Jane L. Kelly

Early life and education

Jane Louise Kelly was born in 1964, to Richard and Judith C. Kelly, and was raised in Greencastle, Indiana. She received a bachelor of arts degree, summa cum laude, in 1987, from Duke University, and a J.D. degree, cum laude, from Harvard Law School, in 1991. She studied pediatrics for one year in New Zealand under a Fulbright Scholarship in between Duke and Harvard. Her graduating class included Barack Obama, who became the 44th president of the United States.

Career

After graduation, Kelly clerked for Donald J. Porter, chief judge of the United States District Court for the District of South Dakota in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. She then clerked for David R. Hansen, a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. During the 1993–94 academic year, Kelly taught as a visiting instructor at the University of Illinois College of Law, while also working on a LL.M. degree, which she did not complete, at the same institution.

Kelly became an assistant federal public defender in the Northern District of Iowa, in 1994 and served as the supervising attorney in the Cedar Rapids, Iowa office, from 1999 to 2013.

Federal judicial service

On January 31, 2013, President Barack Obama nominated Kelly to serve as a United States circuit judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, to the seat vacated by Judge Michael Joseph Melloy, who took senior status, on February 1, 2013. Her nomination was reported on a voice vote of the Senate Judiciary Committee, on March 22, 2013. The Senate confirmed Kelly, in a 96–0 vote, on April 24, 2013. She received her commission, on April 25, 2013.

In March 2016, Kelly was reported as a potential nominee for the Supreme Court to replace the late justice, Antonin Scalia.

Personal life

In 2004, Kelly was attacked while jogging in a park in Cedar Rapids, brutally beaten and left barely conscious; her assailant was never identified.