Minn.: Late judge Diana Murphy honored with renaming of Minneapolis federal courthouse Wednesday, October 16, 2019
MPR News
Dozens of attorneys and judges are expected to gather in downtown Minneapolis to honor a trailblazer in the Twin Cities legal community. Judge Diana Murphy — who died last year at age 84 — was the first woman appointed to the federal bench in Minnesota and the first to sit on the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals.
At a ceremony Wednesday, the federal courthouse in downtown Minneapolis will be named after her, just the sixth U.S. courthouse named for a woman.
Murphy’s path to the federal bench began relatively late in life. In 1971, when she was 37, Murphy enrolled in the University of Minnesota Law School. Ann Montgomery, a federal judge herself, said her classmate immediately stood out, and not just because she was a decade and a half older than the other students.