David Brookman "Brooks" Smith (born 1951) is a senior judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. He was previously Chief Judge of both the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, and is the only judge in the history of the Third Circuit to have served as both a chief district judge and chief of the Court of Appeals.
Legal career Smith was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania. After graduating from Dickinson School of Law, Smith began his legal career in Altoona, eventually becoming managing partner of Jubelirer, Carothers, Krier, Halpern and Smith. From 1977 to 1979, Smith served as an Assistant District Attorney for Blair County, Pennsylvania. Smith was later named as a special prosecutor, conducting a grand jury investigation from 1981 to 1983 into organized criminal activity in central Pennsylvania. He became Blair County's District Attorney in 1983, and in December 1984, Pennsylvania Governor Dick Thornburgh appointed Smith to a judgeship on the Court of Common Pleas of Blair County. The following year, Smith received the nominations of both the Republican and Democratic Parties for a ten-year term as judge on the same court. In 1987, Chief Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court Robert N. C. Nix Jr. appointed Smith Administrative Judge of the Blair County Courts, charging him with responsibility to address that court's chronic backlog.
Federal judicial service District court service In 1988, President Ronald Reagan, with the advice of Senators Arlen Specter and H. John Heinz III, nominated Smith to the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania.Pres. Nom. 1,260, 100th Cong. (1988). He was confirmed by the Senate on October 14, 1988, and received his commission on October 17, 1988. He served as Chief Judge of that court from 2001 to 2002. His service as a district court judge ended on September 23, 2002 when he was elevated to the court of appeals.
Court of appeals service Smith was nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit by President George W. Bush on September 10, 2001.Pres. Nom. 1,005, 107th Cong. (2002). Having been unanimously rated "well qualified" by the Standing Committee of the American Bar Association, his nomination was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on July 31, 2002. He received his commission on August 2, 2002. He served as chief judge of the Third Circuit from October 1, 2016 to December 4, 2021. Smith assumed senior status on December 4, 2021.
In June 2024, the Supreme Court of the United States appointed Smith as Special Master to oversee a matter filed pursuant to that Court's original jurisdiction under Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution. The case is Texas v. New Mexico and Colorado, No. 141.
Professional affiliations and activities During his years on the federal bench, Judge Smith has served, by appointment of the Chief Justice of the United States, on five committees of the Judicial Conference of the United States, the federal judiciary's policy-making body. During his term as Chief Judge of the Third Circuit, he sat on the Conference's eight-member Executive Committee. In 2013, Chief Justice John Roberts appointed Judge Smith to chair the Committee on Space and Facilities. In that capacity, he led a national space reduction initiative which was the federal judiciary's major cost containment measure. Smith was a member of the Space and Facilities Committee from 2006 until 2016. During his time on the District Court, he served for six years on the Criminal Rules Advisory Committee of the Judicial Conference, beginning in 1993. And in early 2020, Smith became one of four federal judges who were members of the Federal Judiciary's COVID-19 Task Force.COVID-19 (coronavirus) Judiciary Task Force Composition, COVID-19 Judiciary Task Force Hub (last updated 2020-03-17), https://covid-19-judiciary-tf-aousc.hub.arcgis.com/pages/judiciary-task-force
After taking senior status in December 2021, Judge Smith was appointed to membership on both the Committee on Judicial Conduct and Disability and the Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure.
He maintains membership in the American Law Institute, the Federal Judges Association and the Allegheny Bar Association.
International rule-of-law efforts Judge Smith has assisted in efforts to enhance the rule of law in the judicial systems of Central and Eastern Europe.Judge D. Brooks Smith '76 celebrates 25 years on the bench, Penn State Law (Oct. 30, 2013), https://pennstatelaw.psu.edu/news/judge-d-brooks-smith-76-celebrates-25-years-benchJudge D. Brooks Smith, "An Independent Judiciary: If You Can Keep It, University of Chicago Law School (May 29, 2013), https://www.law.uchicago.edu/recordings/judge-d-brooks-smith-independent-judiciary-if-you-can-keep-it He has taught in judicial training sessions in Russia for the Department of State and with the American Bar Association’s Central and Eastern European Legal Initiative; in Bulgaria, Latvia and Albania with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID); in Kosovo with the International Development Law Organization; and in Bosnia and Macedonia with the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Overseas Prosecutorial Development, Assistance and Training. In 2007, he assisted USAID with an assessment of the legal system in the Republic of the Philippines as part of that Agency’s Commercial Law and Institutional Reform initiative; participated in seven judicial ethics trainings for the USAID Judicial Development Project in Chisinau, Moldova; and addressed an International Conference “On the Impact of the European Convention on Human Rights to the Development of the Azerbaijani Legal System,” in Baku, Azerbaijan. In October 2008, Judge Smith returned to Moldova to speak on “The New Judicial Ethics Code: Interpretation and Application.” In 2014, as part of a USAID project in Serbia, Judge Smith delivered two training sessions for over 100 judges and judicial assistants of the Belgrade Misdemeanor Court and the Appellate Misdemeanor Court on the role of judges in a modern, independent judiciary.USAID, Judicial Reform and Government Accountability Project, Annual Report – Year 3 at p.42,
Judge Smith’s rule-of-law seminars and lectures in several former Soviet republics led him to conclude both that the public perception of corruption there “probably outruns the reality” but also that corruption is a serious problem. For example, high-ranking judges in one such republic invited Judge Smith into their private offices where he observed the signs of “telephone justice,” in which a powerful politician calls a judge with instructions on how to dispose of a particular case. As Judge Smith put it, “[n]o judge needs three or more telephones in his private office.”D. Brooks Smith, Promoting the Rule of law and Respecting the Separation of Powers: The Legitimate Role of the American Judiciary Abroad, 7 Ave Maria L. Rev. 1, 10 (2008) The independence and public reputation of judges in developing countries also suffer, he has observed, from many judges’ practice of “speak[ing] to the media, perhaps even commenting on how a prosecutor is handling a particular case,” and from the fact that—in war-torn regions like Kosovo—autocrats may remove sitting judges and replace them with favored officials as patronage.
