FEATURE STORY — May/June 2007

In his Favor

Jesse G. Reyes emerged from Chicago’s tough West Side to become the first Latino president of the Illinois Judges Association, thanks in part to the books he read as a child

By Kevin McKeough
Photography By Lloyd Degrane

It’s been a mostly quiet December morning in the courtroom of Judge Jesse G. Reyes ’79 LAS, but things are heating up as two lawyers argue a foreclosure case before him.

“[The defendant] has lived in this property for the whole length of this case, which was filed two years ago,” declares the plaintiff’s attorney, his voice rising as he insists that the bank holding the mortgage be paid $1,000 of the amount past due or be granted immediate possession of the property.

The defendant’s attorney counters that his client’s legal rights have been violated and makes an appeal to emotion: “We don’t believe there is any reason to short circuit [my client’s] due process rights by having him thrown out in the streets in mid-December.”

After listening to the exchange quietly, Reyes rules in favor of the bank. “The record in this matter will bear out that your client has had more than due process,” he tells the defendant’s attorney in a low, craggy voice. “Rest assured that his constitutional rights in this case have been fully protected.”

Even so, the judge doesn’t grant the bank immediate possession, giving the defendant two weeks to make the overdue payments of principal and interest. “It would behoove you to talk to your client,” he advises the defendant’s attorney. “Part of what’s causing this problem is your client’s unwillingness to work with the plaintiff.”

“I always kept my goal in mind, but there were times I wondered whether I was ever going to get there.”

It’s a moment that’s typical of the understated, even-handed manner for which Judge Reyes is known and admired by colleagues, who praise him both for his work as an associate judge for the Circuit Court of Cook County and president of the Illinois Judges Association. He is the first Latino head of IJA, a 1,000-member organization that educates the public about the judicial system.

“He has established himself as a judge with excellent temperament, who [has] learned the law very well and is able to apply the law fairly to the circumstances and facts presented to him,” observes Timothy C. Evans, chief judge of the Circuit Court of Cook County, who swore in Reyes to both the bench and IJA presidency.

Inspired by Abe Lincoln

Reyes’ accomplishments are all the more noteworthy given that his origins were as unassuming as his manner of jurisprudence is today. Raised and schooled in Chicago’s Pilsen and Bridgeport neighborhoods, he was the oldest of four children and the only one to attend college. His stepfather Juan Reyes worked as a foreman for a plate glass company, while his mother Christina kept the family home where she still lives today.

Growing up, Jesse Reyes often attended White Sox games, where he marveled at shortstop Luis Aparicio’s fielding prowess.

In addition to his enthusiasm for athletics, which Reyes maintains to this day, he had a voracious love for reading. With no public library near his Pilsen home, he would wait for the weekly arrival of a mobile book unit, and then check out as many volumes as he was allowed.

Reyes particularly loved reading histories, and found inspiration in the lives of presidents, such as Theodore Roosevelt overcoming childhood physical ailments to become renowned for his vigor or Abraham Lincoln’s efforts to educate himself.

For as long as he can remember, Reyes knew he wanted to be a lawyer, and these stories encouraged him to believe in his dream. “The quest for excellence, the rags-to-riches stories, the pursuit against all odds,” Reyes recalls of their themes. “These were people I aspired to emulate.”

To achieve that dream, he had to resist the pressure to join the street gangs that were sprouting up in the Pilsen neighborhood where he lived as a child—pressure that sometimes took the form of beatings at the hands of gang members. “If you said no, a group of them would be waiting for you after school or during the lunch break,” he remembers. “It became a matter of defending yourself wherever you were, whether it was a playground or an alley or out in the street.

“It helped me to develop a sense of persistence and determination,” he says. “I realized if I wanted to have a certain life, this wasn’t the route to go, and I just hung in there.” Not surprisingly, he didn’t go out after school much, which reinforced his dedication to books.

His family moved to Bridgeport in 1967, and Reyes subsequently attended Thomas Kelly High School in Chicago’s Brighton Park neighborhood, then an enclave of Eastern European immigrant families (the neighborhood’s population now is predominately Latino). For the past five years, Reyes has returned to the school to participate in its annual career night, and his alma mater has named him to its hall of fame.

