By Adair Law
The U.S. District Court of Oregon Historical Society is pleased to honor Judge Anna J. Brown with its 2019 Lifetime Service Award. This article is based on research, interviews, and conversations with Judge Brown, her colleagues, and friends. All photos are courtesy of Judge Brown unless noted.
Like millions of people displaced by World War II, Judge Anna J. Brown’s parents, Adalbert and Margarete Jaeger, sought a new life in America. On February 7, 1952, Adalbert’s 43rd birthday, he and Margarete, with their daughters Irmgard (7) and Rita (3) and Adalbert’s older brother, Franz Jaeger, boarded the SS Homeland in Hamburg, Germany en route to Portland, Oregon, via Ellis Island and a cross-country train trip.
From a Family of Immigrants
Born in 1909 and 1914 respectively, Adalbert and Margarete (Kriegs) Jaeger, came from generations of farming families in East Prussia. They first lost the family farm when Russian soldiers occupied it and then lost it for good when boundaries were redrawn at the end of the war effectively “giving” their land to Poland. While Adalbert worked as a farm hand in northwestern Germany, the family applied for admission to the United States sponsored by Adalbert’s brother and sister-in-law, Hugo and Lydia Jaeger, of Portland, Oregon. Hugo emigrated to the U.S. and became a citizen before the war. He and Lydia owned and operated the Broadway Dyers and Cleaners on Portland’s NE Broadway and Union Avenue. They had made a home for themselves and Lydia’s two adult siblings in a two-bedroom house in the Sellwood neighborhood. They marshaled their resources and assured the U.S. government that the adults and children they were sponsoring for immigration would not become “charges on society.” After a seven-year wait, permission for the Jaegers to enter the U.S. finally came, and somehow enough room was found for three more adults and two children to live in the small house in Sellwood.
Anna Jaeger arrived on July 26, 1952, the first American-born member of her family. By then, Adalbert and Franz were working full time at the dry cleaners while Margarete cared for the children and managed the cramped household the families shared. With Hugo and Lydia providing their room and board, the Jaeger family saved all of Adalbert’s earnings and, in 1956, they bought a house just a block away. In a place of prominence in the living room, they later hung their recently acquired citizenship papers and a painting of a red barn. “The barn was built just before the war began,” Anna recalls, “and it was our Dad’s last contribution to the family farm. The painting was all they had of what was and what could have been.”
Anna’s first language was the German she spoke with her family and later the English her sisters were picking up at school. In the meantime, Adalbert and Margarete attended night school to study English and the civics components they would need to learn to become U. S. citizens. After passing their citizenship tests in 1957, they each took the Oath of Allegiance in front of U.S. District Judge William East, never imagining that 42 years in the future their five-year-old would fill Judge East’s judicial seat. Two more children, Mary and Joseph, joined the family in 1958 and 1960. Around this time, Hugo and Lydia sold the dry-cleaners and, after a short stint with the new owners, Adalbert went to work as a janitor for Emanuel Hospital until he retired in 1974.
All the Jaeger children attended St. Agatha Catholic School in Sellwood. All of them began working different jobs at a young age to help pay for tuition, uniforms, and to supplement the household income. Anna noted dryly that “child labor laws notwithstanding” she, her siblings, and neighborhood friends would board a school bus each summer weekday at four in the morning to travel to berry fields in the Woodburn area south of Portland. They picked berries until early afternoon, returned home, went swimming at Sellwood Park, and then repeated the routine the next day. By eighth grade, Anna spent her summers working as a live-in mother’s helper, a job she kept on weekends during the school year.
High School and Higher Education
The Jaeger daughters went to high school at St. Mary’s Academy (SMA), an all-girls Catholic school a public-bus ride away in downtown Portland. Anna’s classmates came from all over the metropolitan region, and she made multi-decade friendships there. The Sisters of the Holy Names who ran SMA made it clear that each student was expected to meet high academic standards and to engage regularly in community service, beginning immediately. During her first week there, Anna’s homeroom class was taken to SW Fourth and Burnside in downtown Portland to assist with cooking for and feeding the hungry. Although Anna’s father was quite irked the family was paying tuition “for that,” the Sisters crisply reminded him that service was a mandatory part of Anna’s Catholic education.
