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Thomas W. Thrash is a federal trial judge in Atlanta, Georgia. He was born in 1951 in Birmingham, Alabama. As an adolescent and teenager in the Birmingham public schools, he lived through the turmoil that the resistance to equal rights for Blacks brought to the city. His freshman class at Woodlawn High School marked the first year of integration in the school system. After graduating first in his high school class, Judge Thrash went on to attend the University of Virginia on a DuPont Scholarship. He was President of the Virginia Debaters, and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in American Government with High Distinction. He received his Juris Doctor Cum Laude from Harvard Law School in 1976. After law school, he made his home in Atlanta, Georgia. He was a Fulton County Assistant District Attorney for three years, and was then in private practice as a civil and criminal trial attorney for seventeen years. He was an Adjunct Professor of Law at Georgia State University College of Law for nine years. In 1997, President Clinton appointed him as United States District Judge for the Northern District of Georgia. As a federal trial judge he has handled many high profile civil and criminal cases, including more than a dozen cases referred to him by the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation. He served as Chief Judge of the Northern District of Georgia from 2014 to 2021. Judge Thrash is a former Trustee of the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia, and a former Director of the Atlanta Shakespeare Company. He is married to Margaret Lines Thrash, and has two adult children.
