In 1998, Aleta Grillos Trauger ’68 became the first female U.S. District judge in the Middle District of Tennessee. After graduating from Cornell, Trauger taught in England for a year and in Tennessee for two years. Realizing education was not her calling, she enrolled in law school at Vanderbilt University and graduated in 1976.
She worked as a law clerk and later as an associate at a small Nashville firm from 1974 o 1977. She then went to work as an assistant U.S. attorney for five years in Nashville and Chicago and in 1981 prosecuted former Tennessee Gov. Ray Blanton for selling liquor licenses while he was in office. She served as Nashville Mayor Phil Bredesen’s chief of staff for a year in the early 1990s.
Trauger met Vice President Al Gore when they attended Vanderbilt Law School in the mid-1970s, and she was a Clinton-Gore delegate in 1992. She was appointted as a U.S. Bankruptcy judge in 1993, and in October 1998, the Senate approved President Clinton’s nomination that made her a U.S. District judge.