After the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. in April 1968, Anna and some of her friends volunteered for Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign. His Oregon offices were just a few blocks from St. Mary’s. They answered phones, stuffed envelopes, and helped in any way they could, so they were excited just to be in the same room as Senator Kennedy on election night. Even though he lost the Oregon Democratic primary to Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy, they anticipated a better outcome in the California primary and were thrilled when he declared victory in Los Angeles. They were completely devastated a few hours later when they learned Senator Kennedy was shot and killed in the early hours of June 5, 1968.
Anna turned 16 that summer of 1968 and, despite the year’s national tragedies, she looked forward to the start of her junior year at St. Mary’s. Tragedy struck again, this time at home just before Christmas when her mother, Margarete, suffered a debilitating stroke. Anna’s younger sister and brother were just 10 and 8. When Margarete regained consciousness after several weeks in a coma, she was unable to speak and partially paralyzed.
By the beginning of her senior year at St. Mary’s, Anna was the oldest child at home and now facing a new range of responsibilities to help care for her mother and younger siblings. She recalls, “When I really didn’t engage at school for college planning and didn’t sign up for the SATs, the Sisters noticed and were not going to have any part of that. ‘No, no, you’re going to college.’” The Sisters ensured Anna was signed up to take college entrance tests and that necessary fees were paid. “I was told ‘Be here on this day, and you take the test. Let’s see where it goes from there.’”
After Anna did well on the tests, the Sisters researched local college options and secured financial aid packages. They made the case to Anna—and ultimately to her father—that she could attend college and still be at home to help as needed. “They showed up at our house one day in their holy habits and all. ‘Here are the papers, she’s got a scholarship and other financial aid; she can go to college and still be home by 5:00.’” When Adalbert couldn’t muster much opposition to that showing, Anna Jaeger started down the surprising road to becoming Judge Anna J. Brown.
Starting at Lewis & Clark College in the fall of 1970, Anna expected to become a high school chemistry teacher, mostly because her favorite teacher at St. Mary’s taught chemistry. During her early pursuit of an education degree, Anna spent time in a high school classroom and quickly concluded that teaching at that level would not be a good match for her. In fact, she found her part-time work-study job as a records clerk at the Lake Oswego Police Department to be much more interesting. She looked for opportunities at work to fill in where needed, and soon she was working full time, first as a graveyard-shift dispatcher and later as Lake Oswego’s first woman community service officer (which included duties as an animal control and parking enforcement officer).
Anna soon concluded her ongoing college studies weren’t worth the time away from family and work, and she quit college in the middle of her sophomore year. Realizing she ultimately would need a college degree to help support her family, Anna met with a Portland State University counselor a year later to explore options. Anna emphasized she would have to keep working full time while continuing in college, and, other than having ruled out an education major, she didn’t have any particular profession in mind. Trying to draw her out, the counselor asked what subjects held her interest. Anna demurred, insisting she sought a degree in any discipline that would provide enough income to support the family while adding, “Oh, and I can’t pay for college.” When the counselor learned that Anna was working full time as a 911 operator for the City of Portland, she described a federal college funding program through the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration that provided full tuition funding to police officers and other law enforcement personnel (like 911 operators) to attend college while still working full time (with a two-year work obligation to follow graduation). PSU’s Administration of Justice Program qualified for that funding, and Anna enrolled immediately.
Most of the faculty were local lawyers teaching criminal law subjects. Because of her recent work experience, Anna already had an interest and appetite for the material. One instructor, W. Michael Gillette, then working for the Oregon Department of Justice (before joining the Oregon Court of Appeals and then the Oregon Supreme Court), repeatedly encouraged Anna to think about law school. After graduating from PSU in 1975, Anna still owed two years of service to her employer. With ongoing family responsibilities, law school didn’t seem realistic. Nevertheless, she continued to receive encouragement from her good friend, Paul T. Brown, a lieutenant with the Lake Oswego Police Department, to go to law school, and, after a 911 co-worker bet her that he could earn a higher score than her on the LSATs, Anna paid the fee and took the test. Although she lost the bet (her co-worker neglected to mention he was a member of MENSA), she did pass the first hurdle for going to law school. Feeling she had nothing to lose, she took the next step—applying for admission to the Evening Division of Northwestern School of Law (now Lewis & Clark Law School).
