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Join this session to learn about new 2025 Behavioral Health legislation involving the New Mexico judiciary, the work of the New Mexico Supreme Court’s Commission on Mental Health and Competency, and various practical legal issues involving behavioral health.
Hon. Brianna Zamora, as a dedicated public servant, has served at all levels of the judiciary. She began her judicial career when she was appointed to the Metropolitan Court bench in 2008. Four years later, she was elected to the Bernalillo County District Court. As a trial judge, she spent a decade presiding almost exclusively over adult criminal cases. She also presided over various treatment courts, including Homeless Court, the Native American Healing to Wellness Court and the Courts to School program. In 2018, she was elected to the Court of Appeals where she authored opinions in all areas of the law. Justice Zamora was then appointed to the New Mexico Supreme Court after being nominated by a bi-partisan Judicial Nominating Commission. As a Justice, she is the liaison to several commissions, including the Children’s Court Improvement Commission, the Children’s Court Judges Association, the Tribal-State Judicial Consortium and the Commission on Mental Health and Competency. She serves on the Executive Board for the American Bar Association’s Appellate Judges Conference. In 2023, she was selected as a Council of State Governments’ Henry Toll Fellow. Prior to taking the bench, Justice Zamora worked as a litigator for the State of New Mexico in several capacities. Then, she was recruited to join the law firm of Butt, Thornton & Baehr as an attorney litigating a broad range of civil cases, including workers compensation, insurance coverage and personal injury. Prior to being appointed to the bench, she founded the Zamora Law Firm where she managed the law firm and litigated criminal and civil cases. She also represented abused and neglected children as their guardian ad litem. Justice Zamora was born, raised, and educated in New Mexico and she is now raising her children in Albuquerque. She is a graduate of New Mexico State University where she received degrees in Government and Psychology. She graduated in 2000 from the University of New Mexico School of Law. She was the recipient of the Frederick M. Hart Award in Commercial Law and recognized for Honors in Clinical Law.
A system of unfree labor called debt peonage proliferated in nineteenth century New Mexico, and during the 1850s it increasingly came under the scrutiny of anti-slavery politicians and activists in the United States. One important element of American abolitionism as it related to the American Southwest involved several court cases in New Mexico Territory that undermined the legality of debt peonage and placed it within the framework of American slavery more broadly. These court cases from antebellum New Mexico created the legal precedent that led to a federal ban on debt peonage after the Civil War. The New Mexico examples also provided case law that U.S. Supreme Court justices cited in the early 1900s as a basis for striking down debt peonage in the Jim Crow South. In this way, the case law involving debt peonage in nineteenth century New Mexico had sweeping national implications with respect to the abolition of unfree labor.
Dr. William S. (“Billy”) Kiser is a native of Las Cruces and completed his B.A. in history at New Mexico State University. He went on to attend Arizona State University for his M.A. and Ph.D. He is currently Professor of History and Department Chair at Texas A&M University-San Antonio, where he teaches classes on the American West, Native American History, Civil War and Reconstruction, and U.S. Foreign Policy. He is the author of six books, including Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle over Peonage and Captivity in the American Southwest (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) and, most recently, The Business of Killing Indians: Scalp Warfare and the Violent Conquest of North America, published in 2025 by Yale University Press.