Florence Ellinwood Allen

Florence Ellinwood Allen (born March 23, 1884, Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S.—died September 12, 1966, Waite Hill, Ohio) was an American jurist who was the first woman to serve on the bench in a number of state courts and one federal jurisdiction.

Allen was a descendant of American Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen. She graduated from Western Reserve University’s College for Women in 1904 and for two years studied music in Berlin. An injury prevented the development of a concert career, and from 1906 to 1909 she was a music critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. In 1908 she received a master’s degree in political science from Western Reserve.

Allen then turned to the study of law, first at the University of Chicago and then at New York University, graduating from the latter in 1913. She was admitted to the Ohio bar in 1914. While establishing a law practice in Cleveland, she worked also for the Legal Aid Society and campaigned strenuously for women’s suffrage. In 1919 she was appointed assistant prosecutor of Cuyahoga county; in 1920 she was elected a judge of the court of common pleas, and in 1922 she was elected to the Ohio Supreme Court. In each of those posts she was the first female incumbent, and, in the last, to which she was reelected by a large majority in 1928, she was the first woman to sit on any court of last resort. In March 1934 Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt named Allen to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit; she was the first woman to sit on any federal bench of general jurisdiction. She retained that seat for 25 years, the last as chief judge, until her retirement in October 1959.

Among the thousands of cases she heard was the constitutional testing of the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1938. Among her published works were This Constitution of Ours (1940), The Treaty as an Instrument of Legislation (1952), and a volume of memoirs, To Do Justly (1965).