Texas' largest counties buck state, national trends by electing female judges

When Judge Antonia Arteaga was elected to a state district court in Bexar County, she was the only Latina wearing the robes in the civil courts there. “Oh, wow. Things are so different than they were in 2009. Two of my first four years, I was the only Latina here,” she said. But that was 15 years ago, and the story is very different now. “Now we have 14 civil district courts. And as of Jan. 1, 13 of those 14 courts will have a woman presiding — Latinas presiding,” she said. While only a handful of women were judges the year Arteaga was elected — now the roles are reversed — and more that 92% of all state district and appellate judges in Bexar County are women. Bexar County leads the trend that has been sweeping the state’s largest counties. “I think that says a lot about where we live the community we live in and now that the face of the judiciary looks more like community we live in,” she said.

While only 26% of the state judgeships are female, Travis County boasts 85% of its judges as women, while Harris and Dallas both have over 70%. Texas scores poorly in rankings for gender equality — a tepid 27th according to U.S. News and World Report. But in its largest counties, the Lone Star State’s courtrooms are celebrating a golden age of elected women judges. For hundreds of years, men — and more often than not, white men — have run courts. The largest urban counties in Texas are changing that and bucking both state and national trends. “I do think those are surprising figures in that women continue to be underrepresented on both state court benches and federal benches across the country,” said Alicia Bannon, director of the judiciary program for the Brennan Center for Justice. The number of women jurists has been growing, and law schools have admitted more women than men for years. But women’s legal career trajectories narrow, Bannon explained, with fewer judgeships and high-level law partnerships. Most of the women judges in the counties TPR looked at were Democrats but Bannon said it was hard to deduce if, nationwide, the party was more likely to encourage women to become judges. “It actually can be hard to disentangle how party dynamics interact with diversity on the bench and different paths to the benches because Texas is unusual in using partisan elections to choose their judges. So most states that use judicial elections, use nonpartisan elections where a party label doesn't appear on the ballot,” she said.