Texas lawyer John G. Browning has been named the 2021 recipient of the Oklahoma Bar Association’s top legal writing award, the Dr. Maurice Merrill Golden Quill Award. Named for a longtime Oklahoma University Law School professor and author, the award is presented annually to the author of the best written article published in the Oklahoma Bar Journal.

Browning, a partner in the Plano office of Spencer Fane, who is a former justice on Texas’ Fifth District Court of Appeals, and a member of both the Texas and Oklahoma bars, won for his article in the May 2021 Oklahoma Bar Journal issue, “Blazing the Trail: Oklahoma’s Pioneer African American Attorneys.” The issue, published to mark the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, had a special focus on African American legal history in Oklahoma and featured five articles on different aspects of that history, two of which were written by Browning, who also proposed and curated the issue for the Oklahoma Bar Journal.