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He's the law west of the Pecos-all the way to El Paso, actually, and in other directions, too: Waco, and Del Rio, San Antonio and Austin-and everything in between.

He's US District Judge Sam Sparks-one of thirteen US District judges for the Western District of Texas.

Unlike that other Law West of the Pecos, "Hangin' Judge Roy Bean," who sold whiskey to railroad workers in the West Texas Chihuahuan desert town of Langtry, where he ruled the roost as an erratic frontier justice of the peace, Judge Sam Sparks is a longtime trial lawyer and respected jurist known by US presidents and senators and even US Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers.

Sparks presides over the District's Austin territory, a responsibility he's held since his appointment by President H.W. Bush in October 1991.

As a federal judge, Sparks decides cases involving violations of the US Constitution and federal laws, as well as cases in which the United States is a party, mostly civil lawsuits. But there have been high-profile criminal cases as well, such as the sentencing of former Texas Attorney General Dan Morales (for mail fraud and filing false tax returns) and the trial of Gary Paul Karr for federal wire fraud (in connection with the kidnapping and murders of atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair and her son and granddaughter).

One day you'll find him granting a stay of execution for a prisoner on Texas' death row. The next day you might see him administering the oath of American citizenship to immigrants or chastising FBI agents for an unlawful search and seizure, or hunkered down with engineers and corporate attorneys untangling the knotted issues of a high-tech patent dispute.

"I get here about 7 or 7:15am and never know what I'm going to be doing," says Sparks, who turned sixty-six in September. "I mean you've got things scheduled. You know you're in trial. But you never know if an injunction is coming in or what problems are going to come up-and that keeps the staff and me very interested."

He holds court in the federal courthouse built in 1931, next door to a building that once housed the state district courtroom where short story writer and Austin resident William Sydney Porter (alias O. Henry) was convicted of bank embezzlement in 1898 and sentenced to a federal penitentiary. Sam Sparks attended O. Henry Middle School.

Speaking of literature, Judge Sparks has been known to write a poem or two-and insert them in his opinions.

This summer he performed in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night with student actors and another US District judge, Harry Lee Hudspeth. (It was at the Shakespeare Under the Stars Gala, a theater arts fund-raiser at the Harry Ransom Center.)

But whimsy is not a word applied to him by attorneys who have practiced before him.

"Judge Sparks is a tough taskmaster for everyone," says Renea Hicks, whose practice includes constitutional litigation (environmental, telecommunications and election law, much of which ends up in federal court).

"He likes people to get to the point," Hicks says. "He doesn't like them to beat around the bush and use euphemisms for what they're trying to say. He is equally tough this way on all comers," Hicks says. "This is not an unusual for a judge but I would say it's a more dominant or prominent with Judge Sparks than some other judges. It's just characteristic of being in his courtroom. You have to work extra hard and be straightforward. He doesn't like obfuscation," Hicks adds.

Fred Lewis, an Austin attorney who no longer practices but has tried cases in Sparks' court, says, "He's very smart, very independent. He works hard and he doesn't suffer fools gladly. I was always happy to be in his court because I always figured I'd get a fair shake and that's all you can ask for as an attorney. But I wouldn't want to go into his courtroom unprepared."

Bill Bunch is executive director and chief legal counsel for the Save Our Springs Alliance, an organization that strives to protect the Barton Springs Edwards Aquifer and other Hill Country watersheds from pollution and has squared off with federal agencies in US District courtrooms. Bunch says, "We don't always like his rulings but he's smart and he cares about the community."

Gary Schumann, a commercial litigator who has tried insurance liability cases before Judge Sparks, says, "He goes by the law, which is not always the case with judges. So if you have a case where the law is clearly on your client's side, you can expect the judge to rule in your client's favor."

Sparks, who will receive the Trial Judge of the Year award this month from the Texas Chapter of the Board of Trial Advocates, takes this sober view of his role in society: "With the exception of the president of the United States a federal judge has more power than anybody in the United States," he says. "We have the authority to stop traffic and close international boundaries, and even to stop state government.

