Timothy B. Dyk

Timothy Belcher Dyk (born February 14, 1937) is an American lawyer and jurist serving since 2000 as a U.S. circuit judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

Education and early career

Dyk was born on February 14, 1937, in Boston. His mother was the women's suffragist and psychologist Ruth Dyk. His father, Walter Dyk, studied and wrote about the Navajo Indians. He graduated from Harvard College in 1958 with a Bachelor of Arts, cum laude, and from Harvard Law School in 1961 with Juris Doctor, magna cum laude, where he was a member of the Harvard Law Review.

Dyk clerked for retired United States Supreme Court Justices Stanley Forman Reed and Harold Hitz Burton in 1961 and 1962, and clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren from 1962 to 1963. While clerking for Chief Justice Warren, Dyk came across a handwritten pro se petition for a writ of certiorari from a prisoner in Florida named Clarence Earl Gideon asserting that the trial court had improperly denied his constitutional right to a lawyer. Chief Justice Warren had specifically instructed Dyk to look out for a case raising the right-to-counsel issue.

Private practice

Dyk worked in private practice as an attorney in Washington, D.C., from 1964 until 2000, first with Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, where he became a partner, and later with Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue, where he was chair of the Issues and Appeals practice. He was a lecturer at the Georgetown University Law Center in 1983, 1986, and 1989, a visiting professor and lecturer at the University of Virginia School of Law from 1984 to 1985 and from 1987 to 1988, and was also a lecturer at Yale Law School in 1986, 1987, and 1989.

Immediately prior to being nominated to the Federal Circuit in 1998, Dyk was a partner at Jones Day, specializing in First Amendment law. One case saw Dyk arguing for the release to the public of the cockpit recordings of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. In an August 4, 1997, article in The Washington Post, Dyk was identified as one of "only a handful of repeat performers considered heavyweights" in representing clients before the United States Supreme Court. Dyk also made the news in the early and mid-1990s for his desire to open federal courtrooms to news media organizations. After the Judicial Conference of the United States voted on September 20, 1994, to keep cameras out of federal courtrooms by ending a pilot program that had allowed cameras at civil trials and appeals in eight courts, Dyk told the Washington Post that "they appear to have slammed the door on a very important experiment, which, if it had been expanded, would have benefited people throughout the country." He received his commission on May 25, 2000.