Ellen Segal Huvelle

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Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle served as a trial judge in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia for 20 years, having been appointed by President William Clinton. By appointment by the Chief Justice of the United States, she also served for seven years as a judge on the Multidistrict Litigation Panel and as a member of the Judicial Resources Committee and the Judicial Conference Committee on Criminal Law.

Judge Huvelle was awarded the American Inns of Court Professionalism Award for the D.C. Circuit in 2017 and the St. Thomas More Award by Boston College Law School in 2019. She has taught trial practice at Harvard Law School and at the University of Virginia School of Law, and she taught a seminar at the Peking University School of Transnational Law in Shenzhen, China, on Prosecuting Public Corruption Cases in the United States. She also served on the faculty of the CEELI Institute for training Tunisian judges and participated in several State Department sponsored US-China Legal Experts Dialogues and US-China Human Rights Dialogues in both the United States and Beijing.

Judge Huvelle began her legal career as a civil and criminal litigator with the law firm of Williams & Connolly, where she became the first woman partner in 1984. Before joining the federal bench, she served ten years as an Associate Judge of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, having been appointed by President George H.W. Bush in 1990.

She received her J.D. from Boston College Law School, graduating magna cum laude, and she served as law clerk to Chief Justice Edward F. Hennessey of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. She was a member of the American Law Institute and the Edward Bennett Williams Inn of Court, and on the Board of the Abramson Scholarship Foundation, which mentors D.C. high school graduates who are attending college.

As a result of an injury, Judge Huvelle went on inactive status in 2020, and she fully retired from the bench in 2025. She is now a member of the steering committee of the Washington Litigation Group, a non-profit law firm dedicated to the defense of the rule of law.