A nomination letter from Joe Stephens

To Whom It May Concern:

It is difficult to write a letter nominating Professor Patrick S. Metze for an award without feeling that the ordinary language of recommendation is inadequate. Pat has spent a career earning the kinds of adjectives that recommendation letters tend to cheapen through overuse: brilliant, generous, influential, beloved. In his case, they are simply accurate.

I had the extraordinary privilege of working alongside Pat at Texas Tech University School of Law, where he served as Professor of Law and Director of the Criminal Clinics before his retirement. I came to Lubbock to serve as Chief Public Defender of the Caprock Public Defender Office, but the fuller truth is that Pat was the reason I came. I left San Angelo for the opportunity to work beside him, to learn from him, and to watch up close how someone could build programs, teach students, practice law, and become so thoroughly woven into the fabric of a law school and a legal community.

Pat was already a legend when I arrived. I do not use that word casually. He was a fixture of the Lubbock bar, an institution within the law school, and someone whose reputation had been built over decades rather than manufactured by a title. Students respected him because they knew immediately that what he taught them mattered. Lawyers respected him because he had done the work. And those of us fortunate enough to work alongside him respected him because we could see that underneath all of the accomplishment was something much rarer: an abiding decency and an unwavering belief in the humanity of other people.

That humanity is impossible to separate from Pat’s scholarship. His recent article, Free Koko and Zackery: Abolish Texas’s State Jail Felony Experiment, is an extraordinary example. Pat examines a system originally intended to divert people convicted of low-level property and drug offenses toward supervision and treatment, and documents how inadequate funding and increasingly punitive laws transformed that promise into something very different. But what makes the article unmistakably Pat is that the statutes and cases never obscure the people affected by them. Even in a heavily researched law review article, his central concern is redemption, dignity, poverty, addiction, and the human cost of a system that too often substitutes punishment for help.

That is Pat as a scholar, but it is also Pat as a lawyer and teacher.

His scholarship is brilliant. But his scholarship captures only a fraction of what makes him exceptional. Pat understands something fundamental about legal education: we are not merely teaching students how to read cases, make arguments, or stand in a courtroom. We are teaching them what kind of lawyers they will become and, ultimately, what kind of people they will be when another human being places his or her life in their hands. Pat taught those lessons as much by example as he ever did from the front of a classroom.

I saw his influence in students. I saw it in colleagues. I saw it throughout the local bar. And I experienced it myself. There are people we encounter professionally who make us better at our jobs. There are far fewer who change our conception of what the job can be. Pat did that for me. Working alongside him sharpened my own understanding of what a public defender office housed within a law school could become and what it means to build something that will matter after we are no longer the ones running it.

There is a line near the end of Pat’s article that captures him better than perhaps he intended: “Free people should be allowed to do things which other free people are appalled by.” It is quintessential Pat: provocative, funny in its directness, fiercely independent, and grounded in a serious conviction about human dignity. The article ultimately argues that resources should be directed toward helping rather than merely punishing people struggling with poverty and addiction, calling that, simply, “the moral thing to do.” That insistence on seeing the person before the problem has defined far more than Pat’s scholarship. It has defined his career.

Legal careers are often measured in cases won, articles published, titles held, and institutions led. Pat has accumulated all of those kinds of accomplishments. But I think his more important legacy resides elsewhere: in generations of students who learned from him, lawyers who became better because of him, clients whose humanity he insisted upon, programs he helped build, and a law school and legal community that are fundamentally different because Patrick Metze spent his career among them.

I count myself among the people changed by knowing him.

It could not be with greater admiration, affection, or gratitude that I nominate Professor Patrick S. Metze for this award. There are accomplished lawyers, gifted teachers, and important scholars. Pat is all three. More importantly, he is an exceptional human being. I can think of no one more deserving of recognition for a lifetime spent demonstrating what this profession can be at its very best.

Sincerely,

Joe Stephens
Clinical Professor and Chief Public Defender, Caprock Public Defender Office
Texas Tech University School of Law