Collins J. Seitz
American judge
Collins Jacques Seitz (June 20, 1914 – October 16, 1998) was an American judge and lawyer from Wilmington, Delaware. He was a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit from 1966 to 1998, and was its chief judge from 1971 to 1984. He also served as the presiding judge of the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review from 1987 to 1994.
Seitz had previously served on the Delaware Court of Chancery, where he presided over the 1952 case Gebhart v. Belton, and ruled that the racial segregation of Delaware's public schools was unconstitutional. The case was one of several that led to the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education two years later.
Background
Born on June 20, 1914, in Wilmington, Delaware, Seitz received an Artium Baccalaureus degree in 1937 from the University of Delaware and a Bachelor of Laws in 1940 from the University of Virginia School of Law.
Career
He entered private practice in Wilmington from 1940 to 1946. He served as a Vice Chancellor of the Delaware Court of Chancery from 1946 to 1951, as a justice of the Delaware Supreme Court from 1949 to 1951, and as the Chancellor of the Delaware Court of Chancery from 1951 to 1966.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5147386. VIAF identifies the subject as 21205170. The Library of Congress control number is n87859569. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1914, 1998, 1966 and 1971.
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This entry incorporates text from “Collins J. Seitz” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.