Yesterday, June 22, 2008, the Honorable Revius Ortique Jr. died from complications of a stroke suffered earlier this month. Justice Ortique was a civil rights pioneer in Louisiana, practicing law in New Orleans beginning in 1956, becoming the first African-American judge and later chief judge of the Civil District Court in Orleans Parish, then becoming the first African-American justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court. He also served on numerous presidential commissions and, in later years following his judicial retirement, chaired the New Orleans Aviation Board. An article in this morning’s New Orleans Times-Picayune provides a nice encapsulation of his accomplishments.
I had the honor of meeting Justice Ortique while I was still in law school, when his former colleague at the state supreme court (and my boss at the U.S. Fifth Circuit), James Dennis, introduced me to him. Justice Ortique was a sharp legal mind, an advocate for justice in all forms and in all fora, and (at the risk of falling into cliché, though it’s quite true) a true gentleman.
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I think “true gentlemen” aptly describes Justice Ortique. When I was a fledgling lawyer and he was a judge at Civil District Court, I got the task of filing a notice of intent to seek supervisory writ (in La. state court, a supervisory writ is the vehicle to seek interlocutory appellate review–like mandamus, only not as severe). The procedure involves getting the trial judge (in this case, Judge Ortique) to sign an order setting the deadline to file the supervisory writ application. In short, I’m taking a paper to Judge Ortique telling him that my client is seeking appellate review of his interlocutory order. So I get to his chambers, tell his law clerk what I want, and a minute later am invited into the judge’s office. Anyway, he was indeed the perfect gentleman. He asked me how much time we needed to prepare our writ application; I told him 30 days would be nice (the maximum under the appellate court’s rules); and he signed the order giving us 30 days. He gave me a lesson in how lawyers and judges should treat each other.