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Four years after he became eligible, U.S. District Judge George P. Kazen kept coming up with excuses for not taking a well-deserved retirement: There was always something that needed to be done in the Laredo Division of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, he says.
So on May 31, after exactly 30 years of presiding over what has become one of the busiest federal criminal dockets in the United States, Kazen, 69, finally relented and gave up his active status. But instead of stepping off the bench, he'll take senior status and keep taking a full load of cases. By design, his decision is more about Laredo than himself.
Kazen's move means President Barack Obama will appoint a third judge to the Laredo Division. With U.S. District Judge Micaela Alvarez, who also sits in Laredo, and Kazen continuing as a senior judge, the division will have just enough jurists to handle its overwhelming number of drug and immigration cases, Kazen says. On average, in 2008 each of the more than 600 U.S. district judges nationwide handled 516 cases — 91 of them felony criminal cases, according to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.
"We're going to hit 3,000 felonies" filed in the division this year, Kazen says. "I thought we needed three judges."
Full retirement is out of the question for now, he says. "The docket is already obscene. I couldn't dump that on Judge Alvarez."
"I'm extremely grateful because it [the docket] would be impossible to handle with just one judge," Alvarez says. "And obviously with three of us it helps even though the [caseload] average will be above the national average."
Kazen's decision to maintain a full docket doesn't surprise his many friends in the judiciary.
"That is pure George Kazen," says friend Carolyn Dineen King, a 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judge who, like Kazen, was appointed to the federal bench in 1979 by then-President Jimmy Carter.
"That's just how he is," says King. She worked with Kazen on an initiative to help secure staff and facilities to accommodate the rise in cases along the U.S.-Mexico border in the late 1990s while she was chief judge of the 5th Circuit. "He always puts the needs of the judicial system ahead of his own needs."
"Oh hell, he doesn't know what else to do, he's a workaholic. That's all he knows," Hayden Head, chief judge of the Southern District of Texas, says with a laugh. "He is first and foremost a United States district judge. He is committed to it intellectually, he is committed to it ethically and he is committed to it professionally. And he just loves it."
Kazen's accomplishments in Laredo — on and off the bench — can be seen across the growing border city of 200,000 people. He was a founder of the Laredo Legal Aid Society in 1966, which later became Texas RioGrande Legal Aid. He helped start the St. Augustine-Ursuline Consolidated School Board in 1976 to help save three financially strapped Catholic schools in Laredo. He served as the board's president and helped consolidate the schools to create St. Augustine High School, the city's only Catholic high school.
Kazen also pushed for and helped design Laredo's U.S. District Courthouse, which was completed four years ago. A marvel in the use of space and natural light, government architects continue to visit the courthouse to see what they can learn from it, Kazen says.
Kazen may not be well-known outside of his own home town, but in Laredo he's nothing short of a legend. As he left a Mexican restaurant near the courthouse on Memorial Day — he had guisado — a group of businessmen warmly greet the judge as "Mr. Kazen."
He has received just about every award the town has to offer, including being named Mr. South Texas in 2000 — the city's highest honor.
He even dressed up as George Washington in 1983 for the Society of Martha Washington colonial ball, the culmination of a 10-day Mardi Gras-style festival in Laredo that celebrates the birthday of the nation's first president.
Kazen shrugs off the awards and attention. He says it's bound to happen in the once small town where he served as its only federal judge for 20 years; a second U.S. district judgeship was added in Laredo in 1999. Many federal judges remain anonymous despite their positions, but that's not Kazen.
"I couldn't escape if I wanted to," Kazen says during an interview in his chambers, which shows off his talking Kinky Friedman doll, a gift from a clerk. After all, he still lives in the east Laredo house he grew up in — everybody knows where to find him. He's just another citizen of Laredo, he says.
