Anna Diggs Taylor

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Anna Diggs Taylor was a United States district judge for the Eastern District of Michigan. Born Anna Katherine Johnston on December 9, 1932, in Washington, D.C., she earned a BA from Barnard College in 1954 and an LLB from Yale Law School in 1957.

Her early career included work in the Department of Labor, as an assistant prosecutor in Wayne County, and as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Eastern District of Michigan. She also worked as a legislative aide for U.S. Representative Charles Diggs, practiced law privately in Detroit, and taught at Wayne State University.

Taylor was nominated by President Jimmy Carter to a new seat on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan in 1979. She was confirmed by the Senate and received her commission on November 2, 1979. She served as Chief Judge from 1996 to 1998 and assumed senior status on December 31, 1998, continuing to serve until her death on November 4, 2017, in Grosse Pointe Woods, Michigan, after an illness.

Personal life: She was married to U.S. Representative Charles Diggs from 1960 to 1971, and later married S. Martin Taylor in 1976.

In 2006, Taylor became the first federal judge to rule on the NSA’s warrantless surveillance. In ACLU v. NSA, she ruled that the NSA’s domestic wiretapping without court approval violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and was unconstitutional, issuing a permanent injunction to stop it (the ruling was stayed pending appeal). She declined to rule on the legality of an NSA call database for state-secret reasons. Some critics questioned the decision, and the Sixth Circuit later partly overturned it, saying the plaintiffs lacked standing and voiding the wiretapping portion of the ruling.