This Guide was created by Library staff members in October 2016.
Looking for background information about the professional lives of judges? Just follow these suggested steps.
- Depending on the dates on which the judge served, the Baltimore Sun (1837 – 1991) database probably is the best place to start. (Note that this database is available Judiciary-wide.) Another useful database (available at the Library) is Newspaper Archive, which contains articles from the Annapolis Capital (beginning in 1887), as well as from newspapers in Frederick, Hagerstown, Cumberland, Salisbury, and Denton.
- The Maryland State Archives allows users to search its database of biographical sketches of noteworthy Marylanders. This information is frequently linked to news articles about the person. To research information about women, appellate court, and historical General Court judges, users also may select the appropriate category from the “Judicial” section of the Archives’ Historical List, Maryland Government. For those seeking information about Baltimore City judges, the Archives offers its Historical List, Supreme Bench of Baltimore City and Baltimore City Circuit Court, 1867 to date.
- The Maryland State Archives began including judges biographies in the 1979-80 edition of the Maryland Manual. The Archives offers scanned copies of old editions of the Manual. Additionally, the Archives’ Maryland Manual On-Line lists, in the court for which they served, all former judges since the mid-1990’s, and includes biographical information on each.
- The Library has scanned its collection of judge-related articles from 2008 and earlier. The material is in PDF format and can easily be e-mailed or printed. Please contact a librarian for assistance.
- The Library also may have law-related biographical publications written by or about a judge. The easiest way to locate these materials is via the Library’s online catalog. The Library has also digitized its collections of the Transactions of the Maryland State Bar Association and the Proceedings of the Maryland Judicial Conference. Both of these publications cover the professional lives of judges. HeinOnline (available Judiciary-wide) contains thousands of law review and bar journal articles, some of which may be of a biographical nature.
- The printed versions of the Maryland Reports and the Maryland Appellate Reports contain memorials for those appellate court judges who have recently passed away. Please keep in mind that Westlaw and Lexis do not contain these memorials. Page images of the Maryland Reports are available until 1962 on HeinOnline.
- In its Maryland history section, the Library retains several biographical texts of notable Marylanders, including the Bench and Bar of Maryland (also online, Judiciary-wide), the Tercentenary History of Maryland, Men of Mark in Maryland, the Maryland Biographical Dictionary, and the Biographical Cyclopedia of Representative Men of Maryland and District of Columbia. Researchers also may find judges mentioned in books about Maryland’s counties and their significant families. For example, the Portrait and Biographical Record of the Sixth Congressional District, Maryland contains biographies of many of Western Maryland’s judges. Please note that all of these books were published in the 19th and 20th Centuries.
- Finally, if you know the exact date of a judge’s appointment, retirement, or passing, you may wish to look around those dates in the Daily Record, which began publishing in 1888. This Baltimore-based legal newspaper is available in the Library’s microfilm collection.