Guest Speaker Spotlight

Texas Supreme Court Justice

Evan Young

Justice Evan Young joined the Supreme Court of Texas in November 2021. Governor Greg Abbott appointed him to fill the seat vacated by Justice Eva Guzman. The voters elected Justice Young to a full term in November 2022.  

Justice Young was an Air Force kid whose family settled in San Antonio when  he was young. He graduated from Tom C. Clark High School and attended Duke University, where he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa and graduated summa cum laude with a degree in History and minors in Japanese and Political Science. He won a British Marshall Scholarship and spent two years studying at Oxford University, where he earned a First Class Honours degree in Modern History in 2001. He graduated from Yale Law School in 2004. 

After law school, he served as a law clerk first to Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, and then to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. He then served as Counsel to the Attorney General at  the U.S. Department of Justice. During his time at DOJ, he spent nearly a year in Iraq, where from 2007–2008 he was based at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and helped lead our government’s Rule of Law mission. In that role, he worked with the Iraqi courts and prison system to enhance the Iraqi legal system’s commitment to fair, prompt, and equal justice.  

​Following his federal service, Justice Young returned to Texas in 2009 and entered private practice. He focused on trial and appellate litigation and  argued multiple cases in the U.S. Supreme Court, the Texas Supreme Court, and federal and state appellate and trial courts across the country. Justice Young has been an adjunct law professor at the University of Texas School of  Law since 2015 and won the Professor of the Year Award from the student body in 2016. He is an elected member of the American Law Institute and  has served as Chair of the State Bar of Texas Business Law Section, Chair of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s Texas Regional Office, and Trustee of the Texas Supreme Court Historical Society.  

In 2015, the Texas Supreme Court appointed Justice Young to the Supreme Court Advisory Committee, which drafts the rules that govern proceedings in Texas courts. In 2017, Governor Abbott nominated him to serve as a member of the Texas Judicial Council, the policy-making body for the Texas judiciary. The Texas Senate confirmed his nomination, and Justice Young  served as a member of the Judicial Council until his elevation to the bench.  

Justice Young and his wife live in Austin with their seven-year-old daughter.