Becoming a Lawyer
Anna started night law school in 1976 with “a lot of other students who, like me, had full time jobs and families to support, so we pushed each other through.” She acknowledges, nonetheless, that “I didn’t do very well during my first year. After my first mid-term exam, a professor asked whether I was taking the class for a grade or for ‘pass/no pass.’ When I responded, ‘for a grade,’ he said, ‘You might want to change to pass/no pass. And while you’re at it, you might think about whether this is what you really want to do because you’re taking the seat of an otherwise qualified man.’” While his comment upset her, Anna realized there was a lot that she did not understand about law school and what a practicing lawyer needed to know. She decided to quit her well-paying job with benefits to work as a law clerk in a small law firm. That exposure helped her to find practical applications for what she was learning in her classes, and her grades improved accordingly.
During the winter break of her second year of night law school, on December 22, 1977, Anna Jaeger married Paul Brown. She was now Anna J. Brown and her family had expanded to include her husband and four stepchildren.
In 1978, Brown learned that Multnomah County Circuit Judge John C. Beatty Jr. was looking for a night law student to work as his full-time courtroom law clerk. To her everlasting shock (“I wouldn’t have hired me”), Brown got the job and was immediately hooked on trial practice. Judge Beatty made special efforts to point out attorneys who did the right thing, the right way, for the right reasons, and those examples stayed with her. She recalls, “Working in front of the bench in the courtroom, I had a premiere seat to watch great lawyers, like Kim Frankel and Marc Blackman, to name just two, doing excellent work. It didn’t take long before I was thinking ‘I could do that, I could make that argument, and by the way, why aren’t you arguing this point?’ I just loved being in the courtroom. For the first time I began really to understand what being a lawyer was about, and I knew I wanted to be a trial lawyer.”
At the same time, Brown was also observing the first wave of women lawyers joining the bench at various levels. Justice Betty Roberts was appointed to the Oregon Court of Appeals in 1977 and then to the Oregon Supreme Court in 1982. Judge Kimberly C. Frankel joined the Multnomah County District Court in 1978. With President Carter’s appointment in 1980, Judge Helen Frye became the first woman to serve as a U.S. District Judge in Oregon, and Judge Polly Higdon was appointed to Oregon’s Bankruptcy Court as a half- then full-time bankruptcy judge in 1983.
She was in the last months of completing her law degree when her mother, Margarete, died the morning of March 25, 1980, the same day she was to interview at the law school placement office for an associate position with a “medium-sized Portland law firm.” Brown told her father Adalbert she would be canceling the appointment. Adalbert, who often criticized her law school venture as “too much,” was adamant that she proceed, reminding her she still needed a law job for after graduation. Holding back tears and terrified she would break down when asked to speak, Brown went to the interview. There, she insists, “divine Providence” intervened. She was interviewed by a firm partner who had just spent the previous week trying a case in Judge Beatty’s courtroom. Fortunately for Brown, the interviewer seemed more interested in talking about that than in asking her to speak. A few weeks later, Brown was invited to the firm for additional interviews. She then received a telephone call offering her the position on the condition that she pass the bar. She was so excited to accept the offer, she forgot to ask what the position paid.
Brown continued to work for Judge Beatty after her June graduation to hedge her bets until the bar results were known. In the meantime, her father’s health diminished and he was hospitalized in September 1980. He expressed pessimism about the bar results during their daily convesations, but when she finally called to report she had passed, he said simply, “I knew you would.” He passed away a few days later.
Brown joined the firm now known as Bullivant Houser Bailey and pursued a path to becoming a trial lawyer. Although not the first woman attorney the firm had hired, she was the sole woman attorney there when she started. Adjustments were needed along the way. Indeed, for many women entering previously male-dominated professions in that era, humor and simple problem solving were often the first rungs in a ladder of responses when trying to determine if the sexism they were receiving was clueless or intended. For example, when trying to get to the courthouse quickly one morning, Brown took a short cut through a conference room and unexpectedly walked into a roomful of the firm’s senior partners and one of their most important clients, all of them men. The client locked eyes with Brown and barked, “Where’s that coffee?” She could see the partners looking at her with the distinct nonverbal direction, “Don’t mess this up.” Brown replied, “I am so sorry you don’t have your coffee, sir, but I’m due in court in six minutes for another client. If you don’t have your coffee when I return, I’ll be happy to get some for you then.” The client looked at the partners, shook his head and said, “I’ve got to stop doing that.”