“Going to this school wasn’t just an education in books,” he says as he stands in front of a plaque bearing his likeness that rests atop the school’s trophy case. “Because of the neighborhood, the diversity, there was an education along cultural lines and also in terms of work ethic. It instilled in us that if you work hard, you can achieve what you want in life.”

A bookstore down the street from the high school fed his literary passion with paperback copies of The Catcher in the Rye, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Godfather and more. During the same time, he played all manner of sports: halfback for the Kelly High football team (which went to the city playoffs in his junior year); touch football games in the snow in nearby McKinley Park; and tennis, volleyball and wrestling in the park’s programs. (In adulthood, Reyes has completed four marathons and two triathlons.)

“Growing up, we didn’t really know we were deprived of a lot,” he says during the drive from the park. “We found other things to do.” His interest in government also was present early, when he and a friend rode their bikes to the International Amphitheatre to see dignitaries arriving for the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

Serving on the senate

For all his intellect, ambition and drive, pursuing his dreams proved elusive at first. After graduating from Kelly in 1971, he took community college classes while working in factories to support his family. “I always kept my goal in mind, but there were times I wondered whether I was ever going to get there,” he admits.

His wife Terry, whom he married in 1974, encouraged him to keep going. Eventually, UIC provided Reyes with the opportunity he needed, giving him the flexibility to pursue his bachelor’s degree while he worked in a place more suited to his ambitions: the library of a law firm. In between his job and classes with such storied history faculty as Robert Remini, UIC historian and professor emeritus, and Peter d’A Jones, professor emeritus, he found time to serve on the executive committee of the Circle Center Board (which oversaw funding for student organizations) and as vice president of the student senate.

“The overall education I got at UIC provided me with some very good tools in terms of the thought process ... [and] how you can contribute to society,” reflects Reyes following a visit to his alma mater. He’s now sitting in a corner booth at his favorite Mexican restaurant, Nuevo Leon, located in the Pilsen neighborhood. In keeping with Reyes’ deliberate manner, his orange and silver-patterned tie is tucked carefully inside his white shirt to protect it from the chicken fajitas he’s having for lunch.

According to one classmate, the approach and temperament Reyes brings to the judicial bench was already evident when he served on the Circle Center Board. “There were plenty of people who came before the Board who were so passionate about getting their office space or funding for their project,” recalls Gretchen Winter ’79 LAS, now vice president and counsel, business practices, for Baxter International Inc., a Deerfield-based medical health care company.

“Jesse was a very even-keeled person, and emotional responses were interesting to him, but not a determinant,” says Winter. “He’d ask, ‘What’s the program? What’s the funding? What’s the benefit to the student body?’ When I see him today, I think about how little he has changed from when I knew him in school.”

Obtaining justice and judgeship

After graduating from UIC, Reyes received his JD in 1982 from John Marshall Law School in Chicago, and then practiced as a plaintiff’s attorney for Kenneth B. Gore Limited, a Chicago firm specializing in personal injury and workman’s compensation cases.

“It lived up to everything I thought it would be,” Reyes says. “I had the opportunity to go into a courtroom and try cases in front of a jury. It was my vision of what a lawyer does, always trying to seek and obtain justice for the right cause and the right person,” he concludes, making a punching motion in the air.

After leaving KBG, he joined the City of Chicago’s Corporation Counsel Office, where he represented the city in civil lawsuits, and then the law department of the Chicago Board of Education, where he vetted reform procedures and policies.

“Jesse always had good legal acumen. He was a hard worker, studied the issues well and had a good grasp of the law,” says former Chicago Board of Education president and fellow Kelly High Hall of Fame member Gery Chico ’79 LAS, now a senior partner with Chicago law firm Chico and Nunes. “When you’re working in any position that deals with the public, you have to listen; you have to exude interest and compassion.

“I’m very proud that here’s a young man that’s come from the tough West Side who hasn’t forgotten his roots,” continues Chico. “He looks around and sees how he can use his assets to benefit the people who used to live next door to him.”

