Unflappable and unassuming, Matthew Brookman knows the power he yields when he walks into a courtroom. He says he uses the depth of his experience to render the fairest and most just rulings he can.
“I approach it as a difficult job. I try to do the best I can,” says Brookman, who was sworn in as the U.S. District Court Judge for the Southern District of Indiana on April 3, 2023. “Most of the time, when people come into court, it’s one of the worst days of their life. You can’t lose sight that the decisions being made are momentous, that they weigh on people’s lives.”
He was appointed by President Joe Biden. Indiana Republican Senators Mike Braun and Todd Young helped secure a unanimous confirmation.
“There was no controversy,” Brookman says. “It was gratifying to have the support of Senators Braun and Young.”
Born in Saint Louis, Missouri, and a lifelong Cardinals baseball fan, Brookman graduated from Greencastle, Indiana’s DePauw University, with a Bachelor of Arts in economics and history in 1990. At DePauw, he met his future wife, Michele. Brookman earned his Juris Doctor from the Washington University (of Saint Louis) School of Law in May 1993. He also studied at the University of Essex in Colchester, England.
“I lived in Saint Louis for 25 years and eventually made my way to my wife’s hometown,” Brookman says of the former Michele Herrell, a 1986 William Henry Harrison High School graduate. “I felt like (now) this is my hometown. I consider it a blessing to work in a great state like Indiana and live in a place like Evansville and Newburgh. It’s such an idyllic place.”
Brookman, 56, describes the Evansville-Newburgh area as a down-to-earth, comfortable place to live.
“It’s an easy commute – there’s no commute,” he says.
Brookman and his wife have three children. Katie is a science teacher at Edgewood High School, near Bloomington, Indiana. Brookman notes that she previously played for Castle High School’s girls’ tennis team and is currently Edgewood’s head coach. Adam is in his second year of law school at Indiana University. Andrew, the youngest, is a sophomore at Castle. Along with his family’s connections to IU, the judge has become a “big Hoosiers fan, IU basketball and football.”
He received the Director’s Award in 2010 from former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder for superior performance by an assistant U.S. Attorney in the U.S. vs. Jarvis Brown, et al. quadruple homicide prosecution. Before his present post, Brookman served as a U.S. magistrate judge for the Southern District of Indiana from 2016 to 2023. He relished the opportunity to take on a different role when U.S. District Judge Richard L. Young took senior status, open- ing a judicial vacancy in Evansville.
Underscoring the significance of district court decisions, Young’s landmark 2014 ruling in Baskin v. Bogan declared Indiana’s same-sex marriage ban unconstitutional.
Indiana’s district court system is separated into a pair of sectors labeled as the southern and northern districts, which act independently of one another and do not set precedents for each other. The northern district has four divisional offices in Fort Wayne, Hammond, South Bend, and Lafayette, while the southern district operates out of Indianapolis, Terre Haute, Evansville, and New Albany. Each court is made up of five judges who are nominated by the U.S. President and confirmed by the Senate. Confirmed judges serve lifetime appointments.
“My colleagues and I in the district court are hardworking, unbiased, and fair, which is exactly what the people of this district deserve,” Brookman says. “We strive to seek justice and have no bias toward any litigant in the trial court, where the rubber meets the road.”