Within blocks of City Hall and the federal and county courthouses, the all-male University Club was used by many law firms and other businesses for lunches or meetings. In the 1980s, women were allowed in for only “occasional events” and even then, had to enter through the back door. That happened a few times too many for Brown and her friend and colleague, Chrys Martin. They worked together to move firm gatherings to places where those invited could enter through the front door. In 1985, Brown and another woman lawyer, Christine P. Brown, were the first women to join the Bullivant partnership. When they entered their first partnership meeting playing a recording of Donna Summer’s “She Works Hard for the Money,” some partners began to worry!
Judge Anna J. Brown
A March/April 2019 article in Federal Lawyer notes that with her firm’s support, Brown developed a practice defending tort claims, particularly representing public bodies, police officers, lawyers, and other professionals. Brown thrived on resolving complicated disputes and noted in a recent interview, “I think fundamentally, I’ve always been inclined toward solving problems, and to me, this practice area was an opportunity for me to be helpful, to figure out how to get things done, to move people out of conflict and into resolution.”
After 10 years in private practice, Brown began dreaming of becoming a judge. She applied for various openings, placed first in several bar polls, and after being told “not yet” several times, she received “the best news of my career” when Governor Barbara Roberts appointed Anna J. Brown to the Multnomah County District Court in 1992. Judge Brown ran unopposed for that position in May 1992, and Governor Roberts appointed her to a Circuit Court vacancy in 1994 for which she again ran unopposed later that year. Judge Frankel praised her colleague and friend’s organizational skills and her ability to keep things moving. “Anna didn’t go onto the bench believing she was some figurehead sitting at the front of the room. She understood instinctively that the more the parties or issues, the more at stake, and the greater need for the judge to be organized.” Judge Frankel helped Judge Brown realize every judge has days when they must say “That’s enough. That’s it!” to the attorneys in front of them. Whenever their busy dockets allowed, Judge Frankel recalls, “We used to walk the waterfront on the days she’d had to say, ‘That’s it!’ We walked a lot faster on those days, for some reason.”
Learning the ropes on the other side of the bench, Judge Brown recalled working with jurors as Judge Beatty’s law clerk. She learned that most jurors came to the courtroom quite unaware and anxious about all that was expected of them, how they were to conduct themselves, or how long jury duty could keep them from their busy lives. She tried to follow Judge Beatty’s practices to put jurors at ease, to help them understand legal issues, and to empower them so that they knew that they could actually do the job. “Judge Beatty repeatedly emphasized to people the extraordinary importance of a jury trial as a key part of our system of justice. I learned early on that it was fundamental to a fair jury trial that jurors were engaged in the process, knew that the court and parties valued their time, and knew we would not ask them to sit around waiting for us while they worried if they were going to have to reschedule their work and family commitments the next day. In particular, I learned how much the answer to the simple question ‘How long is today going to take?’ meant to somebody who had kids in childcare or to an employee who wasn’t going to get paid while on jury duty. I learned the answer to that question should also be as important to a judge, court administrators and trial lawyers.” Judge Brown continued to learn about jury-management by serving on the Oregon State Bar uniform jury instruction committees for both criminal and civil jury trials. “There I learned how to write a neutral, accurate statement of the law in words jurors could understand while deliberating on a verdict. And I received the added benefit of learning a great deal of Oregon law on the many substantive issues state trial judges must process.”
“The Best and the Brightest the Legal Profession has to offer”
In April 1998, U.S. District Judge Malcolm F. Marsh took senior status creating a vacancy on the U.S. District Court in Portland. Judge Brown’s colleagues and friends encouraged her to apply. While her last trial as a lawyer had been in federal court before Judge Marsh, most of her practice experience was in state court, and Judge Brown wondered whether she’d be a good fit. Again, a sense of “What’s to lose?” prevailed, and she put her name in for consideration.
