Ann Tighe

Ann Tighe died of natural causes on Tuesday, 20 October 2026, in Chicago. She was 87. Her death was reported by the Chicago Sun-Times on 23 October, and her funeral arrangements were handled by the Rago Brothers Funeral Homes.

She was survived by her husband, Jim Houlihan, her sons Mike and Dan and their wives, five grandchildren, and several nieces and nephews. A visitation was planned at Old St. Patrick's Church in Chicago on 27 October 2026, followed by a funeral Mass. The family asked that donations be made to the People's Law Office, a Chicago civil rights law firm, in lieu of flowers.

Ann C. Tighe was born on 26 January 1939, the daughter of Michael and Eda Tighe, and grew up in Highland Park, Illinois, north of Chicago. She had a brother, Michael, who died before her. As a girl she was a keen figure skater, a pastime she kept for the rest of her life.

She attended Mount Holyoke College and Stanford University, receiving her bachelor's degree in 1961. She went on to Northwestern University School of Law, earning her law degree in 1973. At Northwestern she served on the editorial board of the Northwestern University Law Review and published an article on qui tam actions under the False Claims Act. Her husband later recalled that when she asked a male professor for a letter to support her application to law school, he asked why he should help her take a place that would otherwise go to a man who needed to feed his family.

Tighe was admitted to the Illinois bar in 1973, the year she had to obtain a judge's permission to practise under her own name rather than her husband's. In 1974 she joined the United States Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Illinois as an assistant United States attorney, one of the first women lawyers in the office. There she served as deputy chief of the appellate division, chief of the government fraud division and chief of the criminal receiving and appellate division, before leaving the office around 1980.

In private practice she became a name partner of Cotsirilos, Tighe, Streicker, Poulos and Campbell, the Chicago firm now known as Cotsirilos, Poulos and Campbell. Her work centred on white collar criminal defence, corporate investigations, civil litigation and appeals. She was admitted to practise before the United States Supreme Court in 1980, became a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers in 1991, co-chaired its Illinois state committee in 2000 and 2001, and served on the board of the Chicago Bar Foundation from 1998 to 2004.

In 1997 she was shortlisted for United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois. Her husband, Jim Houlihan, was then Cook County Assessor, and groups including the Chicago Council of Lawyers and the Better Government Association raised a possible conflict of interest. Houlihan considered resigning, but she told him not to, calling it a drastic and unnecessary step. Scott Lassar was appointed. Senator Dick Durbin said her critics were trapped in an ancient mindset, and even those who raised the conflict did not question her qualifications or integrity. She continued practising law into her eighties.

Tighe married Jim Houlihan, who later served as Cook County Assessor, and they were married for more than five decades. They had two sons, Mike and Daniel Houlihan, and five grandchildren. Colleagues remembered her distinctive laugh, and Theodore Poulos described her as joyous and classy but tough as nails. She kept a pair of ice skates in her office in the Loop and skated at the rink at Block 37 during lunch breaks whenever she could. She loved spending time at the family's summer home in Beverly Shores, Indiana.

Tighe was among the first women to serve as a federal prosecutor in Chicago and later became one of the city's most respected white collar defence lawyers. Her 1997 candidacy to lead the federal prosecutor's office prompted a public debate about power couples, gender and fairness in public appointments, and friends later said the conflict that blocked her would seem minor by modern standards. The office she hoped to lead had still never been led by a woman at the time of her death.