It was a convergence of history at a recent District of Kansas’ naturalization ceremony. During the 150th anniversary year of the Emancipation Proclamation, standing in the former Monroe Elementary School at the heart of Brown v. Board of Education, the first African American woman to sit on the federal trial bench in Kansas administered the oath of allegiance to a group completing the process of becoming a U.S. citizen.
When the United States celebrates Women’s History Month every March, images like Rosie the Riveter posters or pictures of marching suffragists come to mind. However, another image can be introduced in the framing of women’s history: a judicial robe.
In regions around the country, members of Congress turned to federal judges to take public oaths of office in their home districts. The representatives earlier had taken official oaths in Washington when the current session began.
Earlier this month, Chief Judge Catherine D. Perry, of the Eastern District of Missouri, swore in U.S. Representative Wm. Lacy Clay (D-Mo.), in a ceremony at the Thomas F. Eagleton U.S. Courthouse in St. Louis.
With the swearing-in this week of President Obama, U.S. Presidents have taken the oath of office 65 times in our nation’s history, and a federal jurist has administered that oath on 62 of those occasions.
Celebrating Bill of Rights Day, students in a newly released two-minute video talk candidly about the rights and freedoms they value most and are guaranteed in this seminal document.
A public education program housed in the Thomas F. Eagleton Courthouse has received the St. Louis Bar Foundation’s Spirit of Justice Award, for its excellence in teaching young audiences about the workings of the courts.
Marcia Anderson is the bankruptcy clerk of court for the Western District of Wisconsin. She also is the nation's first female African American major general in the U.S. Army Reserve. Her story and how she balances these two very different worlds are the themes of a new "Serving Our Courts, Serving Our Country" video, released by the United States Courts to honor Veterans Day 2012.
Who knew vampires were into social media? A student vampire club, calling themselves The Fangtastics, goes to court when high school administrators drive a stake through the heart of their online postings.
Independence Day is a fitting date to take the oath of U.S. citizenship and many courts across the country hold naturalization ceremonies. And what says America more than a naturalization ceremony held on a famous aircraft carrier, or on the steps of an historic Town Hall.
