Many lawyers and judges share the so-called “anti-racist” attitudes Judge Brown expressed, yet they possess the judgment to keep such views out of public view.
For a while, I’ve heard whispers about peculiar conduct by Judge Ada Brown in the Northern District of Texas. I hesitated to publish on the matter because my information was incomplete and some details had been disclosed in confidence. Today, some allegations have become public in part, since Judge Brown herself shared items with the press and others.
First, I would like to commend the other jurists in the Northern District of Texas, especially Chief Judge Reed O’Connor. They have shouldered the workload of all the cases Brown has left undecided, quietly taking on additional responsibilities to keep the court functioning. Judge O’Connor has frequently been the target of negative press, yet he remains a gracious and thoughtful member of his bench who seldom seeks the spotlight. In truth, it appears that Brown has attacked O’Connor, despite his willingness to extend help to her. Not every good deed is recognized or rewarded.
In addition, I must acknowledge the leadership shown by Chief Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod. She has afforded Brown every reasonable presumption of good faith and has pursued a process that is as transparent as possible. I would contrast Elrod’s approach with that of Chief Judge Moore at the Federal Circuit. The record shows that Judge Newman has faced a covert impeachment process marked by arbitrary one‑year suspensions, and only after nearly two years was the matter reassigned to a different circuit. Brown has endured shorter suspensions after she elected not to render decisions. She has had every chance to present her side of the story.
Now, to the substance. There seems to be a serious problem with Judge Brown. The behavior she has exhibited in court, as reported by the press, is deeply troubling. Her pattern of refusing to decide cases appears to be a abdication of her duties as a federal judge. And her reluctance to engage with any disciplinary process suggests that something is not right. I will refrain from offering a detailed judgment at this point, because I anticipate that more facts will emerge.
Here, I wish to examine the courtroom conduct that sparked an ethics complaint earlier this year. Jacqueline Thomsen of Bloomberg Law, who is closely attuned to the workings of the Fifth Circuit, reports the striking particulars. Here is a concise synopsis:
A complaint alleging misconduct by U.S. District Judge Ada Brown arose from a hearing in which she repeatedly subjected him to racial insults, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg Law.
Attorney Ezra Young—who has represented a Black woman professor challenging a tenure denial—filed the complaint after the April 2026 Dallas hearing, he confirmed to Bloomberg Law. Young’s complaint and Brown’s formal response were among the records Brown circulated in an Oct. 17 email to lawyers, judges, and members of the media.
During the hearing, the judge—who is a Black woman with Native American ancestry—accused Young of mistreating Black attorneys, invoked “judicial notice” of her own background when making findings about Young, and repeatedly referred to Young, who is Latino, as if he were White. Brown had revoked Young’s permission to practice in her courtroom to assess whether sanctions should be imposed on the attorney.
“I think what’s happening here, quite candidly, is that you are very intimidated for some reason, Mr. Young, with Black excellence, in light of your White mediocrity. Yeah. Right?,” Brown said, according to the transcript. “You should write that down. I mean, you — I’m — you look like a White man, right?”
“I’m not White, Your Honor,” Young replied, noting that he is Latino.
“Well, you are White-presenting; is that fair to say?” Brown pressed, with Young noting his “fair-skinned” appearance and Brown asserting that Young had “White privilege” when he argued that key evidence was missing in the case.
“You’re the White savior, come to rescue all the foolish Black lawyers in Texas who need your help from New York,” Brown added later, according to the transcript. . . .
During the April 24, 2026 hearing, Brown charged Young with “racial bullying” toward Black attorneys involved in the matter.
Brown also described Young as acting like a “Chad,” a term with which Young was unfamiliar. The judge explained that this was the male equivalent of a “Karen”—someone who rings up the manager when their demands aren’t met, and then stomps their feet to insist the rules apply to them, right? Brown continued, according to the transcript. . . .
At the April hearing, Brown disputed a news article’s headline about the case being reviewed by the Texas Supreme Court. The piece cited a brief filed by Young that referenced another law professor who appeared to compare the tenure denial to a “lynching.” The judge accused Young of fabricating that quotation to secure attention for a headline.
“And so when I read a headline — a sensationalized, highly racialized headline that says, ‘it’s like I’ve been lynched,’ and it bears no real relation to this case — I must ask you, Mr. Social Media, Main Character Chad, White Hero, Savior, Who Loves to Help Black People Be An Ally, where did the lynching in this case come from?” Brown stated, according to the transcript.
She also apparently handed Young a copy of a 1920s newspaper article that described a lynching. “So we don’t find lynching jokes funny down here, sir,” Brown added, according to the transcript.
