We draw from a tradition of legal service in Louisiana extending from the late 18th Century to this day. Here are a few highlights of our ancestors starting with four Louisiana judges.
Judge Robert Alexander Hunter was born in North Carolina and lived as a young child in Natchez, then a territory of Spain. His paternal grandfather, Lt. Col. James A. Hunter led troops in the American Revolution for the North Carolina Regulators, and his maternal grandfather, Don Manuel García de Texada, served as a territorial official for the Spanish Court. The Don’s home, the first brick structure in Natchez, became the seat of the Mississippi government in 1817 when first admitted as a state.
Robert practiced law in Imperial Rapides Parish which then included land now organized as parts of Catahoula, Grant, Vernon, Winn and present-day Rapides Parish. He served as Rapides district attorney on several occasions, interrupting his practice in 1846 to volunteer in the Mexican-American War.
In that war, he enlisted as a private but actually started service as a captain of cavalry. Initially, he held the post of adjutant in Col. Mark’s Louisiana Regiment, rising to the rank of colonel in 1847 and returning to his practice in Alexandria in the summer of 1848. Newspaper accounts often referred to him as Col. Hunter even after his service as a judge.
An ardent Democrat, he actively campaigned for that party’s candidates throughout Louisiana. The voters elected him State Treasurer, an office he held from 1855 to 1860. After leaving that office, he became the United States Marshall for Louisiana until the state seceded in January to join the Confederacy.
In the aftermath of Reconstruction, the Whig Party took political control of Louisiana. The Whigs entrenched their power by disenfranchised voters owning no immovable property. Robert’s Whig political opponents and their allied press labeled him “10 Mile Bob” when he purchased a 10 mile-long stretch of sand along the Red River, subdivided it into tiny tracks, and sold them to disenfranchised voters for $1 a parcel. The $1 sales were each represented by an unsecured note which were extinguished by the Louisiana law governing liberative prescription when no payments were made after 5 years. Standing for office as a Democrat, the voters of Rapides Parish elected him to several terms in the legislature and in 1876 elected him their district judge.
Judge Edwin Gardner Hunter was born in 1852 as the 13th child of Judge Robert A. and his wife, Sarah Jane Ford Hunter. His mother died three weeks later from birth complications.
After homeschooling, he graduated from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. In 1874 he received his degree from the Louisiana State Law School in New Orleans. The latter institution subsequently became the Tulane University Law School. He launched his law practice in Alexandria the same year he completed his studies.
For 10 years he served as Rapides Parish district attorney, a post his father had held before him. In 1896, he successfully pursued election to the district court bench, again a seat his father previously occupied. A staunch Democrat, he frequently toured the state delivering orations at political events promoting that party’s candidates. In an era before radio, television, motion pictures and similar entertainment, these events attracted large portions of the population. Many newspapers proclaimed Judge E.G. Hunter the state’s outstanding orator.
He represented clients in numerous landmark and high-profile cases when not involved in public service. His role as lead defense counsel in the murder trials of three labor union leaders in 1912 illustrates his impact as a trial lawyer. The killings arose from what the newspapers referred to as the Grabow Riot (if aligned with mill owners) or the Grabow Massacre (if sympathetic to the striking unions). The striking unions affiliated with the Industrial Workers of the World, nicknamed the Wobblies. The event itself resulted in 4 deaths and at least 50 others wounded in a quarter-hour exchange of gunfire with over 300 rounds expended.
The Beauregard parish grand jury indicted 65 union members in connection with the incident. Although the local sheriff arrested several armed guards employed by the company, all charges against them disappeared. The matter became a cause célèbre nationally and even worldwide. The then-sitting Congressman from Lake Charles took the role as chief prosecutor in the murder trial, arrayed against the team led by retired Judge Hunter. The defense won a total victory, all the defendants were acquitted of each charge and released.
This proved to be one of Judge E.G. Hunter’s last cases. While the trial proceeded in Lake Charles, the Democrat governor of New Jersey advanced on incumbent Republican President William Howard Taft and former President Theodore Roosevelt. When he unseated the former and staved off the return of the latter, Woodrow Wilson took the presidency.
