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Shirley Jones, Md.’s first female U.S. district judge, dies at 93
Listen to this articleShirley Brannock Jones, the first woman to serve on the U.S. District Court for Maryland, died Thursday in Towson. She was 93.
Jones was a judge on the Supreme Bench of Baltimore City, now the Baltimore City Circuit Court, when then-President Jimmy Carter appointed her to a newly created seat on the U.S. District Court for Maryland on Oct. 5, 1979. Jones stepped down from the bench a little more than three years later, on Dec. 31, 1982.
“Judge Jones was a trailblazer, the first woman to serve as a United States district judge in Maryland,” James K. Bredar, the current chief of that court, said Tuesday. “She served with distinction. Her service here was a capstone to a fine legal and judicial career.”
Jones, a 1946 University of Baltimore School of Law graduate, began her career that year as an attorney with the Maryland Department of Employment Security, where she stayed until taking a job as an assistant Baltimore city solicitor in 1952, according to a Federal Judicial Center biography.
Jones, a Cambridge, Md., native, served as an assistant Maryland attorney general from 1958 to 1959. In 1959, she became a judge on Baltimore’s Orphan’s Court.
From 1961 to 1979, Jones served as a judge on the Supreme Bench of Baltimore City.
In addition, Jones was a lecturer in legal ethics at the University of Baltimore School of Law from 1961 to 1968.
