Judge Thomas W. Phillips retired on July 6, 2013, which was also his 70th birthday. Judge Phillips became a U.S. magistrate judge in 1991. He was appointed by President George W. Bush to a seat on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee in 2002.
Judge Phillips was honored for his service on the bench at a July 11 ceremony in Knoxville at which his portrait was unveiled. The portrait will hang in the Howard J. Baker Jr. U.S. Courthouse in Knoxville, where Judge Phillips presided. Judge Phillips has taken senior inactive status.
A native of Oneida, Tennessee, Judge Phillips earned his undergraduate degree at Berea College in 1965 before earning his law degree at Vanderbilt in 1969. He served in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General Corps from 1969-73 and earned an LL.M. from George Washington University. Before his appointment to the federal bench, he was in private practice in Oneida and Knoxville and worked part-time the county attorney for Scott County.
Judge Phillips steered his brother, Paul Phillips ‘75, to Vanderbilt Law School when the younger Phillips was considering a career as a minister. Paul Phillips retired in 2012 after serving as the district attorney for Tennessee’s Eighth Judicial District for 33 years.
Judge Phillips was in the headlines in 2010 when he presided over a case he recalls as among his most interesting—an email invasion case involving Sarah Palin, then governor of Alaska and the Republican vice presidential candidate. In September 2008, a University of Tennessee student hacked into Palin’s email account. The young man was ultimately convicted of destroying records to impede a federal investigation and unauthorized access of a protected computer. “The issues were unique—an unintentional hacking of another individual’s email and the information it contained,” Judge Phillips told a Knoxville News Sentinel reporter.
Judge Phillips and his wife, Dorothy, live in Oneida.