Before earning his law degree from Case Western Reserve University School of Law in 1978, Edmund A. Sargus Jr. studied American history at Brown University, where he graduated with honors in 1975. That fascination with his country’s history has continued throughout his entire life.
Now a U.S. district judge for the Southern District of Ohio, Sargus is also a scholar of the Civil War. In 2020, he co-authored a book called Seceding from Secession: Creating West Virginia, which describes what happened when the western part of Virginia refused to join the Confederacy and Virginia went to the Supreme Court to try to get that part of the state back.
He and his son Edmund C. Sargus have written a not-yet-published novel about Thomas Drummond, an anti-slavery newspaper editor turned commander of the Union’s Fifth Calvary in the battle that basically ended the Civil War.
“There were pieces of his life I could not find answers to, which is why we chose historical fiction,” explains Sargus, adding that he and his son published a New York Times op-ed about Drummond in 2015.
After his death in the Battle of Five Forks, Drummond was buried alongside his mother next to what the elder Sargus describes as “a little tiny cemetery next to where our house was” in St. Clairsville, Ohio, where Sargus grew up. That small town had another major influence on Sargus’s life: His family lived right by the courthouse, which his lawyer father often visited. “I used to go to work with him all the time, even when I was six or seven,” he remembers. “I always wanted to be a lawyer. People made big over him and me and would give me candy.”
Sargus did indeed follow in his father’s footsteps. He has been a U.S. district judge for the Southern District of Ohio since President Bill Clinton appointed him in 1996. He served as chief judge from 2015 to 2019. As chief judge, Sargus created a partnership with the Ohio Access to Justice Foundation, which encourages lawyers to provide pro bono services to district residents in need.
Sargus is actively involved in his community. For more than a decade, he has been a board member of a long-term residential addiction treatment center called House of Hope. “Drug addiction is one of the primary sources of criminal conduct,” Sargus says.
“So many of the cases we get involved with on the criminal side involve addiction issues; probably 40% are guns and drugs combined and another 30% are cases like fraud, where people’s lives are falling apart because of drug addiction.” The program’s success rate is very high because of the long-term commitment required of participants, he says.
Sargus has also tackled the problem of recidivism. In 2010, he helped create the Restored Citizens program, which pairs people exiting federal prison with mentors who help them with problems that could lead to ending up back in prison. Together, they address issues such as employment, housing, driver’s licenses, family contact, and more. “Every year it gets bigger and better,” Sargus says.
Sargus’s interests extend beyond the U.S. Through the Congressional Office for International Leadership and U.S. Department of State, he hosts judges from around the world and has also traveled to other countries. When the Republic of Georgia was about to join the World Trade Organization, for example, Sargus traveled there to participate in a program on copyright, trademark, and patent law. He has also traveled to Thailand, Chile, and Brazil to meet with his international counterparts. “I am proud of our legal system,” he says. “Jury trials seem to fascinate them.”
Before becoming a judge, Sargus was the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Ohio. Earlier in his career, he was in private practice, becoming a partner at Burech & Sargus. He has also served as a special counsel to Ohio’s attorney general; a member of the St. Clairsville, Ohio, City Council; the law director for the city of Bellaire, Ohio; and the solicitor of Powhatan Point, Ohio.
Sargus has even been a special deputy U.S. marshal. The U.S. Marshals Service protects judges and U.S. attorneys, who often receive death threats. “I have lived most of my life in a nice town very far from the nearest marshal’s office,” Sargus says, explaining that the service gave him a gun to carry. “They had to remind me, ‘You are not authorized to shoot except in self-defense; you are not Wyatt Earp!’”