"I don't consider that, through this job, I'm higher than anyone else. It's a job where I render service," he says. "There's a time where we get a bigger picture of life. I spend my time on things that are more enduring," Kazen says. "I could have gone to a big law firm and had a big career. But that wasn't the world I was born into." [See a video of Kazen discussing his career.]
The Kazens and Laredo
The Kazen family has lived in Laredo for more than 100 years, starting with Kazen's grandfather Abraham, a Lebanese immigrant who settled in Laredo and sold groceries and clothing from a wagon to mine workers.
Abraham Kazen never spoke English, but he wanted his four sons, Philip, Charles, James and Abraham Jr. (who was known as "Chick") to get the best educations America had to offer. They did, and all of them became lawyers. Most notably, Chick became a U.S. congressman and Philip became a politically active lawyer who was a close confidant of President Lyndon B. Johnson.
James — Judge Kazen's father — became the Webb County district attorney and later a state district judge. But as a kid, even though he hung around his dad's office, the law held little allure for the young George. Instead, he wanted to join the military.
Kazen graduated from high school early. He was a student at the University of Texas at the age of 15 and joined the school's Reserve Officers' Training Corps program. He also entered a program that allowed undergraduates to take law school classes during their senior year. But to start UT law school at age 18, he had to get a waiver from legendary law school Dean W. Page Keeton in 1958.
"I went there with my dad to see him," Kazen says. "I remember Dean Keeton said that my grades were fine." But Keeton also said: "George, take this test we're experimenting with. It was the LSAT," Kazen remembers. "I guess I did OK."
Once in law school, everything changed for Kazen. "The minute I was in law school, that was it for me," Kazen says. "I said 'Wow, this is cool.' "
Kazen made the law review, was elected to the Order of Coif and scored the highest on the Texas bar exam of all UT law students when he took it in 1961.
Kazen had enlisted in the Air Force and planned on being a Judge Advocate General Corps officer after law school. But Texas Supreme Court Justice James Norvell learned of Kazen's bar score and called Kazen's father to ask if the young graduate would like to be his briefing clerk. Kazen accepted the job but had to get a year postponement from the Air Force.
After the Air Force, he returned to Laredo in 1965 where he joined the law firm that would become Mann, Freed, Kazen & Hansen.
Kazen practiced insurance defense and criminal defense. Like many South Texas lawyers, he often was hired by out-of-town clients as local counsel on big cases. Sometimes he wound up with famous — and infamous — clients. He once represented Timothy Leary, the 1960s counterculture icon and psychedelic drug advocate, when Leary was arrested for crossing the international bridge into Laredo with a small amount of marijuana.
"I was in my own little world. I didn't know how famous he was," Kazen says of Leary.
Kazen also represented Carlos Marcello, boss of a New Orleans organized crime outfit, after he was accused of assaulting an FBI agent. The case was transferred to the U.S. District Court in Laredo from a U.S. District Court in Louisiana on a change of venue motion in 1968. Again, Kazen didn't know who Marcello was. "That was beyond my radar screen," he says.
In 1979, then-U.S. Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, D-Texas, recommended to Carter that Kazen become a U.S. district judge in Laredo and Carter agreed, although he and Kazen never met.
He remembers his Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing was a breeze, with little of the partisan battles that often occur now.
Kazen says one of the toughest questions a senator asked was: "Well, I see you do a lot of insurance defense work. Can you be fair to a plaintiff? . . . It was a no-brainer," Kazen says of his confirmation.
If only that senator knew how few civil cases Kazen would hear over the course of his judicial career.
Learning From Kazen
Lined up along a wall outside his courtroom are some 70 framed photos of Kazen's former law clerks. He proudly points to each of them, remembering personal details about each of the lawyers and their careers. One is now in-house counsel for a huge oil company. Others are partners in big-city law firms. Two are U.S. magistrate judges in Laredo who continue to help Kazen with his docket.
On May 31, many of those former law clerks came back to Laredo for a barbeque to celebrate Kazen's 30th year on the bench.
