Women of Achievement
2025
STEADFASTNESS
for a woman with a lifetime of achievement:
Judge Julia Smith Gibbons
Julia Smith Gibbons grew up in Middle Tennessee, the school-loving daughter of two teachers, among generations of close-knit family in small-town Pulaski. She excelled at Vanderbilt University and was elected to the Order of the Coif for highest scholastic achievement at University of Virginia law school.
After admission to the Tennessee bar and a federal court clerkship, she moved to Memphis in 1976. She practiced law in a big firm until 1979 when she became legal advisor to Gov. Lamar Alexander. One of her projects was the Memphis Jobs Conference which involved hundreds of Memphians on committees discerning the best use of millions of state dollars Alexander had promised for Memphis projects during his campaign.
In 1981, Alexander named Gibbons to Division VI of the Thirtieth Judicial District of the state of Tennessee in Memphis. She was the first woman trial judge of a state court of record in Tennessee’s 185 years!
She was 30 years old.
The overwhelmingly older and male local bar was skeptical of this young woman judge, to put it mildly, but she won them over with excellent preparation, knowledge and adept humor.
She ran and won election to a full eight-year term in August 1982 while balancing judicial responsibilities and being the mother of an infant daughter.
Less than a year later, in June 1983, President Ronald Reagan appointed Julia to the United States District Court for the Western District of Tennessee. She became the first female federal judge in Tennessee, the youngest person in the country at the time appointed to the federal bench and the second youngest ever to be appointed to the federal judiciary.
She was chief judge of the district court from 1994 to 2000.
In August 2002, President George W. Bush appointed Judge Gibbons to the United State Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit where she continues to serve, travelling from Memphis to Cincinnati, Ohio, where the appeals court sits.
In addition to her caseload, Julia chaired many committees of the bench and the court. She chaired the Budget Committee of the Judicial Conference from 2004 to 2018, the longest-standing chair ever. In that role she analyzed weighty budget documents and testified 16 times before Congress to secure funding for the Federal Judiciary.
In 2021 Julia received the Devitt Award, the highest honor for an Article III judge, for significant contributions to the administration of justice. Her female colleagues and law clerks including Tennessee Supreme Court Justice Holly Kirby speak of the model and encourager that Julia Gibbons has been over the decades, paving the way for them to move into the judiciary at a high level. Julia hires women lawyers, advises them, recommends them for positions that advance their careers and connects them with each other to form a web of support.
Her colleagues wrote with deep admiration of Julia’s perseverance in 2019 when a cascade of health problems required surgery and months of hospitalization. Julia stepped right back into work as soon as doctors allowed. In a letter nominating her for the Devitt Award, her peers said, “So much of Julia was on display through it all: courage, duty, a desire to do her bit, and grit.”
With her husband Bill Gibbons she also has been active in church and community and raised two children, one now an attorney and one an art history professor.
Julia Gibbons assumed senior status on the court in the fall of 2024 which technically means she can work a reduced caseload, but no one expects her pace to slow very much as she completes 45 years in the judiciary.
Justice Kirby says many in the 1980s were watching Julia Gibbons. In remarks at the unveiling of Julia’s portrait in the Shelby County Courthouse last year, Justice Kirby said, “(She was a) young woman in a very public position facing all of the family calamities that accompany giving birth and raising children. (S)he had indeed felt pressure to be superlative at everything, lest anyone conclude that women ‘couldn’t cut it’ as a judge…At that time there were in fact many in the legal community and the public at large watching her to see if she would stumble, and ready to pronounce all women as unsuited to the law if she had. I am sure that, at some level, Judge Gibbons bore that burden every single day, on the bench, at activities with her children, in her community.
“Now we can see that, instead of stumbling, she soared. In doing so, she inspired a generation of women who followed her in the law.”
For her grit, her grace, her decades of judicial skill and mentorship, Julia Smith Gibbons is the 2025 Woman of Achievement for Steadfastness.