Early Career
Gonzales was an attorney in private practice from 1982 until 1994 with the Houston law firm Vinson and Elkins, where he became a partner – the first Hispanic partner (along with one other new partner that year) in the firm’s history – and where he worked primarily with business clients. In 1994, he was named general counsel to then-Texas Governor George W. Bush, rising to become Secretary of State of Texas in 1997 and finally to be named to the Texas Supreme Court in 1999, both appointments made by Governor Bush. Gonzales received the endorsement of every statewide official and every major Texas newspaper in his election bid to remain on the court in the Republican Primary in 2000, a race he won with over 57% of the vote. The citizens of Texas elected Gonzales to a full six-year term on the Supreme Court in the November 2000 general election with 81% of the vote.
Read more about this topic: Alberto Gonzales
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or career:
“Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans—which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“John Brown’s career for the last six weeks of his life was meteor-like, flashing through the darkness in which we live. I know of nothing so miraculous in our history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)