Project Spotlight
In My Honor: One Woman’s Trailblazing Path to the Federal Bench (University Press of Kansas, April 2027), Rosemary Collyer tells about her journey to becoming the nation’s most powerful prosecutor against unfair labor practices and a federal district judge in the District of Columbia.
Born just after the close of World War II, she grew up in a large Irish Catholic family in a New York suburb and witnessed some of the tensions of the early civil rights era through high school and college. She closely followed her father’s work as a Bloomingdale’s executive and his two terms as mayor of Stamford, Connecticut, as he advocated for human and civil rights.
She never planned to go into the law; friends and colleagues had to convince her. She loved it. She soon became the first woman to chair the Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission, serve as general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, and chair the management committee of a major law firm. She was just the eighth woman to join the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia since its start in 1801, and the third woman to serve as presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
My Approach
I worked with Judge Collyer for several years, enjoying her sense of humor, humility, and honesty. I also admired her strength as she valiantly fought a debilitating illness while we collaborated on her book. We talked weekly over coffee at her home for nearly a year before beginning to write. She died in early June 2026, having seen the writing through the final stages. She was awed that University Press of Kansas would publish her book, My Honor: One Woman’s Trailblazing Path to the Federal Bench (in April 2027). She hoped her story would be treasured by her family and friends, but also that her words and thoughts would be instructive for younger and future lawyers and jurists. She also hoped her story might help Americans seeking to understand the underpinnings of their country’s democracy and the vital work of federal judges seeking to protect it.
“At a moment when federal judges are attacked as partisans in robes, Rosemary Collyer’s memoir is the perfect rejoinder.”
Judge David S. Tatel (Ret.), author of Vision: A Memoir of Blindness and Justice
“Mindful of her fallibility but also undaunted by it, she became the kind of judge the rule of law requires: determined, intelligent, fair, courageous.”
Daniel R. Ernst, Professor of Legal History, Georgetown University Law Center
“Even a casual reader of this memoir will be awed by her courage and dedication to the law and the security of our country and be delighted by her humility and sense of humor.”
John E. Higgins, Jr. coeditor of The Developing Labor Law, Sixth Edition