U.S. District Senior Judge Thomas N. O'Neill Jr. of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, known to his colleagues as a considerate judge and well-loved for fostering camaraderie among members of the bar, died Tuesday at age 89, the clerk of courts announced.

O'Neill was nominated to the federal bench in 1983 by President Ronald Reagan and assumed senior status in 1996. He served on the Codes of Conduct Committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States from 1995 to 2001.

“If a judge had an ethical issue or question, he was the one you would go to for this district for many years,” said longtime colleague U.S. District Senior Judge Harvey Bartle III.

Bartle, who served with O'Neill for 26 years, remembered O'Neill as a sharp yet compassionate judge with “a real sense of humanity.” As a person, he was kind and generous, Bartle said.

“He also was a wonderful raconteur, great storyteller off the bench, He just had a plethora of wonderful stories,” Bartle said. “Most of all, we greatly miss him. He was a friend of all of ours.”

Another colleague, U.S. District Senior Judge Michael Baylson, recalled his first meeting with O'Neill as an associate at Duane Morris when O'Neill was an established partner at Montgomery McCracken Walker & Rhoads, where he served as chairman of the litigation section and a member of the firm's management committee.

In 1971, Baylson was working on a brief detailing common pleas court funding that was pending before the state Supreme Court when O'Neill called him to strike up a conversation about its contents.

“We got to know each other,” Baylson said, adding, “he was renowned for having a sharp mind and being very considerate. I was thrilled to know several years later of his nomination to the district court. ”

In 1976, O'Neill served as chancellor of the Philadelphia Bar Association and had “
a great reputation for camaraderie,” Baylson said.

He added, “He was a perfect lawyer in every sense of the word and a great judge.”

In a statement, Philadelphia Bar Association Chancellor Mary F. Platt said O'Neill “will always be remembered for his brilliance as a lawyer and judge, his respect for litigants and counsel who appeared before him, his humility, his kind and caring nature and concern for others, and his dedication to public service.”

O'Neill's cause of death was not disclosed and no information on memorial services was available as of press time.

O'Neill graduated from the Catholic University of America in 1950 and received his LL.B. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1953 where he served as articles editor of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, according to the Eastern District clerk's office.

He served as a law clerk to Judge Herbert Funk Goodrich of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit from 1953 to 1954 and to Justice Harold Hitz Burton of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1954 to 1955. He joined Montgomery McCracken in 1956.