US District Judge L.T. Senter Jr. Retiring

U.S. District Judge L.T. Senter Jr., who presided over hundreds of Hurricane Katrina insurance cases, is retiring Friday.

The Sun Herald reports Senter and his staff have spent the week packing up his offices on the fifth floor of the federal courthouse in Gulfport.

He has only one Katrina case still pending, a whistle-blower lawsuit filed against State Farm Fire & Casualty Co. The case, which is not ready for trial, will be assigned to another judge.

Senter, a University of Mississippi Law School graduate, served as a circuit judge before he was appointed to the federal bench by President Jimmy Carter in 1979.

He worked from 1980 to 1982 as a federal judge in Mississippi’s Northern District, then as the district’s chief judge from 1982 to 1998. He took senior status in 1998, and began traveling to the coast in 2000 to help out with the caseload.

He moved to the coast in 2002. After Katrina hit in 2005, he agreed to take on the insurance cases with the assistance of U.S. Magistrate Robert H. Walker. Other judges had to recuse themselves from the cases because their homes suffered hurricane damage.