Bruce Marshall Selya

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American judge (1934–2025)

Bruce Marshall Selya (May 27, 1934 – February 22, 2025) was an American judge who was a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit . Born in Rhode Island, he practiced law and participated in Republican politics before his appointment to the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island in 1982. Elevated to the First Circuit four years later, he gained a reputation for his distinctive writing style, which often involved peppering opinions with figures of speech, puns, and extremely uncommon words.

Education and career

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Bruce Marshall Selya was born on May 27, 1934, in Providence, Rhode Island , to a Jewish family.

He attended Nathan Bishop Middle School and Classical High School in Providence. Selya received an Artium Baccalaureus degree from Harvard University in 1955 and a Bachelor of Laws from Harvard Law School in 1958. He was a law clerk for Judge Edward William Day of the United States District Court for the District of Rhode Island from 1958 to 1960. Selya was in private practice of law in Providence from 1960 to 1982. He was a Judge of Probate in Lincoln , Rhode Island, from 1965 to 1972.

Selya was the Republican candidate for Rhode Island Attorney General in the 1964 election, losing to incumbent J. Joseph Nugent .

He was an informal adviser to Governor John Chafee and chaired both his gubernatorial reelection campaign and his successful 1976 U.S. Senate bid . From 1969 to 1974, Selya was vice-chairman of Rhode Island's Republican State Central Committee.

District judge

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Selya was nominated by President Ronald Reagan on July 27, 1982, to a seat on the United States District Court for the District of Rhode Island vacated by Judge Raymond James Pettine . He was confirmed by the United States Senate on August 18, 1982, and received his commission the same day. He was the first Jewish person to serve as a federal judge for the District of Rhode Island.

Court of appeals

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Selya was nominated by President Reagan on September 26, 1986, to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit , to a new seat created by 98 Stat. 333. He was confirmed by the Senate on October 8, 1986, and received his commission on October 14, 1986. A 1985 _Newsweek _ article claimed that the White House had promised to elevate Selya in order to secure Senator John Chafee 's vote on the MX missile ; the article stated that Selya was an ideological "renegade" who was otherwise "out of favor" with the conservative Justice Department because he had represented abortion clinics while in private practice.

When the _en banc _ First Circuit in 2005 upheld a voluntary desegregation plan in Lynn, Massachusetts , that considered race when evaluating student transfer decisions, Selya dissented, writing that the program "flies in the teeth of the Supreme Court's stalwart opposition to the use of inflexible, race-determinative methods". A 2008 decision by Selya in IMS Health Inc. v. Ayotte upheld a New Hampshire law that prohibited the sale of information about doctors' prescribing practices; the Supreme Court struck down a similar law in _Sorrell v. IMS Health Inc. _

Selya wrote for a unanimous panel ruling in favor of Boston when it refused to fly a Christian flag on a city flagpole, arguing that the government was free to choose which messages it endorsed. The Supreme Court unanimously held in _Shurtleff v. City of Boston _ (2022) that the city had violated the First Amendment .

In 1996, Selya hired future Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson as one of his law clerks for the year. He praised her as a "terrific addition" when President Biden nominated her to the Supreme Court in 2022, and she described him as "a brilliant, meticulous, and scholarly practitioner of the law" in her memoir Lovely One .

In 2000, Chief Justice William Rehnquist appointed Selya to the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation , a position he held until 2004. In 2005, Chief Justice John Roberts appointed Selya to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review , and in 2008 he became its chief judge.

He wrote [a

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