The underlying defense is that a Latino person cannot hold racist attitudes toward African Americans. That proposition is false on its face, even when viewed through a skewed intersectional lens. More fundamentally, Young—who has long identified as liberal—is unaccustomed to being labeled a racist.
Toward the end of the hearing, Young asserted that Brown appeared to be “employing vicious stereotypes about White people, even though I have repeatedly stated to this Court that I am Latino.” He suggested that Brown was attempting to brand him as anti-Black merely because of this Court’s own concerns, a charge he framed as an impression of anti-Black hostility that no one else had raised.
“This Black woman?” Brown asked.
“No, Your Honor. This Court,” Young clarified.
Young later expressed worry that the court had trivialized his actual work as a civil-rights lawyer. Brown pressed him to detail what he had done for Black people, interpreting his actions in the case regarding Black attorneys as “abuse.”
He replied that he had gone to great lengths to support Black professors and others, and when he described his interest in representing the plaintiff, Brown interrupted him.
“Can I pause and just tell you, I appreciate, on behalf of Black people, your White saviorism,” Brown said.
“Your Honor, again, I’m not White,” Young reminded.
This is Ezra Young.
I’ll leave it to others to judge how “White presenting” Young is. He has taught a course called “Critical Race Theory, and Transgender People and the Law” at Cornell Law School. His scholarship “examines the rights of transgender individuals and is rooted in the emerging field of critical trans theory.” Young has served as the board secretary of the African American Policy Forum and helped found the National Trans Bar Association. His postdoctoral research focused on transgender rights, Critical Race Theory, and intersectionality, under the mentorship of Kimberlé Crenshaw. Young is admitted to practice in the Chickasaw Nation. In what universe could Judge Brown reasonably call him a kind of “white savior” hostile to Black litigants?
Some observers may be startled by what Judge Ada Brown uttered in the courtroom, yet the reality is that she is echoing a familiar doctrine from anti-racist and Critical Race Theory circles. The charges may strike some as absurd for someone like Ezra Young, yet one might wonder: if the plaintiff had been represented by a white attorney, would that person be labeled a “White Savior”? Consider the most celebrated white attorney in American literature. Could Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird also be deemed a “White Savior”? Yes.
Welcome to the realm of academia.
In 2015, Law professor Osamudia R. James wrote an essay for the New York Times titled Now We Can Finally Say Goodbye to the White Savior Myth of Atticus. Here is an excerpt:
Like many Americans, I read Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” during my high school years. In a curriculum that seldom explored the impacts of implicit and structural racism on both Blacks and Whites, the novel stood out as a work that confronted race directly. Yet it did so through a conventional lens: Atticus Finch was the white savior, a well-meaning white liberal whose ethics compelled him to defend a Black man accused of rape—even when many Whites would have preferred to see the accused lynched without trial. Harper Lee earned a Pulitzer Prize for addressing racial inequality, which fits the pattern of American storytelling about race: centered on virtuous white protagonists exercising power, while Black characters are pushed to the margins even within narratives about their oppression.
The debate surrounding Watchman invites us to re-examine white liberalism in literature and how it shapes our real-world responses to racial injustice.
Atticus Finch represents a model that many white liberals still cling to. Yet beyond being a fictional figure, Atticus Finch is a myth. And a dangerous one because it discourages White liberals from recognizing that they live in segregated white neighborhoods and from questioning administrators about racial segregation in their children’s schools or white supremacy embedded in the curriculum; or from acknowledging how they benefit from a system that keeps people of color in labor while excluding them from social and professional spaces. Like Finch, the expectation is that they merely “do their best to love everybody.”
Randall Kennedy expressed comparable ideas in an interview with the ABA Journal:
While Watchman may not be Harper Lee’s strongest work, Kennedy notes that it reveals greater complexity in Atticus Finch, the character she most admires. Set against the backdrop of its publication, Go Set a Watchman presses readers to confront the intricate portrayal of Atticus—yet the film adaptation’s portrayal by Gregory Peck remains a touchstone for many.
I searched the Westlaw Law Review database for references to “White Savior” and Atticus Finch, and found a number of articles. Here is a sample of the remarks:
There is a concern that Atticus represents a problematic white savior trope. The familiar image of a local attorney embedded in regional culture but stepping up to defend an unpopular defendant is not only problematic but unsupported by the legal tradition, which was driven by social movements of that era. In a thoughtful piece examining this trope, Cynthia Bond notes that “To Kill a Mockingbird” concentrates on the heroic individual, effectively erasing the social movements of the 1930s and the 1960s that mattered in shaping the era. Sarah Gerwig-Moore, To Outgrow A Mockingbird: Confronting Our History-As Well As Our Fictions-About Indigent Defense in the Deep South, 54 Ga. L. Rev. 1297, 1302 (2020).
