By Jeremy Roebuck for The Monitor
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 herfellow 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. ...
"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 ...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. ...
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 Rio Grande 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
..."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."
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