In 1913, President Wilson appointed Judge Hunter Collector of Customs at the Port of New Orleans. Although the states ratified the 16th Amendment in 1913, the tax itself did not come into effect immediately. This made the Collectors of Customs the principal source of Federal revenue until World War I was well underway. Judge Hunter died in 1919 and is interred in St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans.
Judge Edwin Ford Hunter, Jr. (known as “Chug”) lettered in football, baseball, and tennis at Bolton High School in his hometown of Alexandria. He would later find amusement in a 1953 headline announcing his appointment which read, “Athlete Turns Jurists”.
He enrolled in the LSU Navy Reserve Officer Training program, at the time the source of a relatively free undergraduate education. Because many wished active duty during the Depression given poor employment choices, at graduation he accepted an offer to accept his commission in the reserves rather than report for immediate duty. Instead, he worked as a Capitol Policeman to pay his way through George Washington University Law School, graduating in 1938.
The 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor suspended his law practice in Springhill and Shreveport. He enjoyed telling of contacting the Navy on the following day to ask whether with his post-commission law degree and legal experience, he might better serve the country as a JAG officer. This provoked a telegram from Washington a few days later reading, “Lt. Hunter. We have decided to fight Japan rather than sue. Please report to San Diego at your earliest convenience.”
His initial deployment on CV-3 USS Saratoga resulted in a life-long friendship with his suitemate, Lt. Bill Halsey, III. The two of them frequently enjoyed supper with his friend’s father, Admiral “Bull” Halsey, when both the aircraft carrier and admiral were in Pearl Harbor. By the end of the war, Lt. Hunter had risen to the rank of Navy Captain and was preparing to take command of a newly-outfitted heavy cruiser when the United States Army Air Force delivered Little Boy and Fat Man respectively to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
At the World War II Museum in New Orleans, a display features Capt. Hunter’s line officer uniform next to a naval aviator’s flight gear, Lt. Minos D. Miller, Jr., another family member discussed below.
The Caddo Parish voters sent the returning lawyer to the Louisiana House of Representatives in 1948 where he continued in office until 1952 as a leader of a Democrat Party reform block intent on stemming governmental corruption which plagued the state during the Depression era. He took command in 1952 of Judge Robert F. Kennon’s successful campaign for governor as statewide campaign manager, then assisting the new administration as Executive Counsel to the Governor.
In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower nominated him for a seat on the United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana. He took the position with the intent of resigning in a few years to seek election as a United States Senator. Protecting voting rights, desegregating schools and related civil rights controversies eliminated an early exit. He served as a Federal judge until his death on February 22, 2002. This put his time on the bench at 48 years and 151 days.
Judge E. F. Hunter also served by designation on panels of the Second, Third, Fifth, Ninth, and Eleventh Circuits and numerous bodies including the Federal Judicial Rules Committee. He heard more than 400 cases on these designation panels. He also took pride in having only six of his district court opinions reversed by the Fifth Circuit over his nearly half-century of service. Four of these reversals were, in turn, reversed by the United States Supreme Court, restoring his original determinations.
An example of the turmoil and contentiousness facing the Louisiana federal courts in the few decades of his judicial service concerns his ordering the United States Marshall Service to take the serving Louisiana Attorney General into custody during a court appearance. Ironically, the Attorney General had occupied adjacent dorm rooms under newly-built Tiger Stadium when they had both attended LSU. In pretrial conferences, the A.G. felt comfortable calling the Judge by his nickname, “Chug,” perhaps making the government lawyers from Washington a bit nervous. The hearing involved voting registrars in several parishes who blocked Afro-American citizens from registering to vote. The Louisiana A.G. supported the registrars.
