William Chriss

Dr. Bill Chriss, 2024-25 chair of the Appellate Section of the State Bar of Texas, is a professionally trained lawyer, historian, political scientist, religious scholar, and ethicist. Board certified in Civil Trial Law and Personal Injury Trial Law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization for over 30 years, he handles complex lawsuits and appeals, especially in insurance, injury, and property damage cases, having also recently served as chair of the Insurance Law Section of the State Bar. Dr. Chriss is also one of the few Texas lawyers and judges to have been elected to membership in the American Law Institute (ALI), publisher of the Restatements of the Law. He served for several years as chair of the Texas Pattern Jury Charge Committee-Business, Consumer, Insurance & Employment, as editor-in-chief of The Journal of Texas Insurance Law, and as Executive Director of the Texas Center for Legal Ethics. In 2016, he received the Ethics Center’s statewide Chief Justice Jack Pope Professionalism Award honoring an appellate lawyer or judge who epitomizes the highest level of professionalism and integrity. He also received the Texas Bar Foundation’s 2005 statewide Dan R. Price Award for service to the legal profession and excellence in teaching and scholarly writing. Over the years, he has provided ethics and compliance training to government agencies and major corporations, including the State Bar of Texas, the Attorney General of Texas, the U.S. Army, and American Airlines, and to various professional and industry groups including accountants, architects, attorneys, judges, bank officers, insurance adjusters, real estate professionals, and others.

At age 20, Dr. Chriss was nominated by The University of Texas for the Rhodes Scholarship, and at the age of 23 he received his law degree from Harvard Law School, where he was awarded a Mark de Wolf Howe Fellowship in English & American Legal History and Civil Liberties. He holds four other post-graduate degrees: master’s degrees in political science, Christian theology, and English literature, as well as a Ph.D. in history from The University of Texas, where he was awarded the coveted Dickson-Allen-Anderson endowed doctoral fellowship to study with the prominent historian H.W. Brands, who once called him “my best student.” Dr. Chriss’s master’s theses and doctoral dissertation in these disciplines included commentaries on: Eastern Christian church history and canon law, the writings of Joseph Campbell and Ernest Hemingway, the right to privacy, and American political and legal history. While maintaining his busy law practice, Dr. Chriss taught Judicial Politics, Political and Moral Philosophy, History, and Constitutional Law at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, and he serves as the local legal and political commentator for the Corpus Christi ABC affiliate. He has written several articles for scholarly journals and his first book, The Noble Lawyer, was published by Texas Bar Books in 2011, while his second book, Six Constitutions over Texas, is now available at bookstores and from internet vendors.