Roy, Elsijane Trimble, 1916-2007

Elsijane Trimble Roy was born in Lonoke on April 2, 1916, the daughter of Elsie Jane Walls and Thomas Clark Trimble III. Her father and her grandfather, Thomas Clark Trimble II were attorneys and practiced with Seanator Joseph T. Robinson. She enrolled at the University of Arkansas in 1934, majored in law, graduating in 1939. She was admitted to the state bar in 1939. In April 1966, she became the state's first woman judge, occupying the position of justice for Arkansas's Sixth District court through December of that year. From February to May, 1967, she served as the state's assistant attorney general. From June 1967 to 1975, she sequentially served as a clerk to judges Gordon E. Young and Paul X. Williams of the United States District Court. In 1975 Governor David Pryor appointed her an associate justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court. Judge Roy, the first woman appointed to the state Supreme Court, retained that position until 1977, when Governor Pryor nominated her for the position of justice of Arkansas's Eastern District of the Eighth United States Judicial Circuit. The post had been held by her father from 1937 to 1956. Receiving the endorsements of United States senators Dale Bumpers and John B. McClellan, she was appointed by President Jimmy Carter, and thus became Arkansas's first woman federal judge. She remained in that position until her retirement in 1988, when she assumed the status of senior judge.