Hon. John Tunheim

United States District Court for the District of Minnesota

The Honorable John R. Tunheim has served for over 27 years as United States District Judge in the District of Minnesota and served as Chief Judge from 2015 until July 1, 2022. From 1994-1998, Judge Tunheim served as Chair of the U.S. Assassination Records Review Board, an independent federal agency empowered to declassify the remaining secret records of the assassination of President Kennedy. Before his appointment as a federal judge, he served as Minnesota’s Chief Deputy Attorney General and Solicitor General, and in the U.S. Senate, as Staff Assistant to U.S. Senator Hubert H. Humphrey. He has devoted much of his judicial career to helping develop the rule of law in new democracies, including drafting the Kosovo Constitution and advising over 45 countries on the development of the rule of law, on counter-terrorism measures and on judicial independence, among many other topics. He is a graduate of Concordia College and the University of Minnesota Law School, where he served as President of the Law Review. He was Chair of the U.S. Judicial Conference Committee on Court Administration and Case Management from 2005 to 2009 and currently serves as a Member of the U.S. Judicial Conference. He has served as Chair of the ABA’s Government and Public Sector Lawyers Division and the National Conference of Federal Trial Judges. He is currently a member of the IT Security Task Force established by the Judicial Conference to reform the judiciary’s IT practices. He is a member of the Board of Advisors for the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota and a former Chair of the Concordia College Board of Regents. Judge Tunheim also serves on the Minnesota Historical Society Executive Council. He has presided over three mass tort Multidistrict Litigation consolidated cases and is now presiding over two major antitrust MDLs.

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