JDJ Attorney Nicole A. Westbrook returned to San Antonio on June 26 to celebrate a formative chapter of her career, joining nearly three dozen former law clerks and hundreds of guests for the unveiling of Chief U.S. District Judge Alia Moses’s official portrait at the federal courthouse, home to the Western District of Texas.
Westbrook holds a distinct place in that history: she was Judge Moses’s very first law clerk, hired in Del Rio in the fall of 2002, shortly after the judge’s appointment to the federal bench. Westbrook, then a young attorney from a small town in Wyoming, had planned to clerk for a year, maybe two. She stayed nearly four — an experience she says shaped the lawyer, and the person, she became.
In remarks to the assembled crowd, Westbrook described a mentor who was “intimidating and kind” in the same breath, who pushed her clerks through mock arguments and long nights of trial prep, and who somehow still made time for spin class, marathon training, and the annual overnight Relay for Life walk. From Judge Moses, she said, she learned how to carry herself in a courtroom and outside of one — grace for those who showed genuine remorse, strength for those who did not, and the conviction that preparation and hard work “cure a multitude of problems in any case.”
Westbrook was quick to note that her experience was not unique. In the years since she left the judge’s chambers, somewhere between thirty and forty-five young lawyers have followed the same path and absorbed the same lessons: be truthful, be honorable, work hard, lift up the ones coming behind you, and do not fear the ones ahead of you.
Judge Moses became the first woman to serve on the district bench in the Western District of Texas in 2002 and, in 2022, its first female chief judge. She has presided over more than 250 jury trials and shaped the careers of the many clerks, colleagues, and litigants who have passed through her courtroom — Westbrook among them.
The portrait, painted by artist Tim Byram, will now hang permanently in the San Antonio courthouse, a lasting tribute to a jurist Westbrook and her fellow clerks credit with teaching them not just the law, but how to practice it with integrity.
Read the full story from Texas Woman’s University: https://twu.edu/news/2026/portrait-adds-to-legacy-of-us-judge-twu-alum/