Paul Wilson picked by Gov. Nixon for Missouri Supreme Court

It can’t have hurt Paul C. Wilson’s case to have spent 14 years working for the man who appointed him last week to the Missouri Supreme Court.

But those familiar with Wilson — a Columbia lawyer, longtime state government employee and former circuit judge — say he brings a lot more to the bench than just a familiar face.

Wilson, who was in the Attorney General’s Office from 1996 to 2008, litigated some of the highest-profile constitutional cases of the last decade.

He also has worked for the Supreme Court. From 1992 to 1993, he clerked for then-Chief Justice Edward D. “Chip” Robertson Jr. and made a lasting intellectual impression.

“Anybody who fusses that Paul got this because he was a staff guy to Nixon is really misunderstanding Paul’s rather remarkable gifts and skills,” Robertson said in an interview last week.

Gov. Jay Nixon himself offered an unusually specific assessment of his appointee’s background. After all, Nixon, who was attorney general from 1992 to 2008, used to sign off on Wilson’s briefs.

“Paul Wilson has stood before both the U.S. Supreme Court and the Missouri Supreme Court to represent the state of Missouri in cases on legal issues as diverse as federalism, the conversion of non-profit assets, school funding, and the constitutionality of actions by the General Assembly,” Nixon said in a statement on Dec. 3. “He has demonstrated, time and again, both his ability and his dedication to serving the people of Missouri, and I am very pleased to be able to name him to the state’s highest court.”

In an email last week, Wilson said he is now busy meeting with his clients.

“By statute, I have to be sworn in within thirty days, and that’s not much time to wind down my practice,” he said.

Wilson, 51, is with the law firm of Van Matre, Harrison, Hollis, Taylor and Bacon in Columbia, which he joined after a yearlong stint on the Cole County Circuit Court in 2010. Wilson will be the first judge to join the Supreme Court directly from private practice since Judge William Ray Price Jr., whom Wilson is replacing, was appointed in 1992. Price returned to private practice in August.

Wilson also was counsel for the Office of Administration from 2008 to 2009 and directed the Transform Missouri Project, which oversaw how federal stimulus money was spent in the state, from 2008 to 2010. Early in his career, he spent two years working for Sullivan & Cromwell in New York.

“Everything I have done has led me to where I am now,” Wilson told members of the Appellate Judicial Commission during his public interview in October.

Better Courts for Missouri, the group that lobbied for last month’s failed ballot measure to change the Nonpartisan Court Plan — and which has vowed to pursue a new measure seeking direct elections of judges — criticized Wilson’s selection. A Tuesday posting on the group’s website said Wilson was “a clear example of why Missouri’s judicial selection system needs changes” and noted that Wilson’s short tenure on the Cole County Circuit Court ended in his losing the November 2010 election. Judge Daniel Green, a Republican, succeeded him.

“Nixon’s trial attorney allies presented him with a panel clearly meant to allow him to appoint one of his closest advisors to the court, and now our state will have to suffer the consequences of the appointment of yet another judicial activist,” Better Courts said.

Despite that charge, it’s not clear what kind of ideology Wilson might bring to the court. Although he has long worked for Democratic administrations (and ran as a Democrat in his unsuccessful election bid in Cole County), his formative clerkship with the Supreme Court was during the period from 1992 to 1995 when all seven of the court’s members were appointed by Republican Gov. John Ashcroft.

Former Missouri Supreme Court Judge Ann Covington, who was on the court when Wilson was a clerk there, said he has a “reverence” for the law.

“For him, being a lawyer, being a judge, is not a means to some other end,” she said. “It has its own integrity.”

Wilson brings to the job a hefty intellect and an inherited love of the judicial system. He graduated first in his class from the University of Missouri School of Law in 1992. According to his Supreme Court application, his GPA was 97.08, a record at the time. His father, McCormick Wilson, was a Cole County associate circuit judge. Wilson speaks frequently about his family’s dinner-table discussions of legal matters.

Covington said Wilson frequently would come by her office to trade ideas or argue about cases.

“He was never reluctant — in the nicest, most respectful way — to express his opinion,” she said.

Robertson said his former clerk was instrumental in crafting two major decisions issued in 1993. According to Robertson, Wilson did a lot of the work on ITT Commercial Financial Corp. v. Mid-America Marine Supply Corp., a widely cited case that laid out how summary judgments were to be reviewed on appeal. Wilson also provided what Robertson found to be a persuasive argument in Associated Industries of Missouri v. Director of Revenue.

In that case, the Missouri Supreme Court OK’d a statewide use tax on out-of-state goods that were stored or consumed in Missouri. Robertson dissented, saying the tax violated the U.S. Constitution’s Commerce Clause.

“Once we began kicking it around, I was able to see that I thought he was right — and ultimately, he was very right,” Robertson said.