"Of course your appellate courts can rescind whatever you do but that takes a long time. But as far as the day-to-day immediate action, state law or federal law, federal district judges have the authority to almost do anything, I guess.

"Just like today they came in with this case to enjoin the City (of Austin) from enforcing its own smoking ban ordinance. I don't want to talk about this case of course, because the merits are still there.

"But a federal judge has enormous authorities and powers. The real key to this job is learning how not to use this power," Sparks says.

A storied family history

There is no "hanging judge" in Sparks' family tree but there is a "hanging sheriff" who, unlike Judge Roy Bean (who never hung anybody, according to the Handbook of Texas Online), did hang a prisoner outside his jail in Belton, Texas.

The hanging sheriff was Judge Sparks' great-grandfather Samuel Sparks, sheriff of Bell County. Sparks has a photo in his office of the 1891 hanging.

Sheriff Sparks' son, also named Sam, succeeded him as sheriff of Bell County in 1897. This Sam Sparks became president of the Texas Sheriff's Association in 1903 and the Texas state treasurer in 1906. Judge Sparks has a photo of him in his office, too. His grandfather, State Treasurer Sam Sparks, is shown at work, wearing his six-guns under his coat.

"He became famous when he got a call and learned some carpetbaggers had stolen a bunch of money. He and his staff went out with shotguns and found them and arrested them and found $1.8 million. That was in 1912-and so that was some cash in those days," says Sparks, who also has a photo of the pile of stolen cash and framed news clips of the event. Later Treasurer Sparks became a prominent Austin banker and civic leader.

Our Sam Sparks does not wear six-guns to work. But he's been known to, as Texas Lawyer magazine once put it, "fire off verbal rounds" in his rulings and orders.

Sam Sparks father, Jack Sparks, practiced law at the Austin firm Hart and Brown, after a stint as a Travis County assistant district attorney. A gifted athlete, Jack Sparks made sure that his sons, Joe and Sam, knew how to spar in the boxing ring-not bad preparation for a trial lawyer. "We had to fight and do all this Golden Gloves stuff because (dad) was a boxer, a boxing champion during the war. He just felt like boys needed to know that," Sparks says.

Sam Sparks the younger participated in athletics, made the National Honor Society and became senior class president at Austin High School. He studied primarily English and history in the Plan II program (a liberal arts honors program) at the University of Texas at Austin and graduated from UT law school.

Sparks began his legal career as a law clerk to Homer Thornberry, US District Judge for the Western District of Texas El Paso Division. In 1965, Sparks joined the El Paso law firm of Hardie, Grambling, Sims and Galatzan (now Grambling and Mounce). He found that he loved sparring in the courtroom. He tried insurance and malpractice liability cases, always as a defense attorney. Clients included doctors, hospitals and the law firms of insurance companies. "I was fortunate to have a very good docket and tried cases all over-asbestos cases, Thalidomide cases, Dalkon Shield (intrauterine device) cases, railroad injury and explosion cases," he says.

He became certified in civil and personal injury trial law and was admitted to practice in federal courtrooms, right up to the United States Supreme Court. Although he had cases before the Supreme Court, he never argued before that court.

His name first appeared on a list of prospects to be federal judge during the Carter Administration and it stayed on that list through the Reagan and Bush years, although he was not a Republican.

When US Senator Phil Graham submitted his name to President Bush, Sparks was executive director of Grambling and Mounce, running the forty-person El Paso firm. His wife, Arden Reed Sparks, had died the previous year. (He married his second wife, Melinda Echols, formerly of Fort Worth, in 1995. Between them they have six children and eight grandchildren.)

"When Reagan came in, every Democrat judge in Dallas and every judge in Houston was defeated, and you had Republican judges in both cities. And I'm sure there were Republican federal judges who were politically appointed. I don't know. But I just know it was a terrible time. I had to get all of my clients to different lawyers. Then I underwent an incredible FBI investigation of every home I'd ever been in for longer than three months and all the cases I had ever tried. They interviewed neighbors in every place and lawyers whom I'd tried cases against. I mean it's an excruciating investigation," Sparks says.

