Dolores Korman Sloviter L'56

Image courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia, PA.

Dolores Korman Sloviter is an inactive Senior United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Beginning in April 2016, she stopped hearing cases or matters before the court.

Born to a Jewish-American family in 1932 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Judge Sloviter attended Philadelphia High School for Girls. She graduated from Temple University in 1953 with an A.B. and received her Juris Doctor in 1956 from the University of Pennsylvania, where she served on the University of Pennsylvania Law Review and was one of a group of eight women out of a graduating class of 132.

Group photograph of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review staff, 1956. Judge Sloviter is pictured in the front row.

Judge Sloviter was in private law practice with the firm Dilworth, Paxson, Kalish & Green, joining the litigation department, becoming the third lawyer on the three-lawyer team that tried the historic Electrical Cases in 1964. In 1972, she became a professor of law at Temple University in 1972. President Jimmy Carter appointed her to the Third Circuit in 1979 and she subsequently served as Chief Judge from 1991 to 1998, the only woman to have served as Chief Judge of the Third Circuit. 

The Law Alumni Journal of the University of Pennsylvania Law School. This 1980 edition features an article about the careers of Judges Phyllis Kravitch, Dolores Sloviter, and Norma Shapiro, pg. 14-16.

Image courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia, PA.

In 1996 Judge Sloviter was a member of a three judge panel of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania which heard a challenge to the Communications Decency Act, Title V of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, on grounds that it abridged the free speech provisions of the First Amendment. On June 12, 1996, their decision blocked enforcement of the act, ruling that it was unconstitutional, in addition to being unworkable and impractical from a technical standpoint. The "Findings of Fact" document — written for the case by Judges Sloviter, Ronald L. Buckwalter, and Stewart R. Dalzell — was posted on the internet and cited as a lucid introduction to the internet and related software. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld their ruling on June 18, 1997.

Biography of Judge Dolores Sloviter was taken from the American Bar Association Women Trailblazers in the Law Project, a project initiated by the ABA Commission on Women in the Profession and sponsored by the ABA Senior Lawyers Division.

Additional information about the life and career of Judge Dolores Sloviter: 

• Oral History of Judge Dolores Sloviter; On Behalf of Women Trailblazers in the Law, A Project of The American Bar Association.

• "Interview with Judge Dolores Sloviter" (1999). Legal Oral History Project. University of Pennsylvania Law School.

• “Judge Dolores K. Sloviter’s Antitrust Legacy,” by Carl W. Hittinger (LAW '79) and Tyson Y. Herrold, The Temple Q-10