In 1994, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court essentially agreed with the dissent and said the tax was unconstitutional. (The use tax was meant to compensate local jurisdictions for lost sales taxes, but in some places it was higher than the sale tax would have been.)

Robertson said that, for “a kid fresh out of law school,” Wilson had little trouble telling judges he thought they were wrong.

“I would tell [law clerks] at the first of the year that I’d rather look stupid in here than be embarrassed out there, and you’re here to stop me,” Robertson said. “Some of them didn’t take that seriously, but Paul did.”

In an email, Wilson said Robertson was “too kind.”

“I did the original drafts of these opinions, but based upon his direction and subject (obviously) to his additions/deletions/re-wordings,” Wilson wrote. He added that the cases were “important in their own way.”

“Summary judgments and Dormant Commerce Clause restrictions on sales/use taxes are not the glamor side of the judicial workload,” he wrote.

With Wilson’s appointment, four of the seven members of the Supreme Court will be former clerks. Judge Laura Denvir Stith clerked for Robert Seiler from 1978 to 1979, Judge Mary Russell clerked for George Gunn from 1983 to 1984, and Judge Zel Fischer clerked for Andrew Jackson Higgins from 1988 to 1989.

Wilson will be the only member of the current Supreme Court to have argued a case before its federal counterpart. In 2001 (just weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, as it turned out), Wilson argued a U.S. Supreme Court case over whether a criminal defendant who had failed to follow state procedural rules in requesting a continuance at trial could nonetheless file a federal habeas action. Wilson lost: In a 6-3 vote in Lee v. Kemna, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the defendant to proceed with his federal claim.

Wilson also has argued numerous high-profile state constitutional cases. Among them: State ex rel. Nixon v. American Tobacco, a 2000 case over the Master Tobacco Settlement; State ex rel. Liberty School District v. Holden, a 2003 case over Gov. Bob Holden’s controversial withholding of money appropriated for schools; Nixon v. Blunt, the 2004 fight over Holden’s decision to hold the vote on a ban on gay marriage in August instead of November; and Brooks v. State, the 2004 case that allowed concealed handguns to be carried in Missouri.

“When I talk to high school and middle school classes, I use this case as one of the best examples of how Supreme Court cases are often not what the media or the public think they are about,” Wilson, writing in his Supreme Court application, said of the Brooks case. The legal issue, he said, was whether the concealed carry statute was unconstitutional, not whether it was a good idea.

More recently, while in private practice, Wilson led one of several challenges to Missouri’s legislative redistricting. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court rejected Wilson’s claim that the state House map was unconstitutional.

Ken Brostron, an attorney in St. Louis, opposed Wilson in a series of cases involving the 1999 school desegregation settlement. Although the cases were hotly contested, Brostron described Wilson, who ultimately won, as a very courteous and professional lawyer.

In his application, Wilson described one of the cases as one of his most rewarding despite the “back-breaking” amount of work it involved. Brostron said that wasn’t just a metaphor.

“He had a bad back during that time,” said Brostron, who was a witness in the case because he helped draft the desegregation settlement. “I admired him. He was in absolute pain and was wearing a back brace during the trial. … I thought it was pretty remarkable that he was able to concentrate and get through that, but he did.”

In an email, Wilson said he had surgery on a herniated disk in his lower back. He thanked Brostron and the others who accommodated him at trial.

“I hope I was able to explain in the application how much I admire and respect — and truly LIKE — those with whom I have been privileged to work over the years, regardless of which side of the ‘v.’ they were on,” he wrote.

Among Wilson’s writing samples is a 37-page partial summary judgment in a long-running dispute between the Missouri Baptist Convention and an affiliated nonprofit organization, issued shortly before Wilson left the Cole County bench. In his application, he apologized for the length of the opinion but said it was a good example of how he dealt with complex matters.

“Like peeling an onion, resolving a complex [case] is simply a matter of breaking down the issues to their most fundamental constituent pieces, and then resolving each piece in turn,” he wrote.

But, Wilson wrote elsewhere in the application, the main purpose of an appellate opinion is to offer clear rules and predictable outcomes.

“As a trial judge, I quickly learned that appellate decisions which read like law review articles seldom provide any meaningful guidance to resolving actual cases, and that unpredictability can be the most frustrating trait for an appellate court.”

Wilson’s writing is eloquent and precise, if not exactly succinct. His application for the Supreme Court was 30 pages, equal to the combined applications of his two fellow finalists, Jackson County Circuit Judge Michael Manners and eminent domain attorney Stanley Wallach. A large part of the application is a narrative of Wilson’s career that mixes professional details with his feelings for and philosophy on the law.

Even his short answers are detailed. When asked to say how long he had been a U.S. citizen, Wilson wrote “51 years, 2 months.” (The application apparently was submitted in July, as Wilson’s birthday is May 23, 1961.)

“Just as a swallow knows he will one day go to Capistrano, I knew I was born to go to law school,” he wrote at one point.