Pike Hall Jr.

William Pike Hall (May 27, 1931 – November 25, 1999), known as Pike Hall Jr.,^[1][2] was an attorney, judge, and Democratic politician from his native Shreveport in northwestern Louisiana.

Background

Hall was the younger of two children of William Pike Hall Sr., an attorney, civic figure, and state senator from 1924 to 1932, and the former Hazel Tucker, originally from Haughton in Bossier Parish.^[3] His sister is Hazel Hall Schaffer (born September 1929) of Shreveport. Hall married the former Anne Oden (born October 1931), and the couple had a daughter, Brevard Hall Knight (1952-2014), an educator and businesswoman who died of lung cancer though she had never smoked, and a son, Pike Hall III.^[4]

Hall was a great-nephew of Judge George W. Jack of the United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, who served from 1917 to 1924, and a first cousin once removed of Shreveport attorneys Whitfield Jack and Wellborn Jack, the latter a member of the Louisiana House of Representatives for Caddo Parish from 1940 to 1964.^[5]

Hall was a member of the Methodist denomination.^[6]

Career

Hall was attending C. E. Byrd High School in Shreveport when his father suddenly died in December 1945 at the age of forty-nine. Thereafter, he was sent to Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, Louisiana State University, and then the Louisiana State University Law Center in Baton Rouge, from which he received a Juris Doctor degree in 1953. In 1988, he was made an honorary member of the Order of the Coif at LSU. Like his father, he was highly involved in all levels of the bar association and for several years was the vice chairman of the Louisiana Judicial College.^[7]

Hall practiced with the Shreveport firm Wilkinson, Woods, Carmody & Hall. He was for four years the assistant city attorney under Mayor James C. Gardner. On November 3, 1964, Hall was elected to the Caddo Parish School Board, along with the first three Republican members ever elected to the board.^[8] In 1970, Hall did not seek reelection to the school board but was instead elected to the Louisiana Court of Appeal for the Second Circuit, based in Shreveport. He remained on the appeal court from 1971 to 1990, the last five as the chief judge. From 1990 to 1994, he served as an associate justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court^[6] but stepped down after four years and was succeeded by Jeffrey P. Victory, a Shreveport lawyer elected as a Democrat but who later switched parties.

Hall died in Shreveport five years after he retired from the Supreme Court. LSU sponsors a "Pike Hall Jr. Law Professorship". The appeal court building in Shreveport is named in his honor. It is the first court building in Louisiana designed and built for use as an appeals court. At the dedication, then Chief Justice Pascal F. Calogero Jr., who like Hall was born in 1931, said:

It is my hope that upon seeing the name "Pike Hall Jr." etched onto the front of this building that lawyers who enter will reflect on the significant contributions made by Justice Hall to Louisiana law, the administration of justice, and our state judiciary. Perhaps upon seeing his name, the attorneys and jurists who pass through the doors may even attempt to emulate him. There is no finer role model for a judge or an attorney.^[7]

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