Authority figures don’t always give the best career advice, this appellate justice tells young people
#MyPathToLaw celebrates the diversity of the legal profession through stories detailing attorneys’ unique and inspiring trajectories.
Even when his goals seemed impossible, Jesse G. Reyes, an Illinois Appellate Court justice, says he has kept following them.
“I have always believed that if a door is closed to me, I am just going to find a way around it or over it or through it,” says Reyes, 72.
Growing up in a “blue-collar family and a blue-collar neighborhood” on Chicago’s South Side, Reyes is the eldest of four children, and he says the family lived paycheck to paycheck.
His father was a glass glazier, his mother was a homemaker, and neither went to high school or college. According to Reyes, they also weren’t thinking their son would end up as a lawyer. But he knew from childhood that was what he wanted. “I had a fascination for history, particularly self-made men like Abraham Lincoln,” Reyes says. “These people were often also lawyers and public servants who wanted to help out, and that spoke to me.”
After graduating from high school in 1971, Reyes was accepted to the University of Illinois Chicago. He deferred going for a few years and worked a variety of jobs, including as a taxi driver, to help his family and save money for college.
Reyes married his high school sweetheart in 1974, and they recently celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. They have one daughter, who is a teacher in the Chicago area.
Money was tight in college, and he kept a series of jobs, including one as an assembly-line worker, to afford school. In 1979, he graduated with a degree in history and a minor in political science. Then he enrolled at John Marshall Law School, now the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law, where he was founder and president of the Hispanic Law Students Association.
During law school, Reyes kept working to support his education, sometimes attending school part time. He found employment in a local law firm library and as a research assistant for a law school professor.
After graduation in 1982, Reyes initially worked in private practice for a personal injury firm, but went to work for the city of Chicago, where he was employed in the torts division of the Corporation Counsel’s office until 1996. He then spent almost two years working for the Chicago Board of Education, handling policy and reform issues.
“But then there came a point in my career where I was thinking, ‘What am I going to do for the rest of my life?’” Reyes says. “I thought about maybe opening up my own firm, but it’s always been public service that spoke to me. I saw what judges did on a daily basis during my time in courtrooms, and I thought that being a judge would be another good way to give back to the community at large.”
Reyes says some friends were concerned that he wouldn’t win because he had a “Latino” sounding name. But he did win, in 1997.
In 2012, Reyes was elected to serve on the First District of the Illinois Appellate Court.
“Some of my friends said I would be bored as an appellate judge because I love being where the action is, and appellate work is considered a little monastic,” Reyes says. “But there have been some fascinating issues in which I have had the opportunity to research and dwell.”
Reyes is the first elected Latino justice on the appellate court, and he’s also a founding member and co-chair of the First District’s Diversity & Inclusion Committee. Additionally, he’s a founding member and past president of the Illinois Judges Foundation, and he’s a member of the American Bar Association’s Judicial Division.
Reyes is also a founding member and president of the Diversity Scholarship Foundation, an organization focused on promoting diversity in the legal profession. It provides scholarships to underprivileged and underrepresented students in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa and Wisconsin who want to be lawyers. Sometimes Reyes goes back to his old high school to speak to the teens there and, hopefully, inspire them.
“I tell them that there will be people in your life who are in authority and whom you respect that will tell you, ‘No, that’s not what you should want to do with your life,’” he says. “I tell them they should just keep doing what they want to do—unless it’s something criminal, of course.”
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