Jerome A. Holmes spent a year working for a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit before he became a judge there himself. His clerkship with William J. Holloway Jr. ran from 1990 to 1991. Fifteen years later, President George W. Bush nominated him to the same court. The Senate confirmed him in July 2006, and he received his commission that August.
The appointment followed a career that repeatedly brought Holmes back to Oklahoma City. Born in Washington, D.C., in 1961, he earned a history degree from Wake Forest University in 1983 and a law degree from Georgetown in 1988. At Georgetown, he was editor-in-chief of the Immigration Law Journal. His first job after law school was a two-year clerkship with federal district judge Wayne E. Alley. The Holloway clerkship followed, giving him experience inside both a trial court and an appeals court.
Holmes then practiced civil litigation in Washington for three years. In 1994, he returned to Oklahoma City as an assistant U.S. attorney. Over the next eleven years, his work included white-collar investigations and public-corruption prosecutions. He also became deputy chief of the criminal division and the office's legal ethics adviser. Those assignments combined individual cases with responsibility for how other lawyers carried out their work.
Beginning in April 1995, Holmes worked for nearly a year on the Oklahoma City bombing prosecution team. After the September 11 attacks, he spent two and a half years coordinating the district's antiterrorism initiatives across federal, state and local law enforcement. During his years as a prosecutor, he took a year away to study public administration at Harvard's Kennedy School, completing a master's degree in 2000. He returned to private practice in 2005, handling internal investigations and complex civil litigation before his judicial appointment the following year.
His professional work also included legal ethics outside the prosecutor's office. On the Oklahoma Bar Association's Rules of Professional Conduct Committee, he helped consider revisions to the rules governing lawyers. He later joined the association's Board of Governors and served a term as vice president.
Holmes became chief judge of the Tenth Circuit in October 2022. The court hears appeals from federal district courts in six states, including Oklahoma. His duties include representing the circuit on the Judicial Conference of the United States, the federal judiciary's governing body.
