State Supreme Court Chief Justice William M. Barker has been tapped by a Tennessee university and an Ohio law school as recipient of their 2006 Distinguished Alumni Awards.
“To be Distinguished Alumni at one school is humbling, but to chosen for the award at both the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and the University of Cincinnati School of Law is an unimaginable honor,” Barker said. “These schools have a special place in my life and heart and both are outstanding institutions.”
The chief justice will receive the award from the law school April 21 at a luncheon in Cincinnati to which all alumni have been invited. He will be honored by his undergraduate university May 5 at a banquet at the Chattanooga Golf and Country Club.
Barker, a native of Chattanooga, received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in 1964 and earned his law degree from the University Of Cincinnati School Of Law in 1967. Following service as a captain in the United States Army Medical Corps, he entered the private practice of law.
In 1983, he was appointed Circuit Court judge by Gov. Lamar Alexander and was elected to the position by Hamilton County voters in 1984 and 1990. During his service as a Circuit Court judge, Barker was consistently given the highest rating by the Chattanooga Bar Association in polls of its members.
In 1995, Barker was appointed to the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals. He was elected to the appellate court the following year and served until his 1998 appointment to the Tennessee Supreme Court. He was elected to an eight-year term in 1998.
Barker, who chairs the Tennessee Judicial Council, was elected chief justice by his colleagues on the court in October 2005.
From 1984 until 2002, Justice Barker served as an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Political Science at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. In 2000, he was named Outstanding Adjunct Professor by the Student Government Association.
He is a frequent lecturer at legal seminars on the subject of ethics. Barker and his wife Catherine, a teacher, traveled to Slovakia and the Czech Republic in 2005 where they had been invited to lecture at several schools, including two Slovakian law schools. He taught the prospective lawyers in the former communist nations about the United States and Tennessee legal systems.