HUTCHESON, JOSEPH CHAPPELL, JR. (1879-1973). Joseph Chappell Hutcheson, Jr., United States district and circuit court judge, the son of Mildred (Carrington) and Joseph Chappell Hutcheson,qv was born in Houston, Texas, on October 19, 1879. He attended Bethel (Virginia) Military Academy, the University of Virginia, and the University of Texas, where he graduated first in the class of 1900, the year he was also admitted to the State Bar of Texas. He entered the practice of law with his father's firm of Hutcheson, Campbell, and Hutcheson in Houston, where he practiced for seventeen years. In 1913 he was named chief legal advisor for Houston and in 1917 was elected mayor of that city. In 1918 President Woodrow Wilson appointed him United States district judge for the Southern District of Texas, where he served until he was named federal appeals judge for the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals by President Herbert Hoover in 1931; from 1948 to 1959 he served the court as chief judge. He never had a major ruling overturned upon appeal. During prohibitionqv he served as an advisor to the Wickersham Commission, and in 1945 he was named United States chairman to the British-American commission on the settlement of Jews in Palestine. Joseph Hutcheson married Anne Elizabeth Weeden on December 21, 1905; they had two children. He was the author of Law as Liberator (1937) and Judgment Intuitive (1938). He died on January 18, 1973, in Houston.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Houston Chronicle, January 21, 1973. Houston Post, January 23, 1973. Vertical Files, Barker Texas History Center, University of Texas at Austin. Who's Who in America, 1968-69. Charles Zelden, "Regional Growth and the Federal District Courts," Houston Review 11 (1989).
