After 20 years of riding to work and often riding home to beautiful Hill Country sunrises and sunsets, I have decided to pass the torch to another circuit rider. Three weeks of every month I was blessed to have a time of reflection as I drove from Kerrville to Fredericksburg, Bandera, or Boerne. I don’t know how many times I gave thanks for a meaningful profession, incredible colleagues, firm and fast friends, and a loving wife and children who always understood.

Recently, as I rode into the sunset, I wrestled with personal pearls of wisdom to pass along to all my judicial colleagues. And I remembered that many years ago I was given a treasure by a lady in my Sunday school class: a beautifully bound set of the essays, addresses, and state papers of President Theodore Roosevelt. His knowledge was vast and his insight was keen. In Vol. VII, dealing with social justice, Teddy Roosevelt articulated exactly what I wanted to say, so let me share his wisdom of almost 100 years ago.

“It remains true that the judges are public servants just as other officials are, that they are, or should be, responsible to the public just as other officials are (for it is idle to call a man a servant of the public unless he is responsible to the public,) and that therefore there should be criticism of them just as of other officials. In the case of judges it is even more essential than in the case of other public officials that the criticism should be wise and temperate and, above all, that it should be absolutely truthful. I very seriously question whether, on the whole, we do not suffer in our public life quite as much from unjust assault upon upright public servants as from failure effectively to assault corruption and its exponents. Many newspapers and many magazines, sometimes because they are controlled by the special interests and quite as often because they are seeking to capitalize sensationalism and to turn to commercial advantage the literature of exposure, have done, and are doing, all they can to degrade public life by practicing every species of reckless sensational and hysterical mendacity at the cost of reputable public servants. It makes not the slightest difference whether this form of falsehood is practiced because the writer is hired, directly or indirectly, by some special interest, or whether he is merely recklessly bent upon gaining money or notoriety by sensational slander; it makes no difference whether he is a cultivated man actuated by sour envy, or a crude fanatic who, in the name of conscience, is willing to perpetrate outrages upon conscience; and, finally, it makes little difference as to what particular class of public servant he assails. The infamy lies in the deed itself. The man who violates the ninth commandment and bears false witness against his neighbor stands on as low an ethical plane as the man who violates the eighth commandment and steals from that neighbor. To destroy the confidence of the people in the uprightness of upright judges is only a degree worse than to destroy their confidence in the uprightness of any other upright officials. Emphasis, however, must be laid on the uprightness, on the decency, on the ability and willingness to serve the public, so far as the official is concerned, rather than upon the office which he holds. It is impossible adequately to honor the faithful public servant unless we discriminate in the sharpest possible fashion between him and the unfaithful public servant; and all sense of such discrimination, all sense of proportion, is equally lost, whether we confound the honest and the dishonest, the competent and the incompetent, in indiscriminate praise or in indiscriminate abuse.