Carolyn Dineen King

Her dedication to the preservation and strengthening of the administration of justice has brought Judge Carolyn Dineen King the highest praise from her colleagues and from all who have had the privilege of knowing and working with her.

Beginning her law practice in 1962 as the second female associate at the prestigious Houston law firm Fulbright & Jaworski was a precursor for Judge King's numerous groundbreaking accomplishments, not only in the realms of diversity and private practice, but also in handling difficulty judicial crises in exploding dockets, financial limitations, and natural disasters.

Reflecting upon her appointment to the federal bench in 1979, as the second women to hold the position of Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, Judge King once commented that "only in American would a Southern Baptist male Democrat President appoint a Yankee Catholic female Republican transactions lawyer to the federal appeals court for the South."

Judge King became the Chief Judge of the Fifth Circuit, its first women Chief, in 1999.  Once of her first  initiatives as Chief was to address the burgeoning criminal case loads of the "border courts" in the Southern and Western districts of Texas.  In assessing the problems she visited with judges, marshals, court officers, U.S. Attorneys, public defenders, and members of the bar.  Indicative of her vision and solicitude for the administration of justice, Judge King recognized that the problem also affected the courts of the Ninth and Tenth Circuits. Judge King organized the three Circuits to address the problem systematically in three steps. First, she organized a conference of the border court judges from California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas to meet, share experiences, and develop a best practices approach to confront the crush of case on their dockets.  Second, she initiated a visiting judge program using judges from other districts in the circuit with much lower case loads to alleviate the workload. To address the problem on a permanent basis she organized an appeal to Congress form the entire federal judiciary for new judgeships on the border. In all, sixteen judges were added to the border jurisdictions across Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and Southern California.