Associate Justice, Texas Supreme Court, 1949-1968
Special Judge, Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, 1969
Meade Felix Griffin was born March 17, 1894 in Cottonwood, Callahan County, Texas. He attended The University of Texas, earning a B.A. degree in 1915 and an LL.B. in 1917. In August 1917 he completed officer training camp and served as a major in the infantry during the First World War. He was admitted to the bar in 1917 and began practicing law in Tulia, in the Texas panhandle between Lubbock and Amarillo. He was married the same year, and he and his wife had two children.
Griffin's public service career began in 1919, when he was elected mayor of Tulia. In 1920 he moved to nearby Plainview, where he continued to practice law. He served as Swisher County attorney (1919-20), as county judge of Hale County (1923-26), and as district attorney of the Sixty-fourth Judicial District (1927-34). He served two years as director of the Texas Bar Association and two years as director of the group's successor, the State Bar of Texas, and served on various committees of both groups. Griffin, who rose to the rank of colonel during the Second World War, served as chief of the prosecution subsection of the U.S. Army's War Crimes Branch in Germany at the close of the war.
Griffin was appointed an associate justice by Gov. Beauford H. Jester following the resignation of A. J. Folley from the court in 1949. He served on the court until retiring in 1968. In 1969 he was appointed a special judge to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, thus becoming one of few judges to serve on both of the state's highest courts. From 1969 to 1971 he was an assistant attorney general.
Divorced from his first wife in 1950, Griffin married again later that year. He died in Austin June 3, 1974, and was buried in the Texas State Cemetery.
Griffin, Meade Felix,
Handbook of Texas Online (last updated June 6, 2001).
http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/GG/fgr62.html
12 Texas Bar Journal 151.