When the hearing started, Judge Hunter addressed the A.G., saying “I order you to desist in resisting the registration. In fact, I order you to use the resources of your office to protect these citizens and require the registers to properly carry out their constitutional duties.” The A.G. replied, “Judge, I will not. I will fight this to the end of time, until hell freezes over. I respect you Judge, but I defy this order.” After about thirty minutes in a small holding cell, the A.G. asked a bailiff if he could be taken back to the courtroom to seek the court’s forgiveness. He was returned. He apologized. He promised to carry out Judge Hunter’s orders to the letter. He did.
Judge Hunter often said that at the start of his career there were four “learned professions” that worked for very little money, but for the satisfaction of trying to make this a better world: the teachers, the doctors, the ministers, and the lawyers. He noted that Medicare and other government programs had turned the doctors’ major financial burden of giving the poor free care into profit centers; that some ministers now owned massive churches and flew about in private jets proclaiming their wealth as proof of their worthiness; and many lawyers now harvest massive fees from ever-increasing levels of litigation. For the most part, he said, only the teachers and those members of the clergy with vows of poverty or shepherding small flocks of the faithful seem motivated primarily by their professions’ highest goals. His descendants try to keep his concerns in mind as they work in the law.
The Edwin F. Hunter, Jr. Federal Building stands in the 600 block of Broad Street in Lake Charles.
Judge Minos Dorsin Miller, Jr. (E.F. Hunter III’s maternal grandfather) who was known as “M.D.” was born in Jennings, Louisiana in 1920 and lived there until he passed away in 2006.
M.D. was already in the U.S. Navy – as a flight instructor - when the United States entered the war against Germany and Japan. Being too valuable of a skilled resource to not utilize in combat, the U.S. Navy deployed him into combat immediately after the commencement of the war. He flew numerous combat missions off the USS Saratoga, USS Ranger, and USS Wasp.
Though he was a decorated torpedo and dive bomber, he preferred the role of fighter pilot. His weapon of choice during the war was the F6F-3 Hellcat. He received a Purple Heart after he was shot down by enemy fire in January of 1945, spending 30 hours in the water, and eventually captured and held in a prison camp on the Japanese mainland for nearly nine months. After being among the first Louisiana prisoners liberated and repatriated after Japan’s surrender to the United States, he immediately began taking correspondence courses to continue his studies.
In 1947, he received both his undergraduate and LL.B. degrees from Louisiana State University. Prior to his military service, he attended LSU and was a member of many honorary, scholastic and leadership organizations, including Phi Delta Phi legal fraternity, Omicron Delta Kappa leadership fraternity, and Phi Eta Sigma scholastic fraternity.
M.D. was first elected to the bench of the newly-created 31st JDC in 1953 and was re-elected without opposition in 1954, 1960, and 1966, serving as the only judge for that district during that time and earning recognition for maintaining a current docket with no backlog of cases while serving a population of almost 60,000 people. Of note, he once was elected judge of the new 31st Judicial District Court in 1953; his very first act as judge was to immediately order the desegregation of the Allen and Jeff Davis parish courthouses — a move that came a year before the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark ruling on race.
In 1968, M.D. was elected to the Third Circuit Court of Appeal where he served until his retirement in 1977. He was a past president of the Louisiana District Judges Association and served on the Louisiana Judicial Council. He worked on various projects of law revision conducted by the Louisiana Law Institute and in 1967 served as a faculty advisor for the National College of State Trial Judges at the University of Pennsylvania.
He served by special appointment on the Louisiana Supreme Court in 1958 (as an elected Louisiana Supreme Court judge was unable to finish their term for medical reasons) and also by special appointment on the First, Third and Fourth Circuits of the Courts of Appeal. He was appointed by the Louisiana Supreme Court as an interim judge with the First Circuit Court of Appeal in 1961-62.
M.D. was active in a number of civic, charitable, and community organizations including service as commander of the Jennings American Legion Post, vice-president of the Southwest Louisiana Bar Association, President of the Jenning’s Rotary Club and chairman of the Jeff Davis district of the Boy Scouts of America, earning the Silver Beaver, one of scouting's highest awards.
