John Malcolm Duhé, Jr.

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John Malcolm Duhé, Jr. (born 1933 in Iberia Parish, Louisiana) is a retired senior judge on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. He currently practices law in Lafayette.

Duhé was appointed as appellate judge in 1988 by President Ronald Reagan, and he has been a senior judge since 1999. He was named to the seat vacated by the death of Judge Albert Tate, Jr., of Opelousas.

Duhé received his bachelor's degree from Tulane University in 1955 and his law degree from Tulane Law School in 1957.

Duhe is descended from a wealthy old-line Republican family. One of his kinsmen, Jean (pronounced JOHN) Paulin Duhe (May 7, 1885 - May 2, 1961), was the president of the New Iberia National Bank, head of the Duhe-Bourgeois Sugar Company, president of the Edmundson-Duhe rice mill, third vice-president of the American Sugar Cane League, and the president of the St. Martin-Iberia-St. Mary Flood Control Association. Paulin Duhe was also the GOP candidate for the Third Congressional District in 1948. He lost to the Democrat Edwin E. Willis of St. Martinville, who began a 20-year tenure in Congress. Willis received 26,587 votes (66.6 percent) to Duhe's 13,337 (33.4 percent). Duhe was a delegate to the GOP national conventions in 1936, 1948, and 1952. Republican presidential nominee Thomas E. Dewey actually won Iberia Parish -- the only Louisiana parish in which he prevailed -- in the 1948 contest against President Harry Truman and then Governor J. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, the official Democratic nominee in Louisiana.

Previously, Duhé had served as a federal judge for the United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana. Several distinguished members of the bar have clerked for Duhé, including Tulane Law School professor David Snyder.

Duhé was not Reagan's first choice for the appeals court. The president first nominated former Republican Governor David C. Treen for the post. However, Democratic senators refused to allow a confirmation vote on the Treen nomination.

[edit] External link

• Profile at Federal Judicial Center
• Billy Hathorn, "The Republican Party in Louisiana, 1920-1980", Master's thesis (1980), Northwestern State University at Natchitoches