Dolores Sloviter
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Dolores Korman Sloviter is a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Born to a Jewish-American family in 1932 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, she attended Philadelphia High School for Girls. She graduated from Temple University in 1953 with an A.B. and received her J.D. in 1956 from the University of Pennsylvania, where she served on the law review. Sloviter was in private law practice until she became a professor of law at Temple in 1972. President Jimmy Carter appointed her to the Third Circuit in 1979. Sloviter served as Chief Judge from 1991 to 1998, the only woman to have served as Chief Judge of the Third Circuit.[1] Although Sloviter has been eligible to take "senior status" for some time, she has opted not to do so, preferring instead to remain on "active" status, with a full caseload and full voting rights.
In 1996 Sloviter was a member of a three-judge panel of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania which heard a challenge to the Communications Decency Act, Title V of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, on grounds that it abridged the free speech provisions of the First Amendment. On June 12, 1996, their decision blocked enforcement of the act, ruling that it was unconstitutional, in addition to being unworkable and impractical from a technical standpoint. The "Findings of Fact" document — written for the case by Judges Sloviter, Ronald L. Buckwalter, and Stewart R. Dalzell — was posted on the Internet and cited as a lucid introduction to the Internet and related software. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld their ruling on June 18, 1997.
Sloviter was the subject of former legal clerk Saira Rao's 2007 novel Chambermaid in which a thinly disguised Sloviter is described as a "sociopath" known for abusing staff and clerks. Rao had clerked for Sloviter in 2003, the year during which Sloviter's husband, medical school professor Henry Sloviter, died; Rao sold television and film rights to the novel shortly after publication.
[edit] References
- Dolores K. Sloviter via Federal Judicial Center
- Lewis, Peter H. "Personal Computers: An Internet Primer by 3 Newbies". The New York Times. June 18, 1996. p. C11.
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