His second son encouraged him to accept the appointment. "I had one son left at home. It was kind of giving us both a new start," Sparks says. The appointment finally came by President Bush on October 1, 1991-but not before another investigation, this one by the US attorney general, and a hearing before the US Senate.

Sparks accepted and moved back to Austin.

A man with strong opinions

By inclination-and the fact that he can't be turned out of office by voters-Judge Sparks feels free to state his opinion, say whatever he wants, however he wants to.

"I was brought up that way by parents who said you've got to be careful about what you say but don't worry what other people think. I guess maybe my whole family, to their detriment on occasion, followed that line of thought."

Sometimes he does this in prose and sometimes-former Plan II scholar that he is-he does it in verse, if the muse strikes him. It makes his pronouncements more memorable-and sometimes the stuff of urban legend.

In 1998, Alan Hamilton and Robert Barnhart sued in US District Court to stop the City of Austin's seasonal cleaning of the historic Barton Springs Pool. They claimed that lowering water levels at the spring-fed city pool-a prerequisite for cleaning-could endanger its already officially endangered wildlife inhabitant, the Barton Springs salamander. The city argued that the cleaning was necessary to keep the pool safe for human swimming. Sparks ruled that the city should proceed with the usual scrubbing. But he opined with a rhyme:

"Barton Springs is a true Austin shrine,
A hundred years of swimming sublime.
Now the plaintiffs say swimmers must go
'Cause of "stress" to critters, fifty or so.

"They want no cleaning because of these bottom feeders,
Saying it's the law from our congressional leaders.
But really nothing has changed in all these years
Despite federal laws and these plaintiffs' fears.

"Both salamander and swimmer enjoy the springs that are cool.
And cleaning is necessary for both species in the pool.
The City is doing its best with full federal support,
So no temporary injunction shall issue from this Court.

"Therefore, today, Austin citizens get away with a rhyme;
But, the truth is they might not be so lucky the next time.
The Endangered Species Act in its extreme makes no sense.
Only Congress can change it to make this problem past tense."

"When I was growing up, I was a big fan of Ogden Nash, who used to write for The New Yorker," Sparks says. "His poems were short, succinct and had a little message in there. I always liked him. I've got his books at home. I write cards for friends, and I just wrote a toast for a friend of mine whose son is going to get married. And I write poems to my kids-mainly with a hidden message in there, sometimes not so hidden."

The "salamander poem" ricocheted through the Internet and landed prominently in The New York Times.

"My son saw it there and called my wife and asked her if I was taking my medication. I take high blood pressure medication," Sparks says.

Sparks says that in the Barton Springs Pool ruling, he meant his message for the public. "We have the Congress who has never seen fit until recently to amend the Endangered Species Act. The act itself does not give much discretion one way or the other," he says. "You remember the case of the snail darter. You had a two hundred million dollar dam in Tennessee that was going to give electricity to people for hundreds of miles around-and it's never been operational because a small fish, the snail darter (another endangered species) lives under the area of the dam, which is crazy. But congress for political reasons has never amended the statute.

"That's the reason I put that poem in there. Nobody but the appellate court was going to read the thirty-eight very, very dry pages of legal recitation that followed it, but I wanted people to understand what a significant problem the statute without exception imposed. I will admit I got a lot more publicity than I intended."

Environmental attorney Bill Bunch of the Save Our Springs Alliance shakes his head at Sparks' assessment of the Endangered Species Act and calls the plaintiffs' motion to halt the pool cleaning a "sham lawsuit brought by developers to have the pool shut down."

Bunch says the suit's goal was to create "a backlash of the community against the Endangered Species Act and environmental groups that were trying to protect the salamander and the springs."

"I believe the judge knew it was a sham and didn't hold them accountable," says Bunch, "but he wrote the poem to make the point that the law is extreme."

