D. Brooks Smith

David Brookman "Brooks" Smith (born 1951) is a senior judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. He was previously Chief Judge of both the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, and is the only judge in the history of the Third Circuit to have served as both a chief district judge and chief of the Court of Appeals.

Legal career Smith was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania. After graduating from Dickinson School of Law, Smith began his legal career in Altoona, eventually becoming managing partner of Jubelirer, Carothers, Krier, Halpern and Smith. From 1977 to 1979, Smith served as an Assistant District Attorney for Blair County, Pennsylvania. Smith was later named as a special prosecutor, conducting a grand jury investigation from 1981 to 1983 into organized criminal activity in central Pennsylvania. He became Blair County's District Attorney in 1983, and in December 1984, Pennsylvania Governor Dick Thornburgh appointed Smith to a judgeship on the Court of Common Pleas of Blair County. The following year, Smith received the nominations of both the Republican and Democratic Parties for a ten-year term as judge on the same court. In 1987, Chief Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court Robert N. C. Nix Jr. appointed Smith Administrative Judge of the Blair County Courts, charging him with responsibility to address that court's chronic backlog.

Federal judicial service District court service In 1988, President Ronald Reagan, with the advice of Senators Arlen Specter and H. John Heinz III, nominated Smith to the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania. He was confirmed by the Senate on October 14, 1988, and received his commission on October 17, 1988. He served as Chief Judge of that court from 2001 to 2002. His service as a district court judge ended on September 23, 2002 when he was elevated to the court of appeals.

Court of appeals service Smith was nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit by President George W. Bush on September 10, 2001. Having been unanimously rated "well qualified" by the Standing Committee of the American Bar Association, his nomination was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on July 31, 2002. He received his commission on August 2, 2002. Smith assumed senior status on December 4, 2021. In 2013, Chief Justice John Roberts appointed Judge Smith to chair the Committee on Space and Facilities. In that capacity, he led a national space reduction initiative which was the federal judiciary's major cost containment measure. Smith was a member of the Space and Facilities Committee from 2006 until 2016. During his time on the District Court, he served for six years on the Criminal Rules Advisory Committee of the Judicial Conference, beginning in 1993. And in early 2020, Smith became one of four federal judges who were members of the Federal Judiciary's COVID-19 Task Force.

After taking senior status in December 2021, Judge Smith was appointed to membership on both the Committee on Judicial Conduct and Disability and the Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure.

He maintains membership in the American Law Institute, the Federal Judges Association and the Allegheny Bar Association.

International rule-of-law efforts Judge Smith has assisted in efforts to enhance the rule of law in the judicial systems of Central and Eastern Europe. He has taught in judicial training sessions in Russia for the Department of State and with the American Bar Association’s Central and Eastern European Legal Initiative; in Bulgaria, Latvia and Albania with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID); in Kosovo with the International Development Law Organization; and in Bosnia and Macedonia with the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Overseas Prosecutorial Development, Assistance and Training.

Judge Smith’s rule-of-law seminars and lectures in several former Soviet republics led him to conclude both that the public perception of corruption there “probably outruns the reality” but also that corruption is a serious problem. For example, high-ranking judges in one such republic invited Judge Smith into their private offices where he observed the signs of “telephone justice,” in which a powerful politician calls a judge with instructions on how to dispose of a particular case. As Judge Smith put it, “o judge needs three or more telephones in his private office.” The independence and public reputation of judges in developing countries also suffer, he has observed, from many judges’ practice of “speak[ing] to the media, perhaps even commenting on how a prosecutor is handling a particular case,” and from the fact that—in war-torn regions like Kosovo—autocrats may remove sitting judges and replace them with favored officials as patronage. A special session of Court which was attended by judges of the Third Circuit and the Western District of Pennsylvania was held in Pittsburgh on April 21, 2022, to officially name the lobby.

Judge Smith delivered commencement addresses at, and had conferred on him honorary Doctor of Human Letters degrees by: Mount Aloysius College in 2012, Waynesburg University in 2022; and St. Francis University in 2025.

Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts presented Judge Smith with its Judge Justin Johnson Award in 2023. That award bears the name of a distinguished Pittsburgh legal practitioner who, in 1980 became only the second African American to be appointed to Pennsylvania’s Superior Court.

Smith has been named an Alumni Fellow by the Penn State Alumni Association, and in 2017 was given the Distinguished Alumni Award, the highest honor bestowed by Penn State on an alumnus. Penn State Law presented Judge Smith its first ever Leadership Award in 2016. And in 1996, the Blair and Bedford County Central Labor Council named Smith its person of the year.

For his work as one of a two-prosecutor team investigating organized crime in Central Pennsylvania in the early 1980s, Smith received a commendation from the Commissioner of the Pennsylvania State Police which called him the investigation's "legal shepherd."