A benchmark moment

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Feb. 6—In 1985, David Herrera Urias was a senior at West Mesa High and part of the school's gifted program, but he quit classes before graduating. He just walked away.

"It was hard to be interested in school," Urias said. "I didn't know what I wanted to do. I had no direction. I was someone who got bored."

It took Urias only long enough to see the disappointment in his parents' eyes to regret what he had done.

"I went and got my GED (General Educational Development certificate)," he said.

Urias, now 54, is talking about those long-ago days as he sits in his new office on the seventh floor of Albuquerque's Pete V. Domenici United States Courthouse. He is wearing a handsome, three-piece suit. Law books fill the shelves in the wall behind him.

On Jan. 14, President Joe Biden appointed Urias, the man who did not get a high school diploma, to a position as U.S. District judge for the District of New Mexico.

Now, he uses his impulsive decision to leave school as a teaching point.

"I always tell young people to never give up on their education," Urias says. "Kids end up in places where they fall so far behind, they think they can't make it up. But even if things don't work out as you plan them, you can get to where you want to be."

Paying the rent

Urias was born in Pecos, Texas, but moved with his family to Albuquerque when he was in fourth grade. His father managed a tire store in Downtown Albuquerque, and his mother worked for a leather products business on the West Side.

"Both worked extremely hard," Urias said.

Urias is the middle kid of three children. His older sister is chief of staff for the executive vice president of the University of New Mexico's Health Sciences Center, and his younger brother is a business owner in Seattle.

It took a while for Urias to find his direction. In 1986, he was busing tables at a Garduño's restaurant (now El Bruno Restaurant Y Cantina) on North Fourth Street. For the next seven years, he bounced from job to job.

"Mostly I was bartending," he said. "Sometimes I waited tables. I just found jobs that paid the rent. I always knew I wanted to go to school. I just didn't know what I wanted to do."

That busing job at Garduño's proved to be among the most significant elements in Urias' life because it was there he met Yolanda Roybal. She grew up in the North Valley, attended Cibola High and is part of a family with deep roots in New Mexico. Like Urias, she cleaned tables at Garduño's.

"We really didn't like each other at first," he said.

But they got past that. Today they are married and have a family made up of three sons and two nephews.

"Yolanda was the one who really encouraged me to attend the university," Urias said. "She always made me feel like there was nothing I could not do."

Getting focused

Urias was in his mid-20s when he enrolled at UNM.

"One of my high school friends was working for the FBI," he said. "I thought I might like working in law enforcement. I majored in criminology and political science."

He continued bartending to pay his way through college, and, as he always had, he read avidly.

"I started learning about the civil rights movement — for Black Americans, for Hispanics, for all citizens really," Urias said. "I remembered those Texas border towns where my parents grew up. They had segregated cemeteries. For many years, Hispanics were buried in one section and Anglos in another. In one of those towns, there was the old building that used to be the school where the Mexican-American kids had gone. There was another building where the white kids had gone."

Suddenly, civil rights was his focus, his driving force. He just wasn't sure where it was driving him to.

"Yolanda was the one who said, 'I know you want to help people. You need to apply to law school.' That's when I started to think about the law profession. I wanted to represent people like those I grew up with — lower middle class, not a lot of money. I didn't want to represent big companies or corporations.

"I think it was when I applied to law school that Yolanda decided to marry me."

They were wed in 1997, the year Urias graduated from UNM. He entered UNM's law school in 1998.

Street smarts

From the start, Urias felt that law school was the right choice for him.

"I not only had great professors, but also great classmates," he said.

One of those classmates is Hector Balderas, now New Mexico's attorney general.

"Immediately you could tell he was one of the smarter law students by the way he answered questions in class," Balderas said of Urias. "But it was in the snack bar that I remember him saying his background was bartending, that he came from a blue-collar background."

That resonated with Balderas, who grew up in the small village of Wagon Mound and had worked as a ranch hand.

"That is a commonality we shared," Balderas said. "People are unaware that some of us (lawyers) come from humble backgrounds. I knew he would do well, that he could connect with regular people, that he had street smarts about him."

Balderas and Urias also had strong feelings about equal rights and opportunities.

"We spent a lot of time talking about social justice issues," Balderas said. "He always had this fire for social justice. He was a stand-up guy, remaining grounded with common folks."

In 2001, Urias received his law degree cum laude and went off to Washington.

'Tremendously rewarding'

Urias wanted to work for a civil rights organization, but learned it was unusual for those organizations to hire attorneys fresh out of law school. Instead, he served as law clerk for Judge Vanessa Ruiz of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals in 2001 and 2002.