Spark's poetry is not always of serious purpose. When an inmate of a Texas prison sued Penthouse magazine for half a million dollars for publishing what he called a disappointing layout of Paula Jones, Sparks fined the prisoner for filing a frivolous lawsuit, and dismissed the case with a short Christmas poem (it was filed in December 2000) which said, in part:

"'Twas the night before Christmas and all through the prison
Inmates were planning their new porno mission...
The minute his Penthouse issue arrived,
The minister ripped it open to see what was inside.
But what to his wondering eyes should appear-
Not Paula Jones' promised privates, but only her rear.
Life has its disappointments. Some come out of the blue
But that doesn't mean that a prisoner should sue."

In 2002, the Barton Springs salamander wriggled into Judge Sparks' courtroom again. Sparks turned to prose this time.

"Within a year of achieving endangered status, the Salamander expanded its exclusive habitat to include the docket of this Court and has lived here since then, sounding its three-inch presence from the piles of pleadings like a rhinoceros' snort," he wrote in his ruling in a lawsuit filed by the Save Our Springs Alliance against the US Fish and Wildlife Service and US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Siding with the plaintiff Save Our Springs Alliance, the judge slammed the EPA for dragging its feet in its review of construction permit regulations for the Barton Springs watershed.

"The Court cannot fathom why an entity as resourceful and mammoth as the federal government needs fifteen months, the gestation period of a black rhinoceros, to complete a consultation concerning the effects of construction on a three-inch creature."

In a 2004 case (Klein-Becker LLC, et al. v. William Stanley, et al) he was asked to referee a dispute between lawyers at a deposition. That's when he turned his exasperated eloquence on the attorneys practicing in his courtroom. He wrote an order denying one side's "emergency motion" to prolong a deposition into the evening hours.

"When the undersigned accepted the appointment from the President of the United States of the position now held, he was ready to face the daily practice of law in federal courts with presumably competent lawyers. No one warned the undersigned that in many instances his responsibility would be the same as a person who supervised kindergarten. Frankly, the undersigned would guess the lawyers in this case did not attend kindergarten as they never learned how to get along well with others. Notwithstanding the history of filings and antagonistic motions full of personal insults and requiring multiple discovery hearings, earning the disgust of this Court, the lawyers continue ad infinitum.

"The Court simply wants to scream to these lawyers, 'Get a life' or 'Do you have any other cases?' or 'When is the last time you registered for anger management classes?'

"If the lawyers in this case do not change, immediately, their manner of practice and start conducting themselves as competent to practice in the federal court, the Court will contemplate and may enter an order requiring the parties to obtain new counsel."

The lawyers straightened right up. And Sparks' rebuke reverberated through the worldwide legal community.

"I never dreamed that anyone would be interested in that kindergarten order," Sparks says. "I think it went all across the Internet and I couldn't believe it. I got e-mails from Europe and Canada."

"Every week we come up with something very important here in the court that somebody ought to write about-and then when you get mad and come in and dictate off (the top of) your head just to blow off a little steam…." that's when everyone pays attention, he says.

Still, in that kindergarten order, he had a message that he wanted attorneys to hear: Bellicose behavior by dueling attorneys exists more than it used to and more than it should.

"Part of it is inexperience," Sparks says. "Part of it is a lawyer thinking that's the way they should act, that it's macho to be tough. Of course it's just the opposite. If you're contentious with your opponents, that takes up time. If you can pick up the telephone and call your opponent and say, 'Look I'm really busy I can't take that deposition on Tuesday. Can you make it on Saturday?' And you do that with them and they do that with you-that means you can practice more, take on more and that means you can try more cases. And that's the only thing that makes sense.

"Now I didn't like a lot of the lawyers I competed with when I practiced trial law. We didn't like each other. We didn't invite each other to our homes and that type of thing. But we got along because it was necessary. We were busy lawyers. We didn't have enough time to do this stuff. I mean, you want to be tough in the courtroom, but before you get in the courtroom you ought to relax and enjoy life and you can't when you're being contentious."

It's part of a larger message, the mission he's picked for himself as Austin's highest civic authority: Training lawyers to conduct themselves professionally in the courtroom.

