Who’s Who on Trump’s Supreme Court Wish List
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2016/05/18/a-brief-look-at-trumps-possible-supreme-court-nominees/
Donald Trump on Wednesday disclosed the names of 11 candidates he would consider to fill the current vacancy at the U.S. Supreme Court. The list includes six federal appeals court judges appointed by former Republican President George W. Bush, as well as five state Supreme Court justices with conservative credentials.
Here’s a quick look at the Trump 11:
• Steven Colloton
Judge Steven Colloton, who lives in Iowa, has been a judge since 2003 for the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers a large swath of the Midwest. He was appointed to the position by President George W. Bush. Prior to becoming a federal judge, he served as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Iowa and had been a federal line prosecutor in that district for eight years. He received his bachelor’s degree from Princeton and law degree from Yale. After law school, the 53-year-old clerked for Judge Laurence Silberman at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and for Chief Justice William Rehnquist on the Supreme Court.
Judge Colloton’s name had already been floated as a potential Supreme Court nominee in 2012, during GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s bid for the White House. In 2011, he voted in favor of owners in the National Football League to allow a lockout by the players to continue indefinitely. He also voted in a unanimous decision last year to side with religious nonprofits challenging the Affordable Care Act’s rules for contraceptive coverage.
• Allison Eid
Allison Eid, 51, has been an associate justice on the Colorado Supreme Court, the state’s highest, since 2006, appointed by former Republican Colorado Gov. Bill Owens. Before joining the bench, she served as Colorado’s solicitor general representing state officials and agencies in court. She also taught at University of Colorado Law School and worked as a litigator at the Denver office of Arnold & Porter LLP. She received her bachelor’s degree from Stanford and law degree from the University of Chicago.
In 2012, Judge Eid wrote the majority opinion ruling that the University of Colorado’s policy to ban students from carrying handguns on campus was unlawful. She also wrote a decision last year that said companies in Colorado, which has decriminalized most marijuana use, can fire employees for using marijuana outside of work because the activity still violates federal law.
• Raymond Gruender
A 52-year-old Bush appointee, Judge Raymond Gruender has served on the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals since 2004. A longtime prosecutor before joining the bench, he served as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri from 2001 to 2004 after working as an assistant in that office for many years.
Between stints as a prosecutor, Judge Gruender campaigned for Bob Dole’s failed 1996 presidential bid. He earned law and business degrees from Washington University in St. Louis. In one noteworthy decision he authored, the Eighth Circuit held that it wasn’t sex discrimination for an employer to exclude insurance coverage for birth control.
• Thomas Hardiman
Judge Thomas Hardiman, 50, joined the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2007, after serving as a district court judge in Pennsylvania for four years. Both appointments came from George W. Bush. A graduate of University of Notre Dame and Georgetown University Law Center, he worked in private practice at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP and other law firms before becoming a judge. The Trump campaign says he’s the first in his family to attend college. In a decision he authored, which was later affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court, the appeals court held that a jail’s policy of strip-searching all detainees, even those with minor alleged offenses, wasn’t a violation of the Fourth Amendment.
• Raymond Kethledge
Judge Raymond Kethledge, 49, was nominated to the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals by President Bush in 2007 and confirmed the following year. After graduating from University of Michigan Law School in 1993, he clerked for Judge Ralph B. Guy Jr. on the Sixth Circuit and spent two years as counsel to former GOP Sen. Spencer Abraham of Michigan on the Senate Judiciary Committee before clerking for Justice Anthony Kennedy on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Judge Kethledge returned to Michigan to practice law and founded a litigation firm now known as Bush Seyferth & Paige PLLC in Troy. The firm specializes in defending companies in complex litigation and appeals. He was in private practice from 1998 until his nominations, but for a brief stint as an in-house lawyer for Ford Motor Co. from 2001 to 2002, according to his biography at the Federal Judicial Center.
