Lawton R. Nuss
Chief Justice Lawton R. Nuss earned his undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Kansas. In between obtaining these degrees, he served as a Marine Corps combat engineering officer in the Western Pacific and graduated from the U.S. Naval Justice School.
After law school, Nuss worked for 20 years as a trial attorney in Kansas’s state and federal courts. There he represented a wide range of clients in many types of court cases—both civil and criminal. During that time, his activities included serving as president of the Kansas Association of Defense Counsel and as a mediator appointed by the chief judge of the U.S. District Court
In 2002 Nuss was appointed as a justice of the Kansas Supreme Court by Governor Bill Graves, becoming the first practicing lawyer in nearly 25 years to advance directly to the Court. In January 2010 he began serving as the chief justice. In that role, he led the Court for the next ten years as it exercised general administrative authority over all Kansas state courts. This role made him responsible for the performance and welfare of the nearly 300 judges and 1,500 employees who handled approximately 400,000 court cases each year.
In 2016 Nuss’s leadership of the judicial branch of Kansas government was nationally featured in The New Yorker Magazine article titled “The Political War Against the Kansas Supreme Court.” Later that year his leadership was again nationally featured—in a frontpage article of The New York Times which concluded Nuss “has emerged as a strong defender of judicial independence.” At the invitation of their national Conference in 2019, Nuss presented a program to his fellow chief justices titled “The Chief Justice’s Leadership and Policy Role.” While chief justice, he also served, at the American Bar Association’s request, as a panelist in its annual meeting programs concerning attacks on judicial independence, especially 2019’s “Undermining the Courts: The Consequences for American Democracy.”
Nuss was thanked by one prominent newspaper’s editorial board for having “the kind of clear eye and steady hand that Kansas needs.” And although appointed by a Republican governor in 2002, in 2019 he was publicly commended by Kansas Democratic Governor Laura Kelly because he “has taken challenges head on and never shied from struggle or duty. He’s been in the arena, doing difficult work on behalf of Kansans. And he has done it well.” The Kansas Bar Association later presented him with an award reserved for those “who have performed outstanding and conspicuous service at the state, national or international level in administration of justice.”
Nuss left the Supreme Court in December 2019 with three years remaining in his term so he could devote more time to help his fellow veterans, especially those who are defendants in the criminal justice system. Since then, he has focused nationally on creating more veterans treatment courts—which seek to rehabilitate, instead of incarcerate, many veterans. That focus has led to his present service as board chairman of the Veterans Court Coalition, Inc., as a board member of All Rise (a national leader in the treatment court movement), and as chairman of its veterans treatment court committee.