By Joana Karoshi | Staff Writer
The Honorable Matthew G. Wright does not draw a hard line between his work as a Baylor professor and his work as a judge and attorney. Instead, he brings students into both.
Wright, a lecturer in the department of management, a presiding judge over multiple Texas courts and a rural Texas attorney, has brought students into courtrooms, introduced them to judges and exposed them to legal work far beyond Waco.
Now, through a three-year international project in Mongolia, he is connecting Baylor students and researchers with an effort to study and strengthen judicial virtue.
The project, funded by a $1.2 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, will engage about 200 Mongolian judges and 300 attorneys through workshops, mentorship, peer dialogue and research focused on virtues such as integrity, impartiality, humility, courage and practical wisdom, according to Baylor’s webpage. More than “three dozen” Baylor students studying international negotiations and business will also participate.
For Wright, the project extends the work he has already been doing outside Baylor.
“I want to go where I’m needed and where I can actually make a difference,” Wright said.
That mindset has shaped much of Wright’s career. He said he originally studied foreign service at Baylor because he was interested in international relations and politics. After graduation, he worked in nonprofits, including the Red Cross. He did not decide to become a lawyer until he served on a jury years later.
Wright said he watched the lawyers involved in the case and decided he could do better. He registered for the LSAT shortly after leaving jury service and eventually entered the legal profession.
His work later expanded into rural Texas, where he said he saw a shortage of affordable legal services and lawyers willing to work outside major population centers.
“There is a crisis in Texas regarding rural access and access to lawyers that are affordable,” Wright said.
That work now intersects with his teaching. Wright said he takes students to court so they can see how the legal system operates and decide whether they want to pursue careers in law. His students have also had opportunities to participate in his international work.
Boise, Idaho, senior Joe Simeri took Wright’s Negotiations and Conflict Resolution course last fall and experienced that firsthand.
“He’s a judge; he’s also a lawyer in rural Texas,” Simeri said. “And so I think he approaches the classroom with a background and level of knowledge that few people have.”
Simeri accompanied Wright to Cameron, Texas, where he observed Wright’s legal work. He later traveled with Wright and another Baylor student to Austin to accompany a Mongolian Supreme Court delegation.
The students spent the day meeting Texas justices, touring the Capitol and learning about Mongolian legal customs.
“For him to allow Baylor students to sort of connect with that and get to see that is really neat,” Simeri said.
For Simeri, that experience extended what made Wright’s classroom different in the first place.
“I don’t think you’ll ever take another class like that at Baylor as far as the negotiations,” Simeri said.
In Wright’s course, students participate in simulated negotiations rather than simply learning negotiation theory through lectures. Simeri described a final exercise that could last several hours, in which students were assigned roles and negotiated as if they were actual parties to a dispute.
Simeri said that Wright always tries to encourage students to participate in class and make sure everyone is engaged.
“Every class he would bring snacks at the front, like gummies and candies, Oreos and stuff like that,” Simeri said. “Our class was always at like 5 p.m. For an afternoon section, it was kind of a nice thing to do.”
Wright said that combination of professional experience and academic work is intentional.
“What’s amazing is you put Baylor into that mix, and you have an institution that can really bring some really smart, dedicated people that understand how to do all this, and you can put them together and make things work,” Wright said.
The Mongolia initiative takes that philosophy beyond the classroom. Baylor and the Spurlock Judicial Fund are partnering with the Mongolian Judicial Association and the Lawyer Support Center in Ulaanbaatar on the project. Researchers will study how participation affects ethical reasoning, professional identity and expressions of virtue in judicial and legal decision-making.
Wright said the project will also create opportunities for students to participate in international negotiations and research.
“We’re uniting people who have passion,” Wright said. “We’re uniting people that have needs, and then we’re creating academic opportunities for students to actually get involved in that and learn how to be an international negotiator while you’re actually negotiating overseas.”
For Wright, the project brings together several parts of a career that might otherwise seem unrelated: teaching, judging, practicing law, nonprofit work and international development.
“It’s a really kind of exciting marriage of things,” he said.
