Nathan Hecht has called it a career, stepping down from his post as chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court.

He didn’t exactly leave completely on his own terms. State law forced him. to retire at age 75. So, he did.

I want to join others who have saluted his 35 years on the state’s highest civil appellate court and his lengthy legal career.

Hecht is a reformer. He sought to make the legal system more accessible to lower-income Texans. It’s a fascinating goal for a man thought to be a rock-ribbed conservative Republican jurist. Which brings me to a fundamental point I want to echo.

Judge Hecht also favors judicial election reform. He doesn’t like the way Texas chooses its judges. We elect them on partisan ballots. In this day, if you’re a Republican, you have a built-in advantage simply because you belong to the predominant political party. It used to be that Democrats held that kind of power.

Hecht doesn’t like the current system. He wants to see judges elected as non-partisans. As the Dallas Morning News noted in an editorial saluting Hecht’s tenure: “He also wisely used his high-profile and strong reputation in Austin to push the Legislature for a new system for selecting judges. Partisan elections, he said, put judges in the unfortunate position of becoming political. He famously told the Legislature in 2019: ‘A judicial selection system that continues to sow the political wind will reap the whirlwind.'”

And it has. I have seen too many good judges turned away — at the state and county levels — simply because they belong to the party out of power.

The current system too often turns jurists into potential political hacks.

I hope Judge Hecht continues to use his voice to seek needed change in Texas’s political system … by removing judges and judicial candidates from the partisan cesspool.