"That was a wild year in D.C.," he said. "My second day on the job clerking was 9/11. And then there were the anthrax (mail attacks) and the D.C. snipers."

Judge Ruiz took a personal interest in the goals and ambitions of her staff. When she learned of Urias' desire to do civil rights litigation, she pointed him toward the Fried Frank Civil Rights Fellowship. The fellowship gives an entry-level lawyer the opportunity to work two years with a prominent New York City law firm, then two years with either the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund or with MALDEF, the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Urias got that fellowship and worked from 2002 to 2004 as an associate with Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson in New York.

"The New York experience was unbelievable," he said. "We did securities litigation and failed mergers. But I was also involved in pro bono cases involving civil rights litigation and did work representing families of the victims of 9/11 before the Victim's Compensation Fund. It was a tremendously rewarding experience to do that."

In 2004, he went to work as a staff attorney with MALDEF's San Antonio, Texas, office. His practice there consisted of civil litigation focused on civil rights.

"We tried cases in federal courts all over the Southwest," Urias said. "There was a school segregation case at a Dallas elementary school in 2006. The principal had divided the school into general education, for whites, and nongeneral education, for Hispanic and Black students." He said the school used its English as a Second Language program to separate students even when minority students were proficient in English.

Diversifying the bench

Urias and his wife had two sons while he was in law school and a third son later. The family also includes two sons of Yolanda's sister, who died young. The nephews were just 1 and 4 when Urias and Yolanda took them into their home. The five boys range in age from 13 to 22 now.

"My house always smelled like sweat and boys when they all lived there," Urias said. "My biggest achievement in the last 20 years is that we stepped up to take care of our nephews."

Urias and Yolanda wanted to raise the boys in New Mexico, so he started looking for opportunities in this state and left MALDEF in 2008 when he landed his dream job with the Albuquerque firm known at that time as Freedman, Boyd, Hollander, Goldberg, Ives & Duncan. Today, following Urias' departure to serve as U.S. District judge, the firm is Freedman, Boyd, Hollander & Goldberg.

"That was probably the only firm I wanted to work for," Urias said. "I knew the firm did not normally represent corporations and big businesses. They represented people and causes, and that's what I wanted to do, represent people who did not usually get that kind of representation."

During his years with the firm, Urias worked antitrust cases and major contract disputes, but he also continued to work in civil rights law. He represented plaintiffs in employment discrimination cases and engaged in actions involving constitutional rights, election law, wrongful death, medical malpractice, retaliatory discharge and more. He was made a partner in the firm in 2012.

Last spring, talk connecting him to a U.S. District judgeship started percolating.

"President Biden wanted to diversify the federal bench in professional background," Urias said. "Federal judges had been coming from prosecutors and the larger defense firms. The president wanted to start pulling candidates from civil rights lawyers and public defenders, people who could bring a different perspective to the federal bench. I submitted an application after other local attorneys encouraged me to. And then I found I had the strong support of (U.S. senators) Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Luján."

'All about justice'

Biden sent Urias' nomination for U.S. District judge to the Senate in September, and the Senate confirmed his nomination in December.

"He will make a great judge," said Nancy Hollander, Urias' former law firm colleague. "He is super smart. He's got a great personality, not stiff at all. He really cared about his clients and will care about the people who come before him as a judge, the lawyers and their clients. It's all about justice, and David is all about justice."

David Freedman, another of Urias' former law firm associates, tried several cases with him.

"He is a great trial lawyer, always prepared, hardworking and very collegial," Feedman said. "He is down to earth. He does not take himself too seriously. You do not want a judge who is pompous, and he is certainly not pompous.

"This is bittersweet. We are so happy for him and New Mexico, but we will miss him at the firm, miss him as a colleague."

Lifetime appointment

An appointment to the federal bench is for a lifetime term, and Urias said he is up to the task.

"I want to do this for as long as I can," he said. "I see it as an honor to represent the people of New Mexico. I am mindful that my role as a federal judge is different than the role I had as an advocate. I am not here to advocate on the behalf of clients. I am here to ensure the fair and equal administration of justice, to make sure justice is served in every case. I may not be cut from the same cloth as other judges, but I want to be a positive thing."

The windows in his new office afford a magnificent view of Albuquerque's West Side, where Urias grew up, where he and his family live now, where his mother still lives. His father died in 2003.

He takes comfort in the fact he did not turn out to be a disappointment to his parents.

"Dad saw me graduate from law school and get the fellowship," he said. "Mom keeps telling me how proud my dad would be."