Public defender challenging incumbent in Clark County Dept. 21

Clark County District Judge Tara Clark Newberry, who is wrapping up her first term on the bench, faces a challenge in November from longtime Deputy Public Defender Alex Hubert.

Hubert, who says his job as a public defender “is 85% social worker, 15% lawyer,” says he chose to run against someone with whom he “would have the most contrast.”

Clark Newberry served as a police officer for eight years – a position she says gave her a “qualified, informed and exceptionally well-rounded” view of the legal system. “I spent most of my law enforcement career engaging the community and trying to improve community relations and making the world a better place.”

She also served as a civil attorney before her election to the bench in 2020, and represented plaintiffs and defendants before the Nevada Supreme Court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

She credits her work in disability services at the University of Cincinnati with giving her an appreciation of “how differing life experiences impact interactions with the legal system.” 

Clark Newberry attended the California Western School of Law and was admitted to the Nevada Bar in 2007. 

In 2022, she was named the presiding judge over civil cases, and the task of clearing the backlog of cases accumulating since the pandemic fell to her. 

She says she was “the catalyst” in forming the medical malpractice court, “which helped us dig out of COVID much faster.” Malpractice cases, which rely on a handful of specialty attorneys, present a “logistics” issue, she says, and are known to cause “a bottleneck.”  

Her next charge is to “figure out what do we do with this monstrous caseload increase of the past three years” that she attributes to artificial intelligence. 

Clark County’s civil caseload increased from 21,000 in 2023 to more than 25,000 in 2025, and is projected to top that this year, she says. 

Business technology, such as AI, “when used ethically, increases productivity,” she observes, and is an increasingly popular means of composing legal filings, especially for pro se litigants. “It enhances our access to justice because there are folks that cannot afford attorneys. We do have to figure out how to deal with it in an ethical way,”

Courts across the U.S. are being buried in briefs authored by Chat GPT and other platforms. Some include erroneous interpretations, botched facts, and fake legal citations.  

Clark Newberry compares the phenomenon to the advent of online resources in the 1990s. “If you don’t use the tool correctly, you’re going to make mistakes.”

Clark Newberry had a 68% retention rating from attorneys participating in the Las Vegas Review Journal’s Judging the Judges 2025 evaluation. 

“There’s always going to be folks that you make unhappy, but no one’s perfect, and everyone can improve. And so I see it as an opportunity to improve and find ways to educate yourself, learn, and do better.” 

Clark Newberry is endorsed by SEIU Nevada; Laborers 872; Southern Nevada Building Trades Union; Ironworkers Local 433; and the Clark County Marshals. 

She has raised just under $390,000, which is ten times what she raised in her first campaign. The 2020 campaign season, in which she came in second to Jacob Reynolds in the primary and went on to win the general, was largely sidelined by the pandemic, she notes. 

“I had no idea what kind of fundraising apparatus I’d be going up against,” says her opponent Hubert, adding he was “very naive in that regard.” He has raised just under $13,000 and has just under $7,000 on hand.

Hubert has been a Clark County public defender for almost two decades. “The reality is that we’re 85% social worker and 15% lawyer.” 

The challenge of a public defender, he says, is cutting through the mental health issues and/or addictions that are landing clients in trouble, and then finding help. 

Diversion programs for defendants in Clark County, he notes, “are better than they used to be. The frustration is these programs exist, but they always have funding problems.”

He says he chose to run against Clark Newberry because he finds her approach to justice to be “heavy-handed” with little room for nuance.  

Hubert says he’s not concerned about appearing to be a “public defender masquerading as a judge. As a public defender, my job is to be a zealous advocate. As a judge, my job would be to strive for neutrality.”

Hubert’s endorsements include Veterans in Politics International; Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada (PLAN); Hispanics in Politics; AFL-CIO; Culinary Local 226; Teamsters Local 631; and, IATSE Local 720. 

Hubert grew up in Los Angeles, where his father served as medical director of the day treatment program at the West Los Angeles Veterans Administration Medical Center. He received his law degree from Arizona State University and passed the bar exam in that state before moving to Las Vegas, where he volunteered at a civil law firm while waiting to take the Nevada bar exam.  His experience, however, is largely in criminal law. 

“Everyone has a learning curve,” he observes. “It’s part of the challenge.”