Noteworthy rulings Smith held in Washington v. Klem, 497 F.3d 272 (3d Cir. 2007), that under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), a Pennsylvania Department of Corrections policy allowing only 10 books in a prisoner’s cell—but permitting additional magazines and newspapers, four large storage boxes of personal property, and more than 10 books if approved for educational purposes—substantially burdened an inmate’s right to freely exercise his religion. Smith wrote that a less restrictive alternative would have been to allow prisoners to choose what property could be kept in their permitted storage units. Petruska v. Gannon Univ., 462 F.3d 294 (3d Cir. 2006), cert. denied, 550 U.S. 903 (2007): Smith adopted the “ministerial exception,” which “operates to bar any claim, the resolution of which would limit a religious institution’s right to select who will perform particular spiritual functions,” to preclude a former chaplain’s Title VII and related claims against the private Catholic college that had employed her. The Supreme Court cited Smith’s opinion with approval in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 565 U.S. 171, 188 n.2, 194–95 n.4 (2012). United States v. Green, 617 F.3d 233 (3d Cir.), cert. denied, 562 U.S. 942 (2010): Smith was confronted with whether a defendant’s conviction for a drug trafficking offense should be vacated based on trial testimony that the defendant had tried to purchase dynamite and threatened to use it to murder an undercover police officer. After surveying the history of the “intrinsic exception” to the rule governing admission of other bad acts evidence, Smith held that the challenged testimony was not intrinsic because it did not directly prove the charged offense. But it was admissible as evidence of uncharged bad acts because, for example, it explained the testifying witness’s motive to cooperate with the Government (fear for officers’ safety). United States v. Tomko, 562 F.3d 558 (3d Cir. 2009) (en banc), involved an appeal of a defendant’s non-custodial sentence and statutory maximum $250,000 fine for income tax invasion. Smith held for the en banc court that the abuse-of-discretion standard applies to appellate review of a district court’s sentence. A court of appeals, Smith wrote, cannot presume that a sentence is unreasonable just because it falls outside the advisory sentencing guidelines range: “if the district court's sentence is procedurally sound, we will affirm it unless no reasonable sentencing court would have imposed the same sentence on that particular defendant for the reasons the district court provided.” In J.S. ex rel. Snyder v. Blue Mountain School Dist., 650 F.3d 915 (3d Cir. 2011) (en banc) (Smith, J., concurring), cert. denied, 565 U.S. 1156 (2012), Smith concurred with the majority’s conclusion that a public school district violated a student’s First Amendment rights by suspending her for creating—from her home computer on a Sunday evening—an internet profile containing her school principal’s photograph and profanity-laced statements insinuating that he was a sex addict and pedophile. But Smith would have held that Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, 393 U.S. 503 (1969), under which school officials may justify a restriction on expression only by showing that the forbidden conduct would materially and substantially disrupt the school’s necessary discipline, does not apply to off-campus speech in the first place. Writing for the en banc majority in B.H. ex rel. Hawk v. Easton Area School District, 725 F.3d 293 (3d Cir. 2013) (en banc), cert. denied, 572 U.S. 1002 (2014), Smith held that a school district’s ban on breast-cancer awareness bracelets violated students’ First Amendment rights because the bracelets could plausibly be commenting on political or social issues. The school district’s ban could not be justified under Bethel School District v. Fraser, 478 U.S. 675 (1986), because the bracelets were not lewd, profane, or offensive. Nor would permitting students to wear them substantially disrupt the school environment, as required under Tinker to justify restrictions on such expression.