Timothy B. Dyk

Timothy Belcher Dyk (born February 14, 1937) is a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Education and early career The son of noted women's suffragist and psychologist Ruth Belcher Dyk, and Walter Dyk who studied and wrote about the Navajo Indians, Dyk was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He earned his Artium Baccalaureus degree cum laude from Harvard College in 1958, and earned his Juris Doctor magna cum laude in 1961 from the Harvard Law School, where he was a member of the law review. Dyk clerked for retired United States Supreme Court Justices Stanley Forman Reed and Harold Hitz Burton in 1961 and 1962, and clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren from 1962 to 1963. While clerking for Chief Justice Warren, Dyk came across a handwritten pro se petition for a writ of certiorari from a prisoner in Florida named Clarence Earl Gideon asserting that the trial court had improperly denied his constitutional right to a lawyer. Chief Justice Warren had specifically instructed Dyk to look out for a case raising the right-to-counsel issue. The Supreme Court heard the case, and in March 1963 issued its landmark opinion in Gideon v. Wainwright, which established that the U.S. Constitution provides indigent defendants with the right to have the assistance of a lawyer.