At about the same time, Judge Brown was doing pre-trial work on Oregon’s first tobacco-products-liability case, Williams v Philip Morris, arising from the death of Jessie D. Williams, a 67-year-old Portland school janitor who died of lung cancer after smoking for more than four decades. His family sought millions in compensatory and punitive damages from cigarette-maker Philip Morris. The case generated a great deal of publicity at the same time Judge Brown was seeking the federal court appointment. She was thrilled to be involved with the case’s developing issues of law. “There were lawyers from around the country and outstanding local counsel all working hard to shape how Oregon law would develop. It was fascinating work for all of us.” It hadn’t occurred to Judge Brown that her association with the case might affect her chances for the federal appointment. Then a colleague suggested she should withdraw from the case because her rulings of first impression could definitely impact the politics of the appointment process. Judge Brown responded to her colleague, “You know, that’s very kind of you to think of it that way, but if getting a federal appointment means I can’t do this kind of work, then I don’t want it.”
The bipartisan Selection Committee considered several candidates, and Judge Brown was excited to be one of three finalists recommended by the committee. Although she had been in the same room as Senator Robert Kennedy more than three decades earlier, she had never actually met a U.S. Senator before interviewing separately with Senator Ron Wyden and Senator Gordon Smith for this process. On February 5, 1999, after the Senators’ mutual consultation, Senator Wyden officially recommended Judge Anna J. Brown to President Bill Clinton to be appointed to Judge Marsh’s vacant seat. In his letter of recommendation, Senator Wyden wrote, “I strongly believe that you will find that Judge Brown is highly qualified and will stand as a proud legacy to your commitment to enhancing our federal bench with the best and brightest the legal profession has to offer.”
Just over two weeks later, on February 22, 1999, the Williams v. Philip Morris trial began. The jury of six men and six women (three smokers and four former smokers) were asked to answer two questions: 1) Was Philip Morris negligent in manufacturing its cigarettes, and if so, did that negligence cause Williams’ death?, and 2) Did the company make false representations about the causal link between smoking and cancer, and if so, did those representations contribute to Williams’ death?
On March 23, 1999 the jury found in favor of the Williams estate awarding $81,000,000, including a significant punitive damages component. There were numerous appeals to the Oregon Court of Appeals, the Oregon Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court; eventually the original jury verdict prevailed.
In April 1999, President Clinton nominated Judge Anna J. Brown to the federal bench, and although it felt “like an eternity” to her, the Senate confirmed her nomination relatively quickly in October 1999 by a bipartisan voice vote. On October 26, 1999, Chief Judge Michael R. Hogan administered her judicial oath, and Judge Brown stepped up to serve as a U.S. District Judge in, as noted, the very seat occupied by Judge William East who gave her parents their citizenship oath.
In her federal service, Judge Brown has presided over a wide range of civil and criminal matters and widely publicized jury trials, including the 2002 trial of Jeffrey Grayson who was charged with fraud in managing pensions through his business Capital Consultants; the 2009 trial of Jim Nicholson, an imprisoned father and disgraced CIA spy who used his son, Nathaniel Nicholson, to sell protected information to the Russian government; and most recently, the complex, multi-defendant criminal jury trials arising from the January 2016 armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.
Committee Work/Skill Enhancement
Judge Brown built on her longstanding interest in jury matters while serving as a member and then chair of the 9th Circuit Jury Instructions Committee from 2006-10, a member and then chair of the Jury Trial Improvement Committee from 2011-15 (helping to organize the Circuit’s first Jury Summit in 2014), and a member of the Judicial Conference U.S. Court Administration and Case Management Committee from 2013-19. She noted in a September 2019 interview that it was through this service “I came to appreciate that courts, judges, and trial lawyers often take for granted a citizen’s participation in the process and that we really needed to do a whole lot better to ensure that when a juror crossed the threshold into the courthouse, their time and service was respected not just in words, but in practice.” She emphasized the importance of working with jurors “to help minimize all those different impacts that they feel beyond the substantive challenges they face in deciding a case. If we could take away those unnecessary worries, like whether the judge will really recess the case at the end of the day at a promised time, then jurors would be less distracted and able to do a better job with their primary duty.”
U.S. Magistrate Judge Candy Dale of the District of Idaho recalls that Judge Brown’s leadership on the Jury Trial Improvement Committee “enhanced the communication that gets out there to the jury administrators and to the judges, so that now the judges and the jury administrators have access to recommendations for how to make that experience as positive as we can, keeping it in compliance with the law, of course. . . .We made it known to all of the courts that jurors, after their service on a trial that may be very emotional (or more emotional than others, like for example a case involving child pornography), that the jurors can be entitled to some sort of counseling before they end their term. That’s taking care of the jurors and appreciating the fact that what they go through in a trial can be as highly emotional as it is for witnesses and the parties, and for that matter, the judge.”
