Judge Deborah A. Batts, who passed away unexpectedly in February 2020, was a trailblazer in the United States legal community as the first openly gay federal judge.

Deborah Batts' life was full of historic firsts—perhaps the best known is the fact that she was the first openly LGBT judge to be appointed to the federal bench, in 1994 to the Southern District ...

was “so Deborah A. Batts, because Debbie was all about the truth.” After many rounds of interviews, the first Bush administration said that Batts’s “view of what a federal judge should be ...