Judge Maurice Hilliard will share his program "The List" with us this week. Before he retired, Maurice Hilliard was a Roswell municipal court judge for 32 years with a reputation for being hard on DUI offenders and empathic to youthful offenders. He continues to practice law and maintains an office in the queen tower at Concourse Office Park. On Judge Hilliard's LinkedIn page he posted the following saying: "I am not impressed by your position, title and money. I am impressed by how you treat others." This is a great testament to the Judge's character and fairness to those in his courtroom. Maurice's son George says: “Dad is an old-school guy. My dad is like a founding father in Roswell. A living legend. There are hardly any guys like him left.” Born in Griffin in 1934, Maurice Hilliard grew up in his maternal grandparents’ home with his mother and two younger brothers from the time he was born until the first grade. His father — Maurice H. Hilliard Sr. — served during his son’s earliest years as an infantryman in World War II and fought in the Battle of the Bulge. When he returned home, he took a job selling insurance for Metropolitan Life in Atlanta. And so the Hilliards moved north from Griffin to Atlanta, where Maurice proved a gifted student from his first days in school. He graduated from Bass High School in 1952, then Mercer University and Atlanta Law School. It was no accident that Maurice chose law. In the years that followed his return from WWII, his father had returned to school and become a lawyer. Maurice revered his father and followed his example dutifully in life. It was at his father’s recommendation that Maurice sat for the bar after just one year of law school and passed on the first try. Atlanta Law School sent the first year student a diploma, and he never went back. And reverence for his father is why, after Maurice was named the first municipal court judge in Roswell, he developed a reputation for being hard on DUI offenses. His father had survived Nazi Germany only to come home from war and be killed by a drunk driver when his son was in his 20s. The judge knows loss. In the years after losing his father, Maurice started a family of his own. His firstborn son, Maurice H. Hilliard III, died from a brain aneurism at 12 years old. If losing his father to a drunk driver affected his stern demeanor in court, perhaps losing his son drove Maurice’s empathy toward the youth who came before his bench. The losses of a father and son had at once steeled and softened Maurice. He developed a sort of old-school, kind-but-cranky demeanor during his years on the bench. At home, his daughter Joanie describes him as “a big ol’ teddy bear.” In the community, friends describe him as “acerbic and irascible.” During the course of Maurice’s 32-year tenure, Roswell transitioned from a rural community to a major metropolitan suburb as the population grew from less than 23,000 residents in 1980 to almost 100,000 today. In his courtroom, the joyriding shenanigans of high school football players who might unleash the occasional fire hydrant on a peer had given way to the methamphetamine dealers, the sex traffickers, and all other manner of big-city crime. “For more than 30 years, if you went before my dad,” says son George Hilliard, “you knew you were going to get a fair shake.”