Photography by Sylvia Elzafon.

Harlin DeWayne “Cooter” Hale grew up in St. Joseph, a border town in eastern Louisiana.

The population was around 2,000 then. 

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One day in the third grade, Hale missed school because he was ill. By afternoon he was feeling better, and his father — a cotton farmer — offered to take him to watch a criminal trial at the courthouse. The case had to do with a few hunters, some of them known to Hale’s father, who were robbed during a poker game at their hunting camp. There weren’t many trials happening in St. Joseph, the parish seat, so Hale agreed to go.

“I thought, this is kind of amazing,” he says. “So I always sort of had that in the back of my mind, that this is something I would like to do.”

He lived in St. Joseph until finishing high school and then attended Louisiana State University. Hale was no stranger to Baton Rouge or Tiger Stadium, where his parents had season tickets since 1966. 

After receiving his undergraduate degree, Hale continued at LSU for law school, graduating in 1982. His first job was clerking for James L. Dennis, then an associate justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court and now a judge on the United States Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Hale moved to Dallas and worked at Strasburger & Price. He and his wife, Claire, lived at The Village for a short time and then in 1984, moved to Lakewood, where they still reside. Their two sons — one now a nursing student and reservist for the Air Force, and the other a journalist in Indiana — attended Lakewood Elementary, J. L. Long Middle School and Woodrow Wilson High School.

In 2002, Hale was appointed to the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Texas, and he retired this spring. When the National Rifle Association tried to seek bankruptcy protection and reorganize in Texas, it was Hale’s decision to dismiss the case in 2021. He also presided over cases involving Tuesday Morning and Vitro, a glass manufacturer that produced windshields for GM cars and bottles for Skyy Vodka.

Hale says he plans to continue as a professor at Southern Methodist University, where he has been teaching a course called “creditors’ rights” since 2009. Also, he occasionally does mediations for bankruptcy court.

Photography by Sylvia Elzafon.

WHAT WAS IT LIKE GROWING UP IN SUCH A SMALL TOWN?

It was very fun. Everybody knows everybody, or you’re kin to most people. But all the teachers know you really well. My fourth-grade teacher was also my father’s fourth-grade teacher. It’s that sort of thing, where you have a lot of continuity. It was fun. You have to go out of town to do anything, go to a movie, go out to eat. We have a lake in the town, so kids spend a lot of time on the lake, going swimming or skiing.

WHAT ABOUT BANKRUPTCY LAW APPEALED TO YOU?

The bankruptcy code went into effect in 1979 when I started law school, and one of my teachers in my second year said, hey this is brand new. This is something you might be interested in. I took the class, and did real well in the class. At that time, and they still do this, where firms will come and interview kids in law school to come and work during the summer. The firm Strasburger & Price was one of just two Dallas firms that came to LSU to interview. And I took a summer job at Strasburger and got to work in its bankruptcy section. That would have been summer of ’81. Really liked it.

DO YOU THINK YOU’RE A DIFFICULT TEACHER?

I think I’m really easy, to be honest with you. I try to be nice in class. We have failed some students. It just pains me to death to do that. But if you fail my class, you really deserve to fail. But no, I think I’m pretty easy. I have had 1,200 students.

CAN YOU TALK ABOUT THE NRA CASE?

That was a real hard case. They’re assigned randomly. You know, you don’t get that because you want it. There are three of us here in Dallas, and it’s just assigned randomly. It’s a hard case, probably the hardest case I worked on. It was in the paper every single day. So what was going on every single day was in the paper. And so you knew everybody was watching what you did. I tell my people that work for me, we are actually paid to get this right every day. So that didn’t make me do it any different there, but there’s a lot of public scrutiny in that case, nationally. And the lawyers were very active. They would file things all the time. The trial over whether the filing was a valid filing or not, took place during our WebEx/Zoom time. We had 200 people watching the trial on WebEx, and most hearings had 10-12 lawyers involved. It was a 12-day trial. It had 600 exhibits, 23 witnesses. It was very, very stressful, but I have really good law clerks and court staff working for me, and then the lawyers also did just a marvelous job on that part of it to make it very seamless. It took two weeks to come up with the ruling. That’s a lot of time for you to figure out what the right ruling is and write it up.

WHAT’S THE HARDEST PART ABOUT BEING A JUDGE?

Bankruptcy is often the last stop. Individuals have run out of money for some reason. And they’re about to lose their car or their house or their apartment. Trying to figure out a just solution to that. Sometimes we have to tell you, you have to leave your house. Those are the kinds of cases that kept me awake more than the NRA case or Vitro. I don’t know what they do after me.