Profile in Professionalism
Justice Richard L. Gabriel
2024 Professionalism Award for the Tenth Circuit
By Rebecca A. Clay
Richard L. Gabriel has an unusual qualification for being a trial lawyer and now a justice for the Colorado Supreme Court: being a lifetime trumpet player.
Gabriel’s late father played the trumpet in a wedding band, and when Gabriel himself was asked in third grade if he wanted to join his school’s band, he followed in his father’s footsteps. In the decades since then, Gabriel has played alongside Dizzy Gillespie, Wynton Marsalis, and other well-known jazz musicians. He has played the national anthem at home plate for a Colorado Rockies game. And he now plays with the Colorado Wind Ensemble. Playing the trumpet for 53 years helped train him for what he calls the “performative aspects” of the law. “I am one of those crazy people who like public speaking,” he confesses.
Part of the first generation of his family to go to college, Gabriel did not want his own children to worry about money like he did as a child. He figured the best way to make money was to become a doctor or lawyer. After earning a cum laude undergraduate degree in American studies from Yale in 1984, Gabriel went on to earn his law degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Law in 1987.
Before becoming a judge, Gabriel was in private practice in New York and Denver, specializing in commercial, intellectual property, probate, and products liability litigation. One of his favorite cases from his private practice career was defending Michael Jackson when a woman claimed that she had written his song “Dangerous” and sued him for copyright infringement in the 1990s.
Arguing that Jackson did not need help writing songs, Gabriel asked him to tell the jury how he composed. “He talked about how he wrote ‘Billy Jean’ and how he was driving in his car, the base line came into his head, then the chords,” Gabriel remembers. “It was one of the coolest things I have ever seen in a courtroom.”
But while Gabriel enjoyed being a trial lawyer, he wanted more. Because of his roots—“I come from nothing”—he always felt obligated to give back to the community. He served on the board of the Rocky Mountain Children’s Law Center, for example.
Then it occurred to him that “the highest calling of a trial lawyer is to be a judge some day.” When the Colorado Court of Appeals expanded, he applied and was appointed. He served as a judge on the court from 2008 to 2015, when Governor John Hickenlooper appointed him to the Colorado Supreme Court.
“I have devoted myself throughout my career to making sure that people have a full and fair opportunity to be heard,” says Gabriel, who received a Judicial Excellence Award from the American Board of Trial Advocates’s Colorado chapter in 2023. “My goal is to make people feel heard and respected, whether I agree with them or not.”
Gabriel is also deeply committed to ensuring that people understand how state and federal courts work. He chairs a bilingual civics education program called Our Courts, which is one of only three civics educations programs in the country aimed primarily at adults. A joint project of the Colorado Bar Association and the Colorado Judicial Institute, Our Courts has developed 14 programs on topics such as state and federal courts, bankruptcy court, divorce court, immigration court, and the like.
The program has now expanded to reach high school students. “It took off beyond our wildest dreams,” Gabriel says. Under Gabriel’s leadership, Our Courts won the 2020 Sandra Day O’Connor Award for the Advancement of Civics Education and the 2020 Denver Bar Association Program of the Year Award.
“We are in fraught, polarizing times, and in many quarters, public institutions are under intense scrutiny and sometimes criticism,” Gabriel says. “It helps for us to be out there talking to people so they can ask questions and get answers directly as opposed to the echo chambers people tend to find themselves in nowadays.”
A member of the Minoru Yasui American Inn of Court since 2009, Gabriel served as its president from 2013 to 2014.
Despite Gabriel’s own accomplishments, he says his proudest moment was when his wife, Jill Wichlens, Esquire—who was a federal public defender for almost three decades—argued a case before the Supreme Court of the United States. “I joke that she taught me how to do appellate court,” he says. “We would be sitting at the kitchen table, and I would ask, ‘Would you moot me?’”