Lawlapalooza is the Louisville legal community's annual battle of the bands, staged since 2005, to benefit the Judge Ellen B. Ewing Foundation. The Judge Ellen B. Ewing Foundation was established at the University of Louisville Louis D. Brandeis School of Law in 2005 with generous gifts from the Louisville Bar Foundation and the Women Lawyers Association. The fund provides up to $4,000 in summer fellowship funding for a University of Louisville law student to work in the areas of family law, domestic violence and spouse abuse, and HIV/AIDS.
Judge Ewing was the first woman to sit on Kentucky's former juvenile court bench. She worked as a probation officer before obtaining her law degree in 1972. Upon graduation from the University of Louisville School of Law, she became a staff attorney for the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights. In 1975, she was appointed a part-time trial commissioner with Jefferson County Juvenile Court, and five months later she became a full-time judge. Ewing was elected to Jefferson Circuit Court in 1983, and was one of only three women to have served in that court when she retired in 1998.
In 1985, Judge Ewing received the Brandeis Distinguished Alumni Award, and in 1990 the Louisville Bar Association named her Judge of the Year. She was the 2003 Member of the Year of the Women Lawyers Association. The Foundation honors her long-standing commitment to public service.
