Hon. Rebecca Pallmeyer

Rebecca Ruth Pallmeyer is the Chief United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.

Education and Career

Pallmeyer was born September 13, 1954 in Tokyo, Japan. Pallmeyer received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Valparaiso University in 1976 and a Juris Doctor from the University of Chicago Law School in 1979. 

She was a law clerk to Rosalie E. Wahl, Minnesota Supreme Court Justice, from 1979 to 1980. She was in private practice in Chicago, Illinois from 1980 to 1985 at the law firm of Hopkins & Sutter. She was an administrative law judge on the Illinois Human Rights Commission from 1985 to 1991. She was a United States magistrate judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois from 1991 to 1998.

Federal judicial Service 

Pallmeyer was nominated by President Bill Clinton on July 31, 1997, to a seat on the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois vacated by Judge William Thomas Hart. She received her commission on October 22, 1998.

On July 1, 2019 she became Chief Judge of the Northern District of Illinois. She is the first female to do so, in the nearly 200 years of the court’s existence.

Notable Cases

• 2006, Presided over the corruption trial of former Illinois governor George Ryan, whom she sentenced to six-and-a-half years in prison.
• 2010, Pallmeyer ruled to prevent the Chicago Transit Authority from barring commercial advertisements of video games on trains and buses. She found that the CTA’s ban on “M” and “AO” rated video games was not narrowly tailored to exclude protected speech, and thus that it was ‘overbroad’ and violated the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.