“The most difficult of my career”
As noted, Judge Brown started in October 2013 the first of two terms of service with the Court Administration and Case Management Committee (CACM ) of the U.S. Judicial Conference. Current chair of the CACM Committee, Judge Audrey Fleissig of the Eastern District of Missouri, describes the broad range of the committee’s work as follows: “The CACM committee covers almost every aspect of case management and court operations within the federal system, from records management to jury issues, to technology to recommendations on how we handle our cases.”
The 2016 and 2017 Malheur trials especially drew on a range of skills Judge Brown developed throughout her career and were, for her CACM Committee colleagues, a real-time workshop for many of the case management issues they were charged to address. Judge Fleissig noted: “I know that we all found it incredible, but not surprising, to hear of her commitment, her display of integrity, and her creativity in dealing with one of the most high profile criminal cases that we saw in the federal system these past few years. . . .She handled that with the whole world watching, which is not an easy thing to do.” Judge Kimberly Frankel agrees: “Whatever it is that [Judge Brown] is having to deal with is what her passion is. Getting this case through, getting it right. She will not scatter herself. . . she really bores in.”
The Malheur trials certainly involved a range of unique features not seen before in the District of Oregon. Because the issues surrounding the armed occupation were hotly contested and received tremendous publicity, it was an unprecedented challenge for Judge Brown, the court’s jury administrator, and all trial counsel to find enough potential jurors who hadn’t already formed opinions about the case. Judge Brown worked with counsel and the jury administrator to develop a series of multiple screening questionnaires for more than 1500 potential jurors to complete and for court and counsel to consider before bringing any jurors to the courthouse for a voir dire process to seat 12 jurors and 8 alternates.
Moreover, 26 defendants all initially wanted a “speedy trial” and at the same time. With so many people to accommodate, a courtroom was remodeled to expand the well so that each party had enough space to sit with their trial team. In turn, there was much less space for the public to attend and observe in person. An “overflow” courtroom was created with a live video feed so that the public and press could observe in real time what was going on in the courtroom where proceedings were taking place.
Once a jury was impaneled, a partial-sequestration plan was developed that kept jurors’ identities “anonymous” to insulate them from outside contacts and that included a transportation plan to drive jurors into and out of the courthouse in a manner that would protect them from unnecessary exposure to ongoing protests outside the front of the courthouse. Through it all, Judge Brown recalls, “There were countless issues around the law that applied to the underlying theories; there were almost-daily challenges to whether I had taken the proper oath when I first swore in as a federal judge and whether the court had any power over the defendants; there were issues of first impression being raised that never arose in other criminal cases; and providing a safe environment for all concerned posed many serious and unrelenting challenges. In sum, these trials were logistically and substantively the most difficult of my career.”
The first Malheur conspiracy trial lasted from September 7 to October 27, 2016. The seven defendants were acquitted. Four more defendants went to jury trial in 2017, but they were all convicted (and their appeals remain pending). Although the government dismissed charges against one defendant, the remaining 14 defendants pled guilty to various charges.
Senior Status and Ongoing Service
Judge Brown assumed Senior Status as a U.S. District Judge on July 27, 2017 and continues with substantial judicial service. In October 2017, in a ceremony at the U.S. Supreme Court, she was recognized as the 2017 recipient of the American Inns of Court Professionalism Award for the Ninth Circuit. On May 19, 2018, Lewis & Clark Law School awarded her an honorary Doctor of Laws degree in “recognition of her distinguished service to the People of Oregon.” In March 2019, the Oregon State Bar Litigation Section honored Judge Brown with its Owen M. Panner Professionalism Award. In May 2019, her judicial portrait was unveiled along with an additional panel of photos that she requested. It shows her judicial lineage as the first woman to follow the six previous judges who served in Judicial Position No. 2. Judge Brown inspired the formation of Oregon Women Judges, a collaboration with other volunteers seeking to preserve the history of Oregon women who have served in the state or federal judiciary. She is also the first judge in the District of Oregon (that we know of) who knits for other judges.
The U.S. District Court of Oregon Historical Society thanks Judge Anna J. Brown for all the ways she creates and preserves history.