John Code Mowbray

John Code Mowbray was a Nevada attorney and jurist whose legal career spanned more than four decades. Born September 20, 1918, in Bradford, Illinois, he earned a degree in education from Western Illinois University in 1940 and taught high school before serving as a pilot in the United States Army Air Corps during World War II, rising to the rank of major. He returned to earn his law degree from Notre Dame Law School in 1949, where he served as student body president, and was admitted to the Nevada bar that same year.

Mowbray began his legal career in Clark County as a deputy district attorney before entering private practice in 1953. He served as a Referee in Bankruptcy from 1955 to 1959, and in 1959 took the bench as a judge of Nevada's Eighth Judicial District Court, where he served for twelve years. In 1967, Governor Paul Laxalt appointed him to a newly created seat on the Supreme Court of Nevada.

Justice Mowbray sat on the state's high court for twenty-five years, from 1967 until his retirement in January 1993, winning reelection four times and serving several terms as Chief Justice. During his tenure he worked to reduce the court's case backlog and championed legislation to protect abused children and to provide public defenders for indigent defendants. He died March 5, 1997, in Las Vegas, Nevada, at the age of 78.