Oldest US Judge Marks 100th Birthday, Then It’s Back to Work

The federal court in Brooklyn celebrated Senior Judge I. Leo Glasser’s 100th birthday on Wednesday. A day later, he was scheduled to be back on the bench for a criminal sentencing.

Glasser turns 100 on April 6 and is the oldest judge currently serving on the federal bench, according to data from the Administrative Office of the US Courts. He isn’t the first centenarian ever to serve on the federal bench, but it remains a small club.

Only five other judges born in the 20th century served past 100, according to federal judiciary data, including Wesley Brown of the US District Court in Wichita, who was the oldest active federal judge at the time he died at 104 in 2012. (Joseph William Woodrough, a federal appeals court judge born in 1873, also served until his death at 104 in 1977).

Glasser was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981 and took senior status, a form of semi-retirement, in 1993 after overseeing one of his most high-profile trials involving mob boss John Gotti.

“He lives and breathes the law every day and I think it brings him great joy,” said Larry Krantz, who was Glasser’s first clerk in 1982.

Glasser already had an Eastern District of New York courtroom named in his honor in 2022 when he turned 98. At the time, Judge Raymond Dearie, described Glasser as “our resident shrink, rabbi, conscience, and fan club.”

On Wednesday, Glasser, wearing one of his signature bow ties, sat beside Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor at a ceremony at the EDNY courthouse. Glasser spoke for about 20 minutes and listened as colleagues read congratulatory letters from Attorney General Merrick Garland and Chief Justice John Roberts, Krantz said.

Glasser still retains his storyteller skills and a self-effacing humor, joking that at his age, he doesn’t buy green bananas, Krantz said.

Glasser was born on the kitchen table of his family’s apartment in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, his son said at the 2022 event in his honor.

He keeps a framed copy of his grandfather’s citizenship papers issued by the court in which he still sits more than a century later, in his chambers.

His father, who read and spoke Yiddish, owned a store that sold slaughtered chickens. Glasser attended City College at night while working as a newspaper copyboy.

Glasser joined the US Army during World War II where his knowledge of Yiddish came in handy given its similarity to German. In a 2014 interview, he vividly recalled arriving at the Dachau concentration camp not long after its liberation.

“I saw the crematoria and the ovens and the barb wire trenches,” Glasser said. “Until then, I had no idea.”

After the war, Glasser earned his law degree from Brooklyn Law School, where he went on to teach for decades and ultimately served as dean. He became a family court judge in New York City in 1969.

Glasser was best known on the federal bench for overseeing the Gotti trial in the early 1990s, enduring insults from the defendant after threatening to move the proceedings out of New York and disqualifying Gotti’s longtime lawyer, Bruce Cutler.

He faced particular challenges handling an anonymous and fully sequestered jury, some of whom requested conjugal visits from spouses. Gotti was ultimately found guilty and spent the rest of his life in prison.

Asked in 2014 why he continued to serve, Glasser replied, “if senior judges all decided to go fishing, I think the federal judiciary would be in a great deal of difficulty.”

Senior judges “perform a significant service to the judiciary, and to the country by extension,” he added.