Texas Lawyer is proud to announce the finalists for our 2019 Attorney of the Year as part of our Professional Excellence Awards.

Profiles of the honorees will be published in the September issue of Texas Lawyer magazine.

An awards ceremony in their honor will be held on Sept. 18 at the Belo Mansion in Dallas. The Attorney of the Year award winner will be announced at the ceremony.

Click here for booking information. For information about sponsoring the event, contact Andre Sutton at 757-721-9020 or email [email protected].

Congratulations to each of our three finalists!

Robert Henneke, Texas Public Policy Foundation - Henneke, general counsel and director of the Center for the American Future at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, represents a group of private plaintiffs who, alongside 20 Republican state attorneys general, sued to strike down the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. He took the lead at arguments before the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas last year and successfully convinced the court that the ACA should be invalidated in its entirety as unconstitutional. The district court's ruling, entered in December 2018, was one of the most high-profile and controversial of the year nationwide.

Karen Gren Scholer, U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of Texas - Scholer became the first Asian-American U.S. district judge in Texas history when she was confirmed to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District in March 2018, 10 years after she was first considered for a vacancy on the court during President George W. Bush's administration. Scholer was nominated under President Obama to fill a vacancy in the Eastern District of Texas' Sherman Division but the nomination was left pending when he left office. However, in October 2017, Scholer became one of 12 pending judicial nominees from red states that President Donald Trump renominated, once again to the Northern District. She is the only Texan to be selected for a district judge vacancy in two different divisions by different administrations.

Leslie Thorne and Emily Westridge Black, Haynes and Boone - Thorne and Black successfully convinced a Texas federal judge to block a Honduran woman's deportation pending reunification with her daughter and full due process as part of an ordinary asylum review process. The ruling, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, marked the first time a federal judge exercised jurisdiction over an expedited immigration proceeding to ensure due process. The ruling was also notable for its timing: it came at the height of the border crisis, when thousands of children were being detained and separated from their parents and asylum seekers were being summarily turned away.