Beryl Alaine Howell

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American federal judge (born 1956)

Beryl Alaine Howell (born December 3, 1956) is an American attorney and jurist who serves as a senior United States district judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia . She was appointed to the District of Columbia federal court in 2010 by President Barack Obama , and she served as its chief judge from 2016 to 2023. As chief judge, she supervised federal grand juries in the district, including for the Mueller special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections and investigations into attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election .

Early life and education

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Howell was born in 1956 in Fort Benning . She is the daughter of an U.S. Army officer. She attended elementary and secondary school in six states and Germany.

Howell graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1978 with a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy with honors. From 1978 to 1980, Howell worked as a legal assistant at the law firm Shanley & Fisher (now part of Faegre Drinker ). She then attended Columbia Law School , graduating in 1983 with a Juris Doctor as a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar.

Career

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After law school, Howell was a law clerk for Judge Dickinson R. Debevoise of the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey from 1983 to 1984. From 1985 to 1987, she was in private practice as an associate at the New York City law firm of Schulte Roth & Zabel .

From 1987 to 1993, Howell was an assistant United States attorney for the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York , where she became deputy chief of the Narcotics section. From 1993 to 2003, Howell served on the staff of the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary as a senior advisor to Chairman Patrick Leahy , including as the committee's general counsel starting in 1997.

While working for Senator Leahy, Howell helped craft the E-FOIA amendments , which expanded electronic access to government records. She also helped Sen. Leahy fend off proposals to impose new limits on the FOIA. In 2001, she was honored by the Coalition to Support and Expand the Freedom of Information Act, and in 2004, her FOIA work was honored by the Society of Professional Journalists .

Howell was involved in crafting numerous pieces of legislation for the investigation and prosecution of computer crime and copyright infringement , including the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act , the National Information Infrastructure Protection Act , the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act , the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), the No Electronic Theft Act (NET Act),

the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA),

and the Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act of 1999 .

Howell was involved in national security issues, including the creation of the USA PATRIOT Act ,

which she defended in 2005 in an article for the Pennsylvania Bar Association Quarterly.

The Center for Democracy and Technology lists Howell as a "board alum".

From 2004 to 2010, she served as a member of the United States Sentencing Commission after being appointed by President George W. Bush .

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Hodge v Talkin

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In 2011, Harold Hodge Jr. stood outside the U.S. Supreme Court wearing a sign that protested the American government's treatment of black and Hispanic people. He did so in violation of a 1949 federal law that makes such protests a crime. Hodge sued the Marshal of the United States Supreme Court and the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia under the First Amendment . In a June 2013 decision, Howell struck down the law as violating the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech. The judge wrote, "The absolute prohibition on expressive activity in the statute is unreasonable, substantially overbroad and irreconcilable with the First Amendment." The defendants appealed the decision to the [U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Court_of_Appeals_for_the_District_of_Columbia "U.S. …