Photo by Leah Ingram Eagle.
Judge KC Hairston with Mountain Brook Mayor Stewart Welch III.
Mountain Brook’s city judge KC Hairston was recently elected to serve as president of the Alabama Municipal Judges Association where he will serve a two-year term.
Hairston is in his fifth year in the executive track for the Alabama Municipal Judges Association. For the past two years, he has served the president-elect, and prior to that, he served as vice-president.
It was 2003 when Hairston was first appointed a judge by former Birmingham Mayor Bernard Kincaid, who gave him his start in the Birmingham Municipal Court.
After a seven-year tenure, Hairston moved to the Mountain Brook Municipal Court upon the retirement of Judge Pete Johnson in 2016.
“That's how I got involved in the municipal courts,” Hairston said. “I started in Birmingham and cut my teeth over there and then came over to Mountain Brook.”
As the president of AMJA, Hairston will serve on multiple state committees on behalf of the state’s municipal courts including the Alabama Justice Information Commission, the Domestic Violence Advisory Committee, and the Judicial Study Commission. He will also preside over two statewide conferences each year. Judges from across the state attend the conferences, which focus on key topics, benchmarking key issues and how to address emerging issues in courts.
“My hope is to not only use this role as a way to shape state policy and nationwide policy, but also to make our court in Mountain Brook the best and most efficient it can be,” he said.
He said his role with the city is to share as much information as he can. He recently rolled off as president of All In Mountain Brook, which focuses on youth issues in the community.
“My goal was to try to take the information and what I'm seeing in municipal courts and feed it to the community through that platform to try to avoid making the same mistakes or repeating certain things happening that are percolating up to our court,” Hairston said.
When someone enters the municipal court, it’s generally their first experience with the judicial system. Hairston believes that it’s important about the first impression they receive because it will shape their experience.
“Sometimes folks just want to be heard,” he said. “If they feel like they never got to tell their side of the story, they will feel cheated by the process. They may not agree with our decision, but they at least got the opportunity to state their case.”
Hairston said that many people who come through his courtroom say they did not expect it to be the way it is. His goal is to move people to the next best spot they can achieve.
“Regardless of the type of case, our interest is protecting the community, we are also interested in trying to help people, while helping people in the situations they are currently in,” Hairston said.
Hairston was born in Dothan and grew up in Birmingham, graduating from Briarwood Christian School. He received an engineering degree at Auburn before deciding to pursue his legal studies at Cumberland School of Law at Samford University.
“I do have a sense of what's going on in the community, which allows me to have a well-rounded platform to make decisions from,” Hairston said. “It's rewarding because no matter what people are facing, I try to get them help, because the courts have tremendous resources.”