This “white savior” motif has become a common feature in popular depictions of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, and Atticus Finch is often treated as the quintessential white savior. The problem with such idealization is that it reinforces white empowerment and the kind of white privilege that enabled the oppression now being challenged. The white savior motif deprives African Americans of agency. The motif has been identified by critics who view Atticus as a Christ-like figure, a man of exemplary virtue who sacrifices himself to save others, and there is textual support for this reading of Atticus. Judy M. Cornett, Atticus Finch: Christian or Civic Hero? A Response to Professor Mcmillian, 77 Tenn. L. Rev. 723, 734 (2010)
Thus, as an artwork, TKAM wields considerable power for many viewers, including myself. I too feel the film’s aesthetic appeal and the allure of the idealized father figure, while recognizing that the narrative clings to a White Savior Freudian archetype. I don’t teach the film out of endorsement of the white savior myth, but rather to provoke reflection on law as a social practice that affects lives. Cynthia D. Bond, To Kill A Lawyer-Hero: Atticus Finch in the Law School Classroom, 45 Rutgers L. Rec. 191, 204 (2018)
After considering this material, I wondered: what if a person of color had been among my interviewees for “Does Popular Culture Influence Lawyers, Judges, and Juries?” Might that person have offered a different view of Atticus and a different all-time favorite film about lawyers? Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy describes the book as a meditation on “the nobility of the white savior.” Perhaps that’s biting, for fans of To Kill a Mockingbird, but it is certainly a different and valuable perspective. Ronald M. Sandgrund, Esq., InQ., Can We Talk? Bias, Diversity, and Inclusiveness in the Colorado Legal Community, Colo. Law., February 2016, at 49, 59
To Kill a Mockingbird’s Finch has become an enduring symbol in American fiction, though even his flaws are evident. He can be criticized for his rigid moral code and his broad tolerance that may have allowed him to overlook systemic segregation. Moreover, the novel can fairly be read as a “white savior” tale, even though Atticus fails to save Tom Robinson. Yet many of these weaknesses can be traced to how the character evolves from Watchman to Mockingbird. By definition, the Atticus who once led the local White Citizens’ Council would not have possessed the same, all-encompassing empathy. Mary Ellen Maatman, The Mockingbird’s Brief, 47 Cumb. L. Rev. 85, 115 (2017)
To Kill a Mockingbird marks an early instance of what has come to be known as the white savior genre. Atticus Finch offers comforting reassurance that not all Whites in the South are afflicted with “Maycomb’s usual disease.” For this reason, admirers often place him on a pedestal, revering his pledges with almost scriptural awe.97 His elevated status rests in large part on a cultural myopia that stifles meaningful dialogue about racial issues. It sustains the erroneous belief that Black people were passive in the face of Jim Crow brutality. They were not. Albert M. Pearson, Charles Hamilton Houston: Mockingbird with Talons, 61 How. L.J. 319, 333 (2018)
The film adaptation of Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy, which portrays the real-life fight against racial disparities in mass incarceration and wrongful convictions, invites the spectator to confront the more nuanced reality of race in the legal system. In doing so, it invokes the archetype of the uber white-savior attorney Atticus Finch—arguably the best-known (though fictional) lawyer in Maycomb, Alabama, now associated with Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative in Monroeville. As Stevenson has stressed in his memoir, Atticus’ standing in the civil rights hero pantheon is undermined by the persistence of race-based discrimination in Monroeville’s legal system:
“Sentimentality about [author Harper] Lee’s story grew even as the harsher truths of [To Kill a Mockingbird] took root. The tale of an innocent Black man bravely defended by a White lawyer in the 1930s captivated millions, despite its uneasy exploration of false rape accusations involving a White woman…. Today, dozens of legal organizations bestow awards in the fictional attorney’s name to celebrate the advocacy model described in Lee’s novel. What is often overlooked is that the Black man falsely accused in the story was not successfully defended by Atticus….”65 Cynthia D. Bond, Representations of Law and Race Revisited: An Updated Survey of Recent American Film, 30 U. Den. Sports & Ent. L.J. 51, 67 (2025).
Many lawyers and judges hold the kind of “anti-racist” views Judge Brown expressed, yet they possess the self-control to keep them private.
Should Judge Brown depart from the bench, or be removed, she would likely feel perfectly at home in nearly any academic lounge. She could secure another form of lifetime tenure with relative ease.
