In a quest to escape the cold climate of his native New Jersey and a similarly frozen town where he attended college, Mike Engelhart decided to move to Houston for law school.

“I went off to college at Michigan,” says Engelhart, judge of Harris County’s 151st District Court. “Four years in Ann Arbor, Mich., was fun, but I got a little tired of the winter. So almost all of the law schools I applied to were in the South.”