Robert Ellis, Jr.

Robert Stephen Ellis, Jr. (September 29, 1899 – May 19, 1966), was a lawyer, district attorney, and judge from Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana. Descended from a prominent family, his father, Robert Ellis, Sr. (1871-1945); grandfather, Thomas Cargill Warner Ellis, and his great-grandfather, great-great-grandfather, and great-uncle were also judges. His father-in-law, Bolivar Edwards Kemp, Sr. (1871-1993), was a U.S. Representative for Louisiana's 6th congressional district, and his brother-in-law, Bolivar Edwards Kemp, Jr, was a state attorney general.^[1] 

Born near Amite, the seat of government for Tangipahoa Parish, Ellis graduated from Tulane University and then in 1924 from the Louisiana State University Law Center in Baton Rouge. A Democrat, Ellis practiced law in St. Tammany, St. Helena, and Livingston parishes as well as his native Tangipahoa before assumption of the DA's office and then judgeship of the 21st Judicial District, on which he served until 1948, when he was elevated to the Louisiana Court of Appeal for the First District,^[1] which currently encompasses sixteen parishes in southeastern Louisiana and based in Baton Rouge.^[2]

Ellis was a director of the Louisiana Thoroughbred Breeders Association and was active in several bar associations, the American Legion, Delta Kappa Epsilon, and he was senior warden for the Episcopalian Church of the Incarnation in Amite. From his marriage to Eleanor Kemp, he had three children, Eleanor Dunbar Ellis, Martina Kemp Ellis, and Robert Ellis, III. He died at the age of sixty-six and is interred at his family's graveyard in Amite.^[1]

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