at the Supreme Court when he joined, and he remembers in the late 1990s, the court conducted an all-day hearing about the state of access to justice in Texas and across the country.
“Of course, it was deplorable [to hear] all of this in a concentrated version,” says Hecht. “You couldn't come away from that without thinking to yourself, ‘you know, I don't want to spend my years working as a judge over a justice system that’s doing anything but justice.’”
In the early 2000s, the Texas Access to Justice Commission was founded and Hecht became immersed in the issue as the Supreme Court’s liaison to the commission and the Texas Access to Justice Foundation.
Knowing the history of LSC and support for legal services on the federal level, Hecht understood the importance of establishing Texas’ efforts as non-partisan. A Republican himself, Hecht saw early on that some conservatives did not support government investment in legal aid and politicized the issue.
“The truth of the matter was, if you looked at it evenly and reasonably, everybody should support [access to justice] because it's about the promise of law,” Hecht says.
“The best numbers I've seen in the last few months are that at state courts in the United States, about 30,000 state court judges—we don't know exactly how many—decided about 69 million cases [in 2023]. ˶ 20 million were civil cases, and in 75% of the cases one party or both was not represented by a lawyer,” Hecht says.
Hecht explains that this can be thought of as similar to medicine—the same way it is unwise for people to attempt to care for their own medical needs instead of seeing a doctor, a person with a legal problem greatly benefits from access to the expertise of a lawyer.
“From the structural side of it, it's just very difficult for courts to function without the assistance of lawyers in the courtroom handling the papers, filing the papers, getting people to hearings, getting the case presented,” says Hecht. “When the judge has to wait on laypeople to do all of that—who understandably just don't know the system—then dockets are bogged down, backlogs grow. The system begins not to function as well as it should.”
Hecht says that pursuing access to justice has forced the court to make systemic changes to better serve people, whether it is a small case with a pro se litigant or a multi-million-dollar case. When asked what recent developments in the courts Hecht is most excited about as he leaves the bench behind, he indicates that a shift in the courts after the pandemic has created a culture that is more open and willing to try new approaches.
“It’s exciting to think that we’re moving towards a better system that'll work better,” Hecht says. “If you look around the world right now, the whole world went through COVID, but I think—at least from what I can see—that that experience is having a more profound effect on the American justice system than the justice systems in a lot of other countries, which are just kind of reverted back to what they were doing before it hit.”
Talk Justice episodes are and on Spotify, YouTube, Apple and other popular podcast apps. The podcast is sponsored by LSC’s Leaders Council. More information about the show, which recently surpassed 100 episodes, is