Education
University of Nebraska at Kearney.
University of Nebraska at Kearney.
He served as chief judge of that court from 1999-2004. President George H. West. Bush nominated Kopf to the seat in 1992. From 1987 to 1992, Kopf served as a magistrate judge in the same district.
He assumed senior status on December 1, 2011.
He received his Juris Doctor from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln College of Law in 1972. He was a law clerk for Judge Donald Ross in the United States. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit for two years following law school and then entered private practice in Lexington, Nebraska.
In 1984, he served as counsel for the State of Nebraska in the impeachment of the Nebraska Attorney General. Kopf has received considerable press coverage for abortion-related decisions, particularly for his 474-page opinion striking down a ban on late-term abortions in Carhart, et al., v.
Ashcroft. His decision included the apology "I apologize for the length of this opinion.
I am well aware that appellate judges have plenty to do and that long-winded opinions from district judges are seldom helpful. Nonetheless, I pity the poor appellate judge who has to slog through this thing. I am truly sorry." In 2007 Kopf dismissed without prejudice a case over the use of the words "rape" and "sexual assault" in a rape trial in Lancaster County, Nebraska.
Tory Bowen had filed a lawsuit against Judge Jeffre Cheuvront for violating her right to free speech in a rape trial.
Kopf dismissed the suit because Bowen had not shown enough evidence to demonstrate her lawsuit was not frivolous. Cheuvront had barred the words "rape" and "sexual assault" from the trial, but allowed words such as "sexual intercourse" and "intercourse" to be used instead.
Kopf has served as president and board chair of the historical society for the Eighth Circuit. From 2013 to 2015, Kopf maintained a personal blog entitled Hercules and the Umpire: The Role of the Federal Trial Judge.
Kopf received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Kearney State College (now the University of Nebraska at Kearney) in 1969, where he was a member of Phi Kappa Tau fraternity. He ended the blog due to the fact that members of his courthouse staff felt the blog was an embarrassment to the court.
