Robert Lowell Miller Jr.: the federal judge from South Bend

1950 –

Robert Lowell Miller Jr. (born 1950): born in South Bend on 21 November 1950 — the Federal Judicial Center's Biographical Directory of Federal Judges carries the birth in those words — and born and raised here, as the Congressional Record's tribute puts it. Northwestern University gave him the B.A. in 1972 and the Indiana University School of Law at Indianapolis the J.D., summa cum laude, in 1975. He clerked for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Indiana that year, and in 1975, at twenty-five, he was appointed a judge of the St. Joseph Superior Court — the county's own court — serving a decade, the last years of it, 1981 to 1983, as that court's chief judge. President Ronald Reagan nominated him to the federal bench on 23 October 1985; he was commissioned on 17 December 1985 as a United States district judge for the Northern District of Indiana, sitting in South Bend.

The federal career: Miller was the district's chief judge from 2003 to 2010, presided over four multidistrict litigation proceedings, and served as the Seventh Circuit's district-judge representative to the Judicial Conference of the United States, 1997 to 2000. In January 2022 the judges of his court resolved to name his South Bend courtroom — the third-floor courtroom of the Robert A. Grant Federal Building on South Main Street — the Robert Lowell Miller, Jr. Courtroom. He took senior status on 11 January 2016, was appointed by Chief Justice John Roberts in 2020 to a term on the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, and retired at the end of August 2023, after forty-eight years on one bench or another, all of them in this city. Off the bench he wrote the state's evidence law into its standard books — The Courtroom Handbook on Indiana Evidence and Indiana Evidence — and the honors followed the work home: the Sagamore of the Wabash in 2006, induction into the South Bend Alumni Hall of Fame the same year, and the American Inns of Court's Professionalism Award for the Seventh Circuit in 2023. A living person, retired from the bench; the entry states the official record.

His father, kept distinct: Robert L. Miller Sr. (born 1920) is a different judge, and the record of this city holds both. The elder Miller was born at Wilkinson, Indiana, was a Notre Dame senior when Pearl Harbor was attacked, served aboard the carrier USS Essex, took his Notre Dame law degree in 1947, practiced in South Bend, and was appointed a St. Joseph Superior Court judge in the early 1970s — the bench his son would join later in the same decade. After his own judicial service he returned to practice for decades; the Robert L. Miller, Sr. Veterans Center, dedicated on Veterans Day 2011, is named for the father's work with homeless veterans, not the son's, and Notre Dame's alumni magazine profiled him in 2015, at ninety-four, still at work in South Bend. Father and son, two generations of this county's bench, are entered together here only so that no reader merges them.

Sources:

1. Federal Judicial Center, Biographical Directory of Federal Judges, "Miller, Robert Lowell, Jr." — the South Bend birth, the education, the 1985 nomination and commission, the chief judgeship 2003–2010, the senior status of 11 January 2016, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review service 2020–2023.
2. U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Indiana, press release, 3 August 2023 — the St. Joseph Superior Court service from 1975 at age twenty-five, the chief judgeship 1981–83, the 2022 courtroom naming, the August 2023 retirement, the 2006 Alumni Hall of Fame induction.
3. Congressional Record, vol. 169 (26 July 2023), Hon. Rudy Yakym III — "Born and raised in South Bend," the retirement tribute, the Professionalism Award and the Alumni Hall of Fame.
4. American Inns of Court (2023) — the Professionalism Award for the Seventh Circuit, the evidence treatises, the 2006 Sagamore of the Wabash.
5. Notre Dame Magazine / Echoes (July 2015) — the elder Miller: the 1920 Wilkinson birth, the Essex service, the 1947 law degree, the Superior Court appointment, the veterans' center dedication of Veterans Day 2011.