Boots made for walking

A change is in the works at the Texas Office of Solicitor General. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott announced in an April 9 news release that he will appoint James C. “Jim” Ho, currently of counsel at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Dallas, to replace Solicitor General Ted Cruz, who will leave office later this spring. The solicitor general since 2003, Cruz says he decided to return to private practice, because he and his wife are expecting their first child. Cruz says he is talking to several firms but has not made a final decision where he will go. Ho, who will assume his duties as solicitor general when Cruz leaves, jokes, “I would say I have huge shoes to fill but for the fact that Ted wears boots.” But Ho says he is “humbled and honored” by the opportunity to serve the state in this capacity. A 1999 graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, Ho served as a law clerk to 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Jerry Smith in the 1999-2000 term and worked at the U.S. Department of Justice from 2001 to 2003, first in the Civil Rights Division and later in the Office of Legal Counsel. While at the DOJ, Ho joined John Yoo, now a professor at the University of California at Berkeley Boalt Hall School of Law, in writing a law review article, “The Status of Terrorists,” published in 2003 in the Virginia Law Journal of International Law. At the time they wrote the article, Yoo was a deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the DOJ and Ho was an attorney-adviser. In that paper, Ho and Yoo argued in support of President George W. Bush’s determination in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States that members of the al Qaeda terrorist network and the Taliban militia are illegal combatants under the laws of war and not entitled to prisoner-of-war status under the Third Geneva Convention of 1949. Among his other published writings is a 2008 article in the University of Richmond Law Review that addressed birthright citizenship. After leaving the DOJ, Ho served as general counsel to U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, from 2003 to 2005 and was a law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas during the 2005-2006 term. In 2006, Ho joined Gibson, Dunn in Dallas. Karl Nelson, partner in charge of Gibson, Dunn’s Dallas office, writes in a statement, “Jim Ho is an extremely accomplished and talented attorney, who will serve the people of the state of Texas well.”

-- Mary Alice Robbins