Philip Ciaccio

Philip Charles Ciaccio (August 23, 1927 – November 12, 2015) was a lawyer and Democratic politician from his native New Orleans, Louisiana. He was the District 9 member of the Louisiana House of Representatives from 1962 to 1966, when he began a sixteen-year stint as the District E member of the New Orleans City Council. From 1982 to 1998, he was a judge of the New Orleans-based Louisiana Circuit Court of Appeal for the Fourth Circuit.

Career
Ciaccio graduated in New Orleans at the age of fifteen from the Roman Catholic Brother Martin High School, then St. Aloysius High School. He received his undergraduate degree in 1947 from Tulane University. In 1950, he obtained his law degree from Tulane University School of Law. After law school, he served in the United States Air Force as an officer in the Judge Advocate General's Corps. His tour of duty included Morocco. After his military duties, he launched his law practice in New Orleans.

Ciaccio lost his first bid for the legislature in which his mother, grandmother, and wife knocked on doors in the campaign. He then prevailed in a special election in 1962 to succeed Daniel L. Kelly, who resigned after only two years in the legislature upon his own election to the New Orleans City Council. Four years later, Ciaccio succeeded Kelly on the city council. Known for his analytical mind, Judge Ciaccio served for sixteen years on the Fourth Circuit Court. Even after his retirement from the bench, he was an ad hoc judge, including service under then Chief Justice Catherine D. Kimball on the Louisiana Supreme Court.

Ciaccio was as founding member and first board chairman of the Covenant House crisis center in New Orleans. In 1952, he wed the former Mary Jane Bologna. The couple had ten children, nine of whom survived their father: Kathleen Giler (husband Paul), Charles (wife Judee). Philip, Jr. (Mary Beth), Maureen Anderson (Marc), Maria Schneider, Charleen Schreiner (George), Gregory (Anna Lisa), Michael (Nicole), and Suzanne Graffeo (Charlie), and twenty-nine grandchildren. Son Christopher Ciaccio died in 1990 at the age of twenty-seven while he was nearing completion of a degree in computer science.

He died in New Orleans at the age of eighty-eight.