Sparks believes that many of today's lawyers lack the skills and seasoning of previous generations of their profession. Lawyers used to be able to chalk up a lot more hours of "boxing" with other attorneys under the eye of a judge.

"There are fewer trials nowadays than there used to be-though lawyers make a good bit more money than they used to," Sparks says. "It's not so much an erosion of standards. I thought for a while that people were just more incompetent but then after about a year on this job, I realized it's the fact that so many of them are just inexperienced. They don't want to give up this particular client, so they are over here (in Sparks' courtroom) trying a case and sometimes it doesn't come natural to them when to object or how to object or what they should do. If they tried eighty cases, they wouldn't have a problem.

"It's like my brother and I learned from our dad. You don't get to be a good boxer until you learn that you don't want your nose broken again and you don't want that scar tissue-and it's the same in trying lawsuits.

"When I was trying lawsuits, I was trying at least twenty verdicts every year for years and years and years. Back in those days lawyers made a fair wage but they didn't make what lawyers make today.

"For example my law clerks make more money the first year they leave me than I do. And so they're under pressure to be profitable. The environment doesn't permit you to go down there and do all the trials that we once did, like all those trials on insurance subrogation (to substitute one person before another with respect to a claim or right). They all had the same rules. You select the jury, present the evidence, argue the case. It may take you a couple of days to try the case and then you've made a couple a hundred dollars. Well, lawyers don't have that chance any more. That's just the way of the world works right now.

"So I just hope that I can help improve the caliber of trial lawyers. I want competent lawyers to try lawsuits in the state and federal courts," Sparks says.

"And I think it's no secret I don't tolerate lawyers who are not prepared. I trust that lawyers who practice over here will become more competent the next time they're out. And that's the only thing. That's the only reason I took this job."

Mark G. Mitchell has covered courts for a couple of newspapers, but the closest he has come to actually practicing law was in his high school performance as Henry Drummond in the play based on the Scopes Monkey Trial, Inherit the Wind. You may e-mail Mark at mgmitchell@goodlifemag.com.

The Law According to US District Judge Sam Sparks

A federal judge is appointed to serve for life and with this security comes enormous responsibility. Here is a small sample of cases decided by Judge Sparks since his appointment fourteen years ago by President H.W. Bush.

1994-Judge Sparks decides for the plaintiff in the case of Steve Jackson Games et al. v. the US Secret Service and the United States Government. Four years earlier, the Secret Service had raided Jackson's offices and seized computers, searching for a sensitive file that one of Jackson's employees may have posted on the Illuminati Online bulletin board service operated by the game company. Jackson, assisted in his lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, claimed the government had unlawfully seized his published work product. Sparks awarded more than fifty thousand dollars in damages to Steve Jackson Games, citing lost profits and violations of the Privacy Protection Act of 1980.

1995-Sparks sentences a young computer hacker, University of Texas student Chris Lamprecht, to federal prison for money laundering and bans him from using "the Internet or any computer network" after his release from prison until 2003.

1997-Sparks orders an election be held on campaign-finance reforms for City of Austin elections, as requested by plaintiffs in Austinites for a Little Less Corruption v. City of Austin.

1998-Sparks rules that two of the campaign-finance reform measures passed by Austin voters in the November 1997 election are unconstitutional: Section 8(I), which totally prohibited expenditures by corporations, associations or labor unions to support or oppose a ballot item, and Section 8(J), which limited an individual from contributing more than $100 to a political action committee in a single calendar year.

Sparks refuses Death Row inmate Carla Faye Tucker's request to stay her execution until her lawsuit against Texas clemency procedures are resolved. He says in his decision that there is "no constitutional right to clemency under federal law." Tucker was executed February 3, 1998.

2000-Sparks rules that Ford Motor Company cannot sell vehicles over the Internet in Texas and that state regulators did not violate Ford's constitutional rights by prohibiting the company's use of a web site to sell used cars.

Ford had sued the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) Motor Vehicles Division after the agency cracked down on the manufacturer for its Internet sales site. Ford claimed that TxDOT violated the First Amendment and the "commerce clause" of the Constitution by trying to regulate how the Internet is used. In Texas cars can only be sold through dealers.

