Judge Ravi K. Sandill is running for the Supreme Court of Texas, Place 4, to bring balance to the institution that is” increasingly out of touch with the needs of everyday Texans,” he says. “After nearly a quarter century of one-party rule, our state Supreme Court increasingly caters to an extreme, special interest agenda and is ignoring its duty to the nearly 28 million Texans it is elected to serve,” Sandill said on his site. “On issues from public school finance to equal protection under the law, the court has failed to do its job. It is time for a change.”
On his website, he says that after nearly a quarter century of one-party rule, “our state Supreme Court increasingly caters to an extreme, special interest agenda and is ignoring its duty to the nearly 28 million Texans it is elected to serve.
On issues from public school finance to equal protection under the law, the court has failed to do its job.” He says he is running “to restore an independent voice to our state’s highest judicial body and to focus on the rule of law, rather than a fringe ideological agenda.”
Sandill who describes himself as a Texan, husband, dad and cancer survivor, grew up on military bases throughout Texas, attended college in Austin, and graduated from law school in Houston. He has served as judge of the 127th Civil District Court in Harris County since 2009 and, according to his website, is the first district court judge in Texas of South Asian descent.
After graduating law school, Sandill worked as a briefing attorney for Murry Cohen, senior justice on Texas’s First District Court of Appeals. He then went into private practice in Houston, where he focused on commercial, appellate, and trade secret litigation for a number of years. Sandill first ran for judge in 2008 and since then has presided over more than 225 civil trials and has adjudicated over 15,000 matters.
As a young attorney and just two months before he was to marry his law school classmate, Sandill was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, a cancer of the blood cells. He got married while undergoing chemotherapy and radiation, but the cancer returned just six months later, requiring him to undergo a stem-cell transplant at age 27. Sandill has been cancer-free for more than 13 years.
He and his wife Kelly, a partner at the law firm of Andrews Kurth Kenyon LLP, and their son Asher live in central Houston. The Indian American is from a military family and learned the value of service at a young age, he said. His father, Retired Lt. Col. Brij Sandill, served in the U.S. Army and the U.S. Air Force for a combined 28 years. The judge spent most of his childhood at Fort Hood Army Base in Killeen, Texas, and Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, later moving with his family to Royal Air Force Station Lakenheath, England.
Sandill won the 127th district court seat in 2008, defeating a nearly three-decades long incumbent to claim the seat. Since taking over the seat, the Indian American judge has presided over more than 225 civil trials and has adjudicated over 15,000 matters. He was elected to a third term as judge in November 2016.
Sandill serves on the board of directors of the Garland R. Walker American Inn of Court, an organization dedicated to improving the skills, professionalism and ethics of lawyers, and is a frequent speaker on legal topics throughout Texas and the nation.
