David Aldrich Nelson

David Aldrich Nelson (August 14, 1932 – October 1, 2010) was a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

Early life

Born in Watertown, New York to son of Carlton Low Nelson and Irene Demetria Aldrich Nelson, Nelson was educated in the public schools of East Aurora, New York, and at Hamilton College, from which he was graduated in 1954 as valedictorian, with an Artium Baccalaureus degree. Nelson began his legal studies that year as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Cambridge in England. En route to England, he met Mary Dickson, a recent Vassar College graduate who also was a Cambridge-bound Fulbright Scholar. The couple became engaged in England; they were married for fifty-four years and had three children. Nelson took first class honours at Cambridge in 1955, on the strength of which he was retrospectively made a scholar of his college, Peterhouse.

Education and military service

Nelson received his Bachelor of Laws from Harvard Law School, cum laude, in 1958. Admitted to the bar in that year, he began the practice of law in Cleveland, Ohio with the firm of Squire, Sanders & Dempsey. From 1959 to 1962 he served on active duty with the United States Air Force at the Pentagon as a U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Attorney-advisor, Office of General Counsel. He remained in the Air Force Reserve for several years thereafter, attaining the rank of major.