Though Ford delivered its cars to dealers and allowed the dealers to close on the transactions begun on the web site, Sparks says that procedure didn't legitimize the sales activity that the state says is illegal in other mediums. "Thus," Sparks writes, "the plaintiff is prohibited from selling motor vehicles to consumers by mail, phone calls, leafleting, skywriting or drum signals, as well as on a plane, on a train, in a house, or with a mouse."

2001-Sparks rules that the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) can continue constructing its water pipeline along US Highway 290 West to Dripping Springs. Three environmental groups, the Hays County Water Planning Partnership, the Save Our Springs Alliance and Save Barton Creek Association, had sued the LCRA, the US Corps of Engineers and the US Department of the Interior to halt installation of the fourteen-mile water line until the Corps and the US Fish and Wildlife Service completed their "consultation…on all the effects of the project on endangered species," namely the Barton Springs salamander. The In Fact Daily newsletter reported that Sparks said in court, "These folks are never going to agree about any biological opinion-never. But they say they don't have enough information here…because the Endangered Species Act is one act that the Congress doesn't have the guts to suspend or to amend."

Sparks sentences Juanita Lozano, a former aide to George W. Bush's presidential campaign, to a year in jail for mailing secret debate material to Democratic rival Al Gore's campaign and then lying about it to a grand jury. Lozano later admitted to leaking a video tape of candidate Bush practicing a campaign debate, along with other confidential debate material, to a Gore associate. Sparks gives Lozano a three-year probated sentence and fines her three thousand dollars. He also scolds her for trying to disrupt the presidential election.

2002-Sparks ruefully allows Longhorn Partners to move forward in retrofitting its Longhorn Pipeline to carry gasoline, diesel and jet fuel through the City of Austin (on a seven hundred mile transit from Houston to El Paso) without permitting from the city, saying he believes regulation of the pipeline is a federal matter exempt from local interference.

The city, a Central Texas water conservation district, and two landowners had sued Longhorn Partners to try to force compliance with the city's environmental monitoring standards.

Sparks writes in his opinion, "Had the court been granted more discretion, at a very minimum, the undersigned would find it reasonable to order Longhorn to replace the fifty-two-year-old pipe in all populated areas and in areas that affect people's drinking water supply. However, the court has no such discretion.

"Time will only tell if (Longhorn Partners' own) mitigation measures will be sufficient to contain the dangers inherent in this decrepit pipeline, and the people and critters in its threatening shadow can only hope and pray that they will."

2004-Sparks rules that the University of Texas and state agencies have the right to use filters to block e-mail spam. White Buffalo Ventures LLC had sued to force the University to accept and deliver to campus computers unsolicited e-mail ads for its on-line dating service, LonghornSingles.com. White Buffalo argued that the university in blocking its ads had interfered with the company's First Amendment right to free speech.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott argued that the university, with limited computer resources, has the right to block illegal and legal spam that burdens its systems. Sparks agrees, writing that the university could use technology like spam filters "to conserve server space and safeguard the time and resources of its employees, students and faculty."

2005-On October 18, Sparks renders a sixteen-page decision regarding the challenge to the smoking ban ordinance that voters had approved May 7. The suit was brought by a group of Austin bar owners who claimed that their businesses were hurt by the ban, which took effect September 1. Sparks' decision criticized the plaintiffs' "everything-but-the-kitchen-sink-style" petition and he refused to grant an injunction that would prevent enforcement of the ordinance as a whole, finding against the plaintiffs on most of the grounds presented in the petition. The decision stated "…it is clear that there is no constitutional right to smoke in a public place."

Sparks' decision did, however, order the City of Austin to observe the restrictions mandated by a new state law by not imposing any fine that exceeds five hundred dollars (instead of up to two thousand dollars, as provided in the smoking ban ordinance). The decision also ordered the city not to suspend or revoke any city permits or licenses without first allowing for expeditious judicial review.

-Mark G. Mitchell and Ken Martin