For more than half a century, Professor Metze has spent his career on one side of the American criminal justice system: the accused. First as a trial lawyer who built a private practice around pro bono defense for people who couldn’t afford it, then as a clinical professor, and through it all as a scholar who treats the courtroom as his primary focus. These are his published works and made readable for everyone, from law professors to teenagers with no legal training, because his arguments deserve a wider audience than the law reviews he wrote them for.

Published Papers

• Criminal Law (Year in Review)

  Texas Bar Journal

  2023

  Each year, the Texas Bar Journal runs short reviews of the previous year's most important rulings in different practice areas so working lawyers can stay current.

• Dissecting the ABA Texas Capital Punishment Assessment Report of 2013: Death and Texas, a Surprising Improvement

  Akron Law Review

  2017

  In September 2013, the American Bar Association published a 517-page report on Texas's death penalty.

• The Attorney-Client Working Relationship: A Comparison of In-Person Versus Videoconferencing Modalities

  Psychology, Public Policy, and Law

  2016

  When the pandemic shut down courthouses in 2020, judges and lawyers had to figure out, almost overnight, whether the constitutional guarantee of "the assistance of counsel" could be delivered through a video screen.

• Nothing Changes, It All Remains the Same: Modern Capital Punishment (Human Sacrifice by a Different Name)

  Texas Tech Law Review

  2014

  For Texas Tech's annual criminal law symposium, Professor Arnold Loewy gave the panel a single question to wrestle with: is capital punishment a good idea or a bad idea?

• Feed Me Seymour: The Never-Ending Hunger of the Criminal Process for Procedural Rights and Removing Children from Its Shop of Horrors

  Texas Tech Law Review

  2013

  Professor Patrick Metze was asked a simple question at a Texas Tech criminal law symposium: should children accused of crimes have more, fewer, the same, or different legal protections than adults?

• Speaking Truth to Power: The Obligation of the Courts to Enforce the Right to Counsel at Trial

  Texas Tech Law Review

  2012

  The Sixth Amendment guarantees every person charged with a crime the right to a lawyer.

• Plugging the School to Prison Pipeline by Addressing Cultural Racism in Public Education Discipline

  U.C. Davis Journal of Juvenile Law & Policy

  2012

  You may have heard the phrase "school-to-prison pipeline." It names the path by which a child's misbehavior at school stops being handled by a teacher or a principal and starts being handled by police, courts, and probation officers.

• Death and Texas: The Unevolved Model of Decency

  Nebraska Law Review

  2011

  In 1972, the Supreme Court ruled in *Furman v.

• Troy Davis, Lawrence Brewer, and Timothy McVeigh Should Still Be Alive: Certainty, Innocence, and the High Cost of Death and Immorality

  Charleston Law Review

  2011

  On September 21, 2011, two men were executed on the same day.

Clinic Newsletters

Eighteen years of annual notes from the Criminal Defense Clinic and the Capital Punishment Clinic at Texas Tech, 2007 through 2025. Forty-nine columns. The case ledgers, the student rosters, the chili cookoff results, the chosen student voices. Quieter than the published papers, and just as much him.

Browse the archive →