Wikipedia:WikiProject United States courts and judges/judgenames

In an attempt to bring American federal judges into compliance with WP:COMMONNAME/WP:NCP, the various possible permutations of their name (including multiple middle names, matronymic surnames, maiden names, married names, and nicknames) were searched at newspapers.com in the phrase "judge [name]" from the time they became a judge until their death (or through 2021). For individuals whose coverage as a judge was minimal as portion of their overall coverage, "judge" was omitted and noted below. While it is easy to double-count results at newspapers.com (its search results allow a word, and thus a middle name or initial, between each word in a search phrase), care was taken to ensure this did not happen. Care was also taken to not confuse judges of the same era with similar names. For individuals with fewer than 15 matches in press coverage, the names listed on their respective courts' websites are listed.

Many American federal judges' pages are out of compliance with WP:COMMONNAME because article titles were largely taken from their Federal Judicial Center entries, which tend to be encyclopedic in their use of full names, which of course is rarely how individuals are commonly known. Listed below are the various forms of the judges' names that made up at least 15% of their press coverage. For individuals for whom a suffix is a possible inclusion, the portion of all matches with the suffix is listed in a separate column.

When one version of a judge's name is clearly the most common (10%+ more than the next most common), it will be used unless it requires a parenthetical disambiguation and another commonly-used version doesn't (complying with WP:MIDDLE/WP:MAIDEN: "Adding given names, or their abbreviations, merely for disambiguation purposes (if that format of the name is not commonly used to refer to the person) is not advised...Adding or subtracting a second last name or a patronymic artificially, as a disambiguation aid, is rarely advised. The most usual form of the name is the one that should be used." When several forms of names are used with similar frequency and one of them is the "First Name Last Name" format, it is used, per WP:NCP because they are not "much better known by some other name." Names including just initials and a surname are avoided if there was another name by which the judge was known.