Honorable John R. Tunheim

Honorable John R. Tunheim has been a United States District Judge since 1995. One of seven judges in the District of Minnesota, he handles both criminal and civil trials for which federal courts have jurisdiction. From February 1994 to September 1998, Tunheim served as chairman of the U.S. Assassination Records Review Board, an independent federal agency responsible for ensuring and facilitating the review and public disclosure of government records related to the assassination of President Kennedy. The Review Board completed its work in 1998, presenting its Final Report to the President and establishing a legacy of over 4 million pages of materials concerning the assassination, now available to the public at the National Archives in College Park, Md. Prior to his appointment as a federal judge, Tunheim served nine years as chief deputy attorney general of Minnesota, responsible for supervising and directing all operations of the office. He also served as Minnesota’s solicitor general and manager of the Attorney General's Public Affairs Litigation Division from 1984-1986, spent three years in private litigation practice in St. Paul, and served as law clerk to Senior U.S. District Judge Earl Larson. He is a 1980 cum laude graduate of the University of Minnesota Law School, where he served as President of the Minnesota Law Review, and a 1975 summa cum laude graduate of Concordia College in Moorhead, MN.