James D. Maxwell II
James Donald "Jimmy" Maxwell II is a United States district judge of the United States [District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi]. He previously served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of Mississippi.
Early life, education and career
Maxwell was born on May 4, 1975, in Metairie, Louisiana. He received a Bachelor of Business Administration from the University of Mississippi. He attended Mississippi College School of Law for his first year of law school, before completing his final two years and receiving a Juris Doctor from the University of Mississippi School of Law. He practiced civil law in Jackson in the firm of Daniel Coker Horton & Bell before returning to Oxford to serve as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Northern District of Mississippi in 2002.Mississippi Court of Appeals
Maxwell served as a judge on the Mississippi Court of Appeals. He was initially appointed to the appeals court by Governor Haley Barbour on February 2, 2009, then elected in 2010 and re-elected in 2014.Supreme Court of Mississippi
On December 23, 2015, Governor Phil Bryant announced his appointment of Maxwell to the Supreme Court.In 2023, Maxwell wrote the 8-0 majority opinion of Saunders, et al. v. Mississippi concerning the establishment of the Capital Complex Improvement District ; an inferior court created by HB 1020 which would allow the Chief Justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court to appoint four 'temporary special circuit judges' for a period of 42 months to assist with potential crime increases in the Jackson metro area. In his opinion Maxwell sided against the law stating that, while the Legislature had the authority to create separate inferior courts such as the CCID under Article I, Section II of the Mississippi Constitution, the appointment of judges by the Chief Justice violated state constitutional provisions that circuit-court judges be elected for a four year term. The appointment of judges to inferior courts were determined permissible only under 'exigent circumstances' such as 'emergenc or overcrowded dockets' as stated by the Mississippi Code Section 9-1-105. These judges were permitted to be only temporary, needing to have been appointed in collaboration with a majority of the State's Supreme Court Justices and to be 'tailored to address specific emergencies or docket crises', in contrast, the judges to be appointed by HB 1020 - despite being referred to as 'temporary special circuit judges' - were deemed to have "nothing expressly tethering them to a specific judicial need or exigency" and thus did not have the statutory support for their appointment.
In 2025, Maxwell wrote the 8-1 majority opinion of in re the petition of S.M.-B., holding that a 16-year old transgender boy could not legally change his name to better fit his gender identity. Despite both of the teenager's parents consenting to the name change, Maxwell stated that according to Mississippi law and past precedent such as the 1957 Mississippi State Supreme Court decision Marshall v. Marshall, any name change must be "clearly in the best interest of the child". While such a reasoning was not expressly stated by the Chancellor in denying the name change, the court determined that similar Mississippi restrictions on the activities of minors were based on the common law reasoning that minors lacked the proper maturity to partake in the associated activity, most relevantly the restrictions of any medications or surgical procedures to assist in gender transition. As such, given the invocation of such common law restrictions regarding a minors gender transition, the court concluded that the youth lacked the maturity for a decision with "serious or long-lasting ramifications" to be in their best interest, precluding them from such a name change.