Garnett Thomas Eisele

Garnett Thomas Eisele (born 1923) is a United States federal judge from Arkansas.

Born in Hot Springs, Arkansas, Eisele was a private in the United States Army during World War II from 1942 to 1946. He then received in 1947 an A.B. from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and an LL.B. in 1950 from Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and an LL.M. in 1951, also from Harvard Law School. From 1952 to 1961, Eisele was in the U.S. Naval Reserve. He was in private practice in Hot Springs, Arkansas from 1951 to 1953. He was an assistant United States Attorney in Little Rock from 1953 to 1955. He was then in private practice in Little Rock from 1956 to 1970. He was the legal advisor to Governor Winthrop Rockefeller from 1966 to 1969.

Eisele was Rockefeller's choice for the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas, a position vacated in 1969 by Gordon E. Young. Two other Arkansas Republicans had expressed interest in the judgeship, Odell Pollard of Searcy in White County, then the state Republican chairman and the choice of former U.S. Senate nominee and later Arkansas state party chairman Charles T. Bernard, and state Circuit Judge Henry M. Britt of Hot Springs, the Arkansas 1960 Republican gubernatorial nominee against Orval E. Faubus.^[1]

On January 23, 1970, Eisele was nominated by President Richard M. Nixon. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on August 5, 1970. He received his commission the following day. He served as chief judge from 1975 to 1991, having assumed senior status on August 1, 1991.

Sources

• Garnett Thomas Eisele at the Biographical Directory of Federal Judges, a public domain publication of the Federal Judicial Center.