Carter appointee, what did you expect?
Bio from Detroit Free Press:
Anna Diggs Taylor never planned to become a federal judge.
But opportunity knocked.
She never intended to become the first black woman to serve as chief judge of the U.S. District Court in eastern Michigan.
But she accepted out of a sense of historic duty.
Most of the accomplishments of her 49-year legal career, Taylor said, resulted from good luck and heeding the advice of her junior high school English teacher -- work hard, get good grades and the doors of opportunity will open.
Even for a black woman in the segregated 1940s and '50s.
Now, the 73-year-old matronly judge who has spent her career shunning the spotlight is back in the media glare.
Any day now, she's expected to rule on the American Civil Liberties Union's request to strike down the Bush administration's controversial domestic spying program. The ruling could affect the civil rights of millions of Americans and alter the course of the administration's war on terror.
Although Taylor is a liberal with Democratic roots and defended civil-rights workers in the South in the 1960s, people who know her say she will follow the law -- not her politics -- in deciding the case.
"She'll rule based on what the law requires, not on what people perceive her biases to be," Southfield lawyer Harold Pope III said last week. Pope is a former president of the National Bar Association, a prominent black lawyers' group.
Pope said Taylor, a former City of Detroit staff attorney who defended Mayor Coleman Young's efforts to integrate city government in the mid-1970s, ruled against Pope and Detroit in 1993, declaring unconstitutional a program that reserved municipal contracts for minority vendors.
"She's not going to let anything stand in the way of a proper analysis of the law and the facts," Pope said.
Taylor couldn't comment on the National Security Agency case because of judicial canon. Neither would the lawyers in the case.
The ACLU sued the NSA in January, calling unconstitutional its program of intercepting international phone calls and e-mails of suspected Al Qaeda members without obtaining search warrants first. The suit says the program has hampered journalists, scholars, lawyers and others trying to speak to sources overseas.
Justice Department lawyers say the program is vital and legal -- created after Congress authorized the Bush administration to combat terrorism following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. They want Taylor to dismiss the suit, saying the case cannot proceed without divulging state secrets.
Although four other suits challenge the legality of the NSA program, the Detroit case is the farthest along.
The administration wants all of the cases, along with about 20 lawsuits filed against telecommunication companies suspected of giving phone records to the NSA, transferred to Washington. The ACLU hopes Taylor will rule before that happens.
Taylor was born Anna Katherine Johnston in 1932 in Washington, D.C. Her father was treasurer of Howard University. Her mother was a homemaker and a business teacher.
After the ninth grade, Taylor's parents sent her to Northfield School for Girls in East Northfield, Mass. -- one of the few prep schools that accepted black students -- to groom her for a career.
Although being separated from her family was difficult, Taylor credits the school with broadening her horizons and preparing her for the prestigious Barnard College at Columbia University in New York, where she earned a degree in economics in 1954.
Three years later, she received a law degree from Yale. She attended on a scholarship and was one of only five women in her graduating class.
Unable to get a job as a lawyer at New York or Washington, D.C., law firms -- a near impossibility for black people, especially women, in the 1950s -- Taylor turned to the Solicitor's Office of the U.S. Department of Labor. She became a lawyer there with the help of J. Ernest Wilkins, then assistant secretary of labor and the first black person appointed to a subcabinet post. He also was a friend of her father's.
"I'd be unemployed today if it hadn't been for that man," Taylor said in a 1984 interview with the Michigan Bar Journal.
In Washington, Taylor met Charles Diggs Jr., son of a wealthy Detroit mortician and a rising star in Congress.
They married in 1960 and moved to Detroit.
The following year, she became a Wayne County assistant prosecutor.
In 1964, five months after the birth of the first of her two children, Taylor went to Mississippi to defend civil-rights workers who were jailed for registering black people to vote.
The day Taylor arrived, three workers -- James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner -- disappeared near Philadelphia, Miss.
Taylor, her brother, another law student and Detroit lawyer George Crockett Jr., who eventually became a Michigan congressman, drove to the Neshoba County Courthouse to inquire about the missing men.
Sheriff Lawrence Rainey Jr., who was implicated and later acquitted in the men's deaths, was less than helpful, Taylor recalled. As Taylor and the group walked back to their car, they were menaced by a crowd of angry white people who shouted racial slurs at them.
"We were afraid we were going to be killed," Taylor said.
In 1966, Taylor became an assistant U.S. attorney in Detroit, but left the following year to manage her husband's Detroit congressional office.
In 1970, she went into private practice.
During the next five years, she and Diggs divorced. She also campaigned for Coleman Young, helping him become Detroit's first black mayor.
In 1975, Young asked her to become a staff lawyer to defend his programs to integrate city government.
A year later, she married S. Martin Taylor, then director of the Michigan Employment Security Commission.
In 1979, three years after she campaigned for Jimmy Carter's presidential bid, Carter rewarded Taylor with a lifetime appointment to U.S. District Court in Detroit.
Taylor was the first black female federal district judge in the U.S. 6th Circuit, comprising Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee.
In the years that followed, she presided over high-profile cases and made some waves.
In 1984, she sentenced Ronald Ebens to 25 years in prison for beating 27-year-old Vincent Chin to death with a baseball bat outside a Highland Park bar. Ebens, a laid-off autoworker, was angry about Japanese car imports. Chin was a Chinese American.
An appeals court overturned the verdict and Ebens was acquitted at retrial.
"The entire experience was a wrenching one from start to finish," Taylor said later.
In 1984, Taylor banned nativity scenes on municipal property in Birmingham and Dearborn in ACLU lawsuits.
The same year, she publicly rebuked then-Chief Judge John Feikens for racially insensitive remarks about the ability of Young and other black leaders to run city government. They later became friends.
In 1998, a year after Taylor became chief judge, Judge Bernard Friedman blasted her for her role in an effort to have a suit challenging the University of Michigan's use of race in its law school's admission policies assigned to another judge who was handling a similar case. Taylor's husband is a U-M regent.
Lawyers say Taylor is fair, pleasant and dignified, yet in firm control of her courtroom.
"She is smart as hell," one lawyer told the 2006 Almanac of the Federal Judiciary.
In January 1999, Taylor went on senior status, continuing with a smaller caseload.
On Friday, she will be inducted into the National Bar Association Hall of Fame during its conference in Detroit.
Legal experts wouldn't predict how Taylor might rule in the NSA case.
But even if Taylor harpoons the spying program, experts said, the decision likely would be overturned by the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals.
"Given the composition of the 6th Circuit and its previous rulings in related areas, it seems more likely to favor national security over civil liberties if that issue is squarely presented," said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond in Virginia. "And that's what this case is all about."