Diana Saldana is in one of the photos on the wall. She served as Kazen's law clerk and an assistant U.S. attorney in his court before she became a U.S. magistrate judge in Laredo three years ago.
"I am the attorney and the judge I am because of him — no doubt about it," Saldana says. "It's one of the highlights of my past, meeting him and coming to interview with him as a law clerk and seeing first-hand how inquisitive he is."
While sentencing as many as 80 defendants a month — and reading presentencing reports on all of them — could become a grind for some judges, she says, that has never happened with Kazen. He cares about the people he sentences, takes time to learn who they are and always treats them with respect, she says.
"There was one time we were in court and he was sentencing someone who was employed at a candle factory in Laredo. And he starts asking him, 'What kind of candles? How do you get the scent in the candle? And how do you get them to change colors?' " Saldana says. "It was this entire dialogue with this defendant about his employment. And he got to know him very well before he sentenced him."
On a shelf in a corner of his chambers, Kazen keeps another doll that represents his inquisitiveness — Curious George.
When Kazen does handle a civil case, his rulings are sometimes ahead of their time, says Nina Perales, Southwest regional counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF).
In 1983, Kazen issued an unpublished opinion in Alzono v. Jones in which he used a balancing test similar to one later adopted by the U.S. Supreme Court in cases involving the voting rights of minorities in single-member districts, says Perales, an expert on voting rights law.
"When I came to MALDEF and I became a voting rights lawyer, someone gave me the case and said this opinion is truly prophetic," says Perales. "Judge Kazen's decision tracked the Supreme Court's analysis . . . but years before the Supreme Court had a chance to analyze the facts. What was amazing when you read Judge Kazen's opinion, it's so close to where the Supreme Court went with these cases."
Israel Morales Reyna, the local branch manager of the Laredo Office of Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, remembers a glitch in the settlement of an environmental case he was handling in Kazen's court. The problem, he told Kazen, was that he needed to have a settlement meeting with a large number of clients and he couldn't get the Mother Cabrini Catholic Church in Laredo to allow them to use their meeting hall. The priest at the church refused because he believed the meeting was political in nature. So Reyna listened in as Kazen got on the phone with the priest to help.
"He calls them up and says, 'This is Judge Kazen. I wanted to ask you about the church hall for this meeting,' " Reyna recalls. "And the father says, 'It's political.' " Then Kazen said, "It's in the public interest. . . . Do you want me to call the bishop?" Reyna says.
"And I thought he might have called the pope," Reyna says.
The priest relented and the meeting happened. "I can tell you one thing," Reyna says of Kazen. "He sits on the right hand of God."
Lost Chances
In the early 1990s, Bentsen was looking to promote Kazen to the 5th Circuit. But that opportunity went away when then-President Bill Clinton appointed Bentsen secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury in 1993.
"I was disappointed," Kazen says of missing his shot at the 5th Circuit. The job would have allowed Kazen to decide a variety of civil and criminal law issues and branch out from his constant docket of drug and immigration cases.
"I've been told a couple of times it's a shame I've been handling criminal law. But I don't lose any sleep over it. I guess I could have become the king of ERISA," Kazen says, laughing.
But if he'd been appointed to the 5th Circuit, he wouldn't have been chief judge of the Southern District, a position he held from 1996 to 2003, or a judge on the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), to which then-U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist appointed Kazen in 2003. Kazen will serve on the FISC until 2010 and is the only Texan on the 11-member court.
Congress created the FISC in 1978 to rule on U.S. government requests for wiretaps and surveillance of suspected foreign intelligence agents inside the United States.
"You see a side of life you don't normally see," Kazen says of his service on the FISC.
As far as the future of the Laredo Division of the Southern District, Kazen hopes Congress approves a third full-time judge. If and when it does, he may reduce his docket, he says.
"I hope I can have a civil trial," Kazen says. "I know that sounds really stupid."