In 1997, Reyes was elected an associate judge by his peers on the circuit court. (Circuit court judges are elected by public vote; they in turn select associate judges from a pool of candidates who have been evaluated by the chief judge’s screening committee and local bar associations.) Like all new associate judges, he started out hearing traffic cases, and later presided over misdemeanor crime and domestic violence cases. Reyes was then assigned to the Circuit Chancery Division, where he is responsible for hearing cases involving foreclosures and liens attached to a property by a contractor or supplier.

“It is a very sensitive area of the law where people are facing the possibility of losing their home and investment in housing, and he has distinguished himself as a judge who is able to handle those cases fairly and expeditiously,” says Chief Judge Evans.

Hear the other side

In his courtroom in the Richard J. Daley Center, Reyes sits at a raised podium behind a long grey marble façade, his brow furrowed and eyebrows bearing down under his swept back, jet black hair as he reviews court documents. Mostly dressed in lumpy gray suits, attorneys wander in and out of the courtroom or shuffle papers as they sit at two tables in front of the judges’ bench, their black leather bags lying on the floor.

During the course of a morning in mid-December, Reyes grants an emergency motion to stop the foreclosure sale of a property scheduled to begin within the hour, but denies the argument of a woman (who’s defending herself) that a judgment against her should be dismissed due to inadequate counsel.

Elbow on his bench, chin cupped in his hand, Reyes listens as two attorneys engage in long arguments before issuing a detailed ruling, reading from a prepared statement filled with citations of legal precedent by name and case number.

The ruling reflects his studiousness. Reyes reviews case law daily, even in areas where he feels confident of his knowledge. Legal volumes fill the shelves of his chambers on the Daley Center’s 28th floor, a corner office that offers a birds-eye view of downtown Chicago’s skyscraper canyons. The numerous awards and honors he’s received also line the walls, and on a computer stand behind his desk rests a photo of the Reyes’ 10-year-old daughter Renee, who frequently accompanies her father to work-related events.

“We try to make sure both parties receive justice,” Reyes says after the morning’s court call. His judgments typically include a reinstatement option for the owner to sell the property or make good on the loan. “If there’s a way something can get resolved, I will try to do that. If there’s no other recourse, I’ll let the foreclosure go through.”

Illinois Supreme Court Justice Anne M. Burke says that Reyes’ approach in court exemplifies the motto on the back wall of her own courtroom: audi alteram partum, “hear the other side.”

“As a jurist, he just epitomizes it,” says Justice Burke, who originally befriended Reyes when he worked on her campaign for appellate judge. “He’s a collaborator, someone who listens.”

Sharing his love of books and learning

By all accounts, Reyes has brought the same qualities he demonstrates on the bench to his leadership of the Illinois Judges Association. (He has also served as president of the Latin American Bar Association, regional president of the Hispanic National Bar Association and secretary of the Chicago Bar Association—where he was the first Hispanic elected to an officer position.) He first joined IJA’s executive ranks six years ago as its treasurer, the first in a series of positions that traditionally lead to the presidency.

“He understands the issues for judges in this state,” says Anne Jorgensen, Chief Judge of DuPage County 18th Judicial Circuit and a former IJA president. “As an associate judge, he understands the nuts and bolts, the heavy volume of court calls that are traditionally staffed by associate judges.”

As president, Reyes has expanded IJA’s program to provide speakers to community groups and schools, and he hosts a series of cable television shows that discuss courtroom related topics, taping several of the broadcasts in Spanish.

He’s also tried to instill his love of books and learning in children with backgrounds similar to his own, initiating an annual book drive four years ago, which this year provided more than 6,000 books to needy Chicago schoolchildren.

The undertaking reflects Reyes’ belief in reading and learning as pathways to success, and he’s determined to give others the same chance to succeed that he had. “I remember what it was like growing up and not having a helping hand, not having role models of your own ethnicity and background,” he says. “If these children are given an opportunity, think of what they can do with their lives.”

UIC helped provide that opportunity for Reyes, but it’s evident that he made the most of it. “When you don’t have any gauge to measure where you’re going or what routes to take, you have to be determined and believe that your goal is achievable,” he reflects.

“There’s no feeling sorry for yourself or room for excuses. This is what you want to do and you’re going to do it. If the chips don’t fall the way you want, at least you gave your best.”