New Chief Judge of the U.S. Fifth Circuit is Loyola Alumni

As many news sources noted last week, the new Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit is the first African-American to hold that position. Particularly notable to us here at the College of Law is the fact that Judge Carl E. Stewart is an alumni of ours, from 1974.

As the official press release [PDF] from the Court states, Judge Stewart served with the Army Judge Advocate General Corps for several years after graduating from Loyola, then worked in both the US Attorney’s and the Louisiana Attorney General’s offices, and was a city attorney and in private practice for several years. He also served as a state judge at both the district and appellate court levels before being appointed to the Fifth Circuit by President Clinton in 1994.

In 1997, he was the inaugural speaker in our Louis Westerfield Legal Society Lecture series and spoke “Contemporary Challenges to Judicial Independence”. His speech was published at 43 Loy. L. Rev. 293 (1997), and you can read it through Hein Online.