Judge Acree was first elected judge for the Kentucky Court of Appeals in November 2006 to serve Division 2 of the 5th Appellate District. He was appointed to that position in August 2006 to fill a vacancy created when by the retirement of Judge Julia K. Tackett. He was re-elected for another eight-year term in 2014. He served as chief judge of the Court of Appeals from July 1, 2012 to June 30, 2016.
Judge Glenn Acree is a 1973 Metcalfe County High School alum, a US Army veteran, and a 1980 UK graduate. He received a Master of Arts degree from the University of Maryland in the history of science and medicine before returning to the UK College of Law to obtain his Juris Doctorate in 1985.
He practiced law for nine (9) years at McBrayer, McGinnis, Leslie & Kirkland in Lexington before becoming a partner at Thomas, Stidham & Acree. In 1998, he went solo until his appointment and election to the Court of Appeals in 2006, where he has served ever since.
In 2007, Judge Acree founded the Appellate Advocacy Section of the KBA, and he was a Founding Fellow of the Fayette County Bar Foundation in 2008. For seven years, beginning in 2012, he served on the Kentucky Bar Foundation Board.
The judge’s colleagues elected him Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals and he served in that capacity from 2012 to 2016.
In 2013, Judge Acree was elected a Fellow of the Advanced Science and Technology Adjudication Resource Center in Washington, DC. That same year, he founded the Central Kentucky American Inn of Court and served as its first president until 2016. He has been invited and will attend the American Inn of Court Amity Visit to London, England, on October 1, 2019.
A frequent CLE presenter, Judge Acree received the KBA’s Thomas B. Spain Award for Outstanding Service to Continuing Legal Education in 2014 and, in 2018, the University of Kentucky College of Law named Judge Acree its Distinguished Jurist.
On the national level, Judge Acree served on the Board of Directors and chaired several committees of the National Center for State Courts’ Council of Chief Judges. He was recently nominated to serve as the national organization’s treasurer for 2019-2020.
He currently serves on the Judicial Conduct Commission.
He authored an inspiring article for the KBA’s Bench & Bar entitled, Pro Bono: Getting to the Heart of a Little Latin, (Bench & Bar Vol. 77, No. 5 p.24 (Sept. 2013)), and a more scholarly work, Non-Cooperation Provisions in Settlement Agreements After Kentucky Bar Association v. Unnamed Attorney (Bench & Bar Vol. 79, No. 1, p. 8 (Jan. 2015)).
The judge and his wife, the former Lisa Hahn of Versailles, raised two sons: Taylor, a 2017 Centre College graduate who lives in Lexington; and Matthew, a 2017 University of Wisconsin graduate who lives in Baraboo, Wisconsin with his wife, Andrea, and their daughters, Aimee and Ruby.