Fordham Law alumnus Kevin Thomas Duffy ’58 was profiled in the March 2016 issue of The Federal Lawyer.
Judge Duffy has impressed litigants, lawyers, jurors and his colleagues as a jurist of rare legal acumen who gets right to the core of a case, a human being of unusual common sense, humor, and humility.” Hon. John F. Keenan wrote those words of praise 24 years ago, on the 20th anniversary of Judge Kevin Thomas Duffy as a U.S. district judge. Judge Duffy is now in his 44th year on the bench, and Judge Keenan’s description remains as apt as it did in 1992.
The first 20 years of Judge Duffy’s judicial career were famously marked by large, complex, criminal trials involving organized crime, narcotics, murder, extortion, and RICO charges, as well as crimes arising from domestic terrorism by the Black Liberation Army. Upon his appointment, he was the youngest member of the federal judiciary. And in his first year on the bench, he was assigned “one of the most complicated and difficult organized crime narcotics cases ever tried in Manhattan federal court” (i.e., United States v. Tramunti, which had 31 defendants). All of the convictions were affirmed.