Irene Keeley will be one of the honorees at the 2018 Irish Legends Gala which will be held on Saturday, March 24 at Via Veneto.

United States District Judge Irene M. Keeley of Clarksburg, WV, was born in Brooklyn, NY, and, together with her parents and four siblings, moved to the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., where her father was an attorney in the Department of Justice. She received her undergraduate degree from the College of Notre Dame of Maryland in Baltimore, MD, in 1965, and a Masters Degree from WVU in 1979. Before attending law school, she was a secondary education teacher in Harrison County. She received her Juris Doctorate degree from the WVU College of Law in 1980, where she was an Associate Editor of the West Virginia Law Review and a member of the Moot Court Board. She and her husband Jack live in Clarksburg, where they raised three daughters, Reenie, Kate and Meaghan. They are the proud grandparents of two granddaughters and two grandsons. From 1980-1992, she practiced law with Steptoe & Johnson in the areas of litigation and health care. She was appointed as Judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of West Virginia by President George H. W. Bush on August 12, 1992. She served as Chief Judge of the Northern District from March 2001 to March 2008. Judge Keeley is a member of the American Bar Association, WV State Bar, and the WV Bar Association. She is a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation and a Fellow of the WV Bar Foundation. She is a past chair of the ABA National Conference of Federal Trial Judges. From 2005 to 2007, she served as President of the Federal Judges Association. Later, she served as Chair of the Committee on Criminal Law of the Judicial Conference of the United States from 2013 to 2016. Currently, she is a member of the Budget Committee of the Judicial Conference. She is a former Chair of the Board of Advisors of WVU. In 2003, she was honored with the Order of Vandalia from WVU, and in 2005 she received the Justicia Officium Award from the WVU College of Law.