Judge Kethledge authored what The Wall Street Journal editorial board described as the “Opinion of the Year” in 2014, rebuking the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in a lawsuit alleging the for-profit education company Kaplan used credit checks on prospective employees to discriminate against minorities. Judge Kethledge wrote that the EEOC “brought this case on the basis of a homemade methodology, crafted by a witness with no particular expertise to craft it, administered by persons with no particular expertise to administer it, tested by no one, and accepted only by the witness himself.”
• Joan Larsen
Justice Joan Larsen, who serves on the Michigan Supreme Court, was a professor at the University of Michigan School of Law from 1998 until her appointment to the bench in 2015 by Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican. After graduating first in her class at Northwestern University Law School in 1993, she clerked for Judge David B. Sentelle of the District of Columbia U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and then for the late Justice Antonin Scalia, according to her official biography.
After her clerkships, she joined the Sidley & Austin LLP’s Washington, D.C., office, before shifting into academia, first as a visiting professor at Northwestern and then to University of Michigan, where her research and teaching topics included constitutional law, criminal procedure, statutory interpretation and presidential power. She took a break from Michigan’s faculty from 2002 to 2003 to serve as deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, a quasi-judicial unit that answers thorny questions of law from the White House and other executive branch agencies.
Judge Larsen, 47, recently wrote about her experience clerking for Justice Scalia in the New York Times, saying his “passing leaves a giant void in the court and in the intellectual discourse over the law.” Justice Larsen describes her judicial philosophy this way: “Judges should interpret the laws according to what they say, not according to what the judges wish they would say. Judges are supposed to interpret the laws; they are not supposed to make them.”
• Thomas R. Lee
Thomas Lee of Utah is an associate justice of the Utah Supreme Court, a position to which he was appointed in 2010 by Gov. Gary Herbert. While on the court, Justice Lee has authored a number of high-profile opinions, including one that overturned a 4-year-old adoption on grounds that a lower court had improperly terminated the birth-father’s parental rights, and a ruling striking down a law that allowed the state to increase a sentence based on an inmate’s behavior at a state hospital.
From 1997 until his appointment to the Utah Supreme Court, Justice Lee served on the faculty of Brigham Young University’s law school with a short stint in Washington, D.C., working as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Civil Division. He got his undergraduate degree from BYU and his law degree in 1991 from the University of Chicago, and he clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas.
Justice Lee, 51, is also the son of former U.S. Solicitor General Rex Lee and the brother of current U.S. Senator Mike Lee. As a boy, according to the Deseret News, Justice Lee “said he assumed he would be a lawyer because his father, the founding dean of the BYU law school who died of cancer in 1996, was a lawyer.” While his thoughts changed in high school, according to the story, “after taking some government classes and participating in moot court, he became hooked on the law.”
• William H. Pryor, Jr.
Judge William H. Pryor, Jr. , 54, serves as an associate judge of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta. He was nominated to the bench in 2004 by President Bush and confirmed by the U.S. Senate in a 53-45 vote the following year. From 1997 to 2004, he was the attorney general of Alabama, in a tenure marked with controversial moves. In 2003, for instance, he called for the removal of Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, who had refused to go along with a federal court order to remove a Ten Commandments pillar from the Alabama Judicial Building.
On the 11th Circuit, Judge Pryor has written a host of newsworthy cases, including a 2009 opinion upholding Georgia’s voter-ID law. Another was a 2014 concurrence to a court order that stopped the Secretary of Health and Human Services from enforcing Obamacare’s contraception mandate against a Catholic television station, ruling that the requirement burdened the station’s First Amendment religious rights.
Judge Pryor received his undergraduate degree from the University of Louisiana at Monroe, and his law degree from Tulane. He clerked for Judge John Minor Wisdom of the Fifth Circuit.
• David Stras
Justice David Stras was a 35-year-old criminal law professor in Minnesota when he was appointed to the state’s highest court in 2010. Before that, he earned his law degree from the University of Kansas and clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas, whom he described as his mentor.
Announcing his appointment in 2010, then-Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty called Justice Stras “one of the brightest legal scholars in Minnesota.” Hamline University law professor Peter B. Knapp, who studies the state court, said Justice Stras takes a “strict approach to interpreting the law” that “hews very closely to the language of a statute,” a