For 20 years, Judge Frank Hull has served in a courthouse named for Elbert P. Tuttle, for whom Hull once clerked and whom she has called her greatest influence in the law.
But after two decades as a circuit judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in Atlanta, Hull, 68, has decided to slow down. She notified the White House in a July 4 letter that she intends to retire from regular active service and take senior status at the end of December or earlier, if her successor is selected and confirmed.
Hull said in her letter that she intends "to continue to render substantial judicial service as a senior judge."
Hull's decision to take senior status is the culmination of a judicial career that spans more than 30 years and a legal career that spans more than 40. After clerking for Tuttle, Hull joined what was then Atlanta's Powell Goldstein, Frazer & Murphy in 1974. She spent 10 years there, four of them as the firm's first female partner. Hull left Powell Goldstein in 1984 to become a Fulton County State Court judge. Six years later, she rose to become a Fulton County Superior Court judge.
By 1993, Hull's name had surfaced for another judgeship, this one on the U.S. District Court bench in Atlanta. By then, she had served with Hillary Rodham Clinton on the American Bar Association's Commission on Women in the [Legal] Profession. Clinton had been the inaugural chair of the 12-member commission after its creation in 1987. Hull was also an attendee at what was then known as Renaissance Weekend, an annual New Year's event at Hilton Head Island, S.C., that attracted hundreds of leaders in business, law, the arts and politics, including Hillary and Bill Clinton.
Hull was confirmed in 1994. She had been on the federal trial bench just three years when her name surfaced as a candidate for the Eleventh Circuit to replace Phyllis Kravitch, who had just taken senior status and was the first woman to serve on a federal appeals court in the Deep South. In 1997, Clinton elevated Hull to the federal appellate bench.
Of the hundreds of cases Hull has reviewed, at least three garnered extensive national attention. In 2005, Hull was on the appellate panel that considered the case of Theresa "Terri" Schiavo a profoundly brain-damaged Florida woman whose fate became the center of a national political and religious firestorm over whether, and for how long, she should intravenously receive nourishment.
Hull joined with fellow Circuit Judge Ed Carnes in siding with the lower courts that had refused to order Schiavo's feeding tube be restored.