Senior U.S. Judge Rosemary Pooler, a longtime federal judge from Syracuse who blazed a trail for women on court benches, has died, a court clerk said Thursday.
Pooler was 85.
In 1991, she became the first woman elected to the state Supreme Court’s fifth judicial district, which includes Syracuse.
In 1994, President Bill Clinton appointed Pooler as the first woman to serve as a U.S. district judge in the Northern District of New York, which covers 32 counties in Upstate New York.
Four years later, she was appointed as a U.S. Circuit judge for the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The court is one level below the U.S. Supreme Court. She was the first person from Onondaga County to sit on the appeals court since 1907.
In October 2021, Pooler took senior status and stayed on the court.
“She is an extraordinary woman and a great jurist,” Catherine O’Hagan Wolfe, the clerk of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, said Thursday. “We will miss her dearly.”
Before taking the bench, Pooler spent nearly two decades running for elected offices at the county, state and federal levels. Besides her 1990 election to state Supreme Court, Pooler won one other election – to the Syracuse Common Council in 1973.
She also ran for Congress twice, narrowly losing to Republican opponent George Wortley by fewer than 1,000 votes in 1986.
In 1988, she lost to Jim Walsh, who would go on to serve 20 years in Congress.
Former Syracuse Mayor Stephanie Miner on Thursday remembered being introduced to Pooler as a child by her grandmother, who thought the city council candidate at the time was “the best thing since sliced bread.”
Miner met Pooler again as a young lawyer. Pooler was a U.S. district judge and a warm and welcoming presence for Miner.
“At that time, it was still unusual for women to be a lawyer,” she said.
For Miner, Pooler was the “physical representation that you could excel and be welcomed and that there was room for you. Often time you’d walk in courtrooms and you’d be the only woman there.”
The two later became close friends. Miner asked Pooler to swear her in as a city councilor and later as mayor.
“She was such a great model for anybody in Syracuse. You could go around the country and say, ‘Rosemary Pooler is my neighbor’ and people who were in the legal world would say what a tremendous mind she had and what a credit to judges she was.”
In her later years, Pooler split her time between Syracuse and New York City, Miner said.
“She had a storied career, but she was also such a warm and caring and unique person,” Miner said. “The kind of person who could walk into a room and just light it up with her wit and her smile and laugh and her ability to talk about the human condition.”