Thomas L. Foley

Thomas L. Foley was the founding lawyer of one of Southern Nevada's most storied legal families, whose descendants came to include two federal judges, district judges, district attorneys and state legislators. Born to an Irish family that had come to the United States during the potato famine of the 1840s, he read the law in Sioux City, Iowa, where he served as a Municipal Court judge before moving to Chicago to practice alongside his brother James. In Chicago he was known both as a practicing attorney and as a boxing promoter - a dual life he would carry west.

Foley brought his family to the mining boomtown of Goldfield, Nevada, in 1906, where he built a law practice during the height of the district's silver-and-gold rush. There he befriended the legendary fight promoter Tex Rickard, sharing a common enthusiasm for the ring. His son, the future federal judge Roger T. Foley, joined him in Goldfield in 1910 to apprentice as a lawyer under his father, launching a family tradition of legal service in Nevada that would span four generations.

As patriarch of the Foley family, Thomas L. Foley was the father of U.S. District Judge Roger T. Foley, for whom the Foley Federal Building in downtown Las Vegas is named, and the grandfather of former Clark County District Attorney George Foley Sr. After his first wife died of tuberculosis, he married Alice Dean, who studied law and worked as his law clerk. His enrollment in the newly integrated State Bar of Nevada dates to 1929, and his legacy endures in the many Foleys who followed him into Nevada law.