Biographical Directory of Federal Judges

George Washington named 38 of them, 15 before the first of January 1790.

Barack Obama has named 201, 29 of them so far this year.

William Jefferson Clinton named the most — 372.

The youngest was 25 when he began his career, the oldest 104 when he ended his.¹

The first woman didn’t join their ranks until 1934. The first African American, not until 1950.²

They are our United States federal judges — judges of the trial courts, called United States District Courts³; judges of the intermediate appeals courts, called the United States Circuit Courts of Appeal⁴; justices of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Over the years since the adoption of the Judiciary Act of 1789,⁵ there have been 3,457 men and women named to the federal bench — and just as there is a place for one-stop-biographical-shopping for members of Congress,⁶ there is a website where you can read about any member of your family who has ever been named by any President to serve as a federal judge.⁷

Or perhaps about the federal judge a member of your family appeared in front of as a plaintiff, as a defendant or (gasp) even as a lawyer.

It’s called the Biographical Directory of Federal Judges, 1789-present, and it’s described by the Federal Judicial Center this way:

The Biographical Directory of Federal Judges contains the service record of all judges presidentially appointed during good behavior who have served since 1789 on the U.S. District Courts, the U.S. Circuit Courts, the U.S. Courts of Appeals, the Supreme Court of the United States, and the following courts of special jurisdiction: the U.S. Court of International Trade; the U.S. Customs Court; the U.S. Court of Customs and Patent Appeals; the Court of Claims; and the Commerce Court.⁸

There, for example, you can read the biographical details of John Jay, pictured above, the first Chief Justice of the United States, born 12 December 1745 and died 17 May 1829. You can find out that he had both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from King’s College, now known as Columbia University, and that he resigned as Chief Justice after serving for six years.⁹

Or you can read the biographical details of that first woman appointed as a federal judge: Florence Ellinwood Allen, born 23 March 1884 and died 12 September 1966, appointed to the bench by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1934. She had both a B.A. and an M.A. from what was then Western Reserve University (and now Case Western) and a law degree from New York University, and had served as a prosecutor and a judge in Ohio — including on the Supreme Court of Ohio — before being named to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.¹⁰

Or you can read the biographical details of that first African American judge: William Henry Hastie, born 17 November 1904, died 14 April 1976, a graduate of Amherst with two law degrees from Harvard, who’d served as a government lawyer, Dean of the Howard University Law School and Governor of the Virgin Islands before he was appointed by Harry Truman to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in 1949.¹¹

You can even read about one Judge named Law¹² and one named Laws¹³ but not even one — darn it! — named Outlaw.

Good information, coupled with a great overall history of the federal courts, federal courthouses and more. A recommended site for anyone looking for solid information about those who have served as judges during the last 224 years.¹⁴

SOURCES

Image: Gilbert Stuart portrait of John Jay, 1794
National Gallery of Art via Wikimedia Commons