Who and What is a Justice in Texas? ... On judge & justice as occupational categories (commentary)

WHAT IS A JUSTICE? 

I’ll leave it to more erudite minds to ponder and expound on what is justices as an abstract concept, and what justice is not; not to mention what is injustice; -- manifest or otherwise. I’ll leave it to those with a more philosophical bend, not to mention those blessed to earn a living honoring the hallowed traditions of Western thought all the way back to the ancients, the Greeks and the Romans.  

The term justice also refers to a person, one cloaked with governmental power of the third-branch variety, and that is a more amenable subject for a short blog post.

Alas, in Texas who is a justice, or who is entitled to sport that title, is a little confusing, especially when it come of matters of rank.

You see, in Texas, it’s not only that everything is bigger; some things are also a lot more complex and confusing than necessary, whether by lack of taxonomic rigor, or for no reason at all. The venerable justice as an occupational classification is good example. 

MULTI-LAYERED JUSTICE - JUSTICES IN VARIOUS CLOAKS AND GUISES  

The folks at the pinnacle of the judicial hierarchy, the members of the Texas Supreme Court (Tex., Tex. Sup. Ct., or SCOTX), and of the Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA , Tex. Crim. App.) are justices, and so are the 80 that sit on the next-lower rung, the members of the courts of appeals whom they lord over and occasionally reverse. Each court has a Chief Justice, but the non-chief members of the court are not associate justices, they are just justices, plain vanilla, though with a capital J. 

And so are those that populate the lowest rung in the pecking order, the ones that preside over the JP Courts. They are justices too. JP, after all, stands for Justice of the Peace. And they do not even have to be attorneys. 

So where does the official nomenclature leave those in the middle, the duly licensed lawyers that preside over county courts at law, constitutional county courts, probate courts, family courts, and criminal and civil district courts? They are judges. But so are the justices. All of them are judges, lawyers or not. That’s because judge is also a generic terms for office-holders in the third branch of government. 

But they do not have exclusive claim to the job title that comes with being a part of the Texas Judiciary. The county judge is a judge likewise, at least in name. When on the job, though, the county judge is the chief executive of the county, a political subdivision of the state, of which Texas has a total of 254. So there are more than two hundred county judges that run their respective counties and deal with such matters are roads, bridges, and parks, and other infrastructure, and budget for county services such a sheriff and county jail.

You couldn’t blame a search engine algorithm for getting confused, or the average Jane or Joe, for that matter. Not to mention that beauty contests and American-idol type contests have judges too. At least the latter are not as numerous and generally known by name to a much larger portion of the general public than the local JP and the assortment of other "county-level" judges in a location.  

At least, in sports, those making the calls are called umpires and referees. 

Sometimes we get to be judges ourselves, judges of character, judges of this, judges of that…and if are presumed to be good at appreciating the finer and more expensive offerings the marketplace, we may even be appealed to as discriminating. 

At least when we are called to court, they call us juror, not judges….unless you don’t actually get selected to sit, in which case you will probably be thanked anyhow for bothering to show up, for doing your your duty as a good citizen, for playing your part in the system as a member of the venire.

Say what? 

VENIRE 

You did your civic duty, thank you, and you got lucky. You got lucky you are being sent home, or back to work, as the case might be. Depending on how long it took to pick the jury. You won't be seated, even though you just go up from the long, uncomfortable wooden bench in the courtroom. You won't be seated in the box, even if you just got out of it because the many benches were all filled with other folks like you, most of them in ordinary garb, not suited. You may courted, just a bit. In the end, you got to remain a plain member of the venire, after voir dire. 

And if you listened carefully to the judge on the bench, not the one you  and your fellow random citizens just sat on, you will have learned that the preceding sentence does not even rhyme. 

Be blessed for not being a Loya… and for not having to practice Whoa Dah.  

LINKS:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/venire

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voir_dire 

What do lawyers mean by "Bench" and "Bar" 

Anchor text: JUDGE VS. JUSTICE - What’s the difference between a judge and a justice in Texas?