For Patricia Breckenridge, law started out as a family affair. Growing up in the tiny town of Nevada, Missouri, she absorbed her lawyer father’s values and developed what she calls “a passion for law and rules and the importance of the justice system to society.”
Breckenridge worked in her dad’s office while earning an undergraduate degree in agricultural economics from the University of Missouri-Columbia, where she graduated with honors in 1975. She went on to earn a law degree from the university in 1977. After graduation, she returned to Nevada to work with her father and husband in the firm Russell, Brown, Bickel, and Breckenridge.
But Breckenridge did not practice law for long. She began her judicial career even as she was practicing law, serving as Nevada’s assistant municipal judge from 1979 to 1982. Practicing law in a town of 9,000 people—where “you did anything and everything”—was a great background for her role as a judge.
“I had a struck-by-lightning opportunity to go onto the bench at age 28 as an associate circuit judge,” she says. She became the first woman in Vernon County’s history to serve in the position.
The opportunity came about after Missouri adopted a constitutional provision requiring judges to retire at 70. When a judge was discovered to be over 70 and abruptly removed, most of the likely replacements had well-established practices they were loath to risk in a situation where the governor was of a different party than most voters.
“I had only been practicing for four years, so I did not have a huge client base I was worried about losing,” says Breckenridge, who ran unopposed three times after her initial appointment. In 1990, she was appointed to the Missouri Court of Appeals for the Western District, becoming only the second woman to serve in the position.
In 2007, she was appointed to the Supreme Court of Missouri. She served as chief justice from 2015 to 2017, a contentious period for Missouri’s justice system.
“I happened to come into the position of chief justice just after Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, resulting in civil unrest and calls for the Supreme Court to do away with the lowest level of courts, the municipal courts,” she says.
An investigation revealed that the system was punishing people simply because they could not afford to comply with the judgments imposed on them and that there was blatant bias against and mistreatment of people of color charged with low-level offenses.
“What I am proudest of is that we took ownership of that and committed to revamping the system and eliminating the abuses that were discovered,” she says.
During her tenure as chief justice, the court launched a Commission on Racial and Ethnic Fairness, Task Force on Criminal Justice, Commission on Civil Justice Reform, Partnership for Child Safety and Well-Being, and Committee on Practice and Procedures in Municipal Division Cases.
The Supreme Court of Missouri also adopted a full roster of reforms dealing with fines, fees and costs, and pretrial incarceration. Thanks to that and the court’s other work on these topics, Breckenridge was invited to join the National Center for State Courts’ National Task Force on Fines, Fees, and Bail Practices, which gave her a platform for improving the administration of justice nationwide.
In addition to her judicial career, Breckenridge has been active in the nonprofit world. While she was a trial judge, for example, she co-founded the Council for Families in Crisis. Still going strong 35 years later, the council offers a hotline, a support group for abuse victims, anger management sessions for abusers, and a domestic violence shelter in Breckenridge’s Nevada hometown.
Breckenridge has also supported Operation Breakthrough, a nonprofit childcare provider and after-school program that serves low-income children in Kansas City, Missouri. When Breckenridge first toured the facility, she was assigned as a “study buddy” to a seven-year-old girl and is still in touch with her—and her three sisters—now that she is in her early 30s. “They became like a family to me,” Breckenridge says.
Breckenridge retired in 2023 but is still active in the legal world. She is certified as a senior judge and serves on a Missouri Bar Association committee that assesses whether judges are qualified to be retained. She serves on another bar committee that is developing an activity book that teaches elementary school students about the court system. And she is traveling the world with her former law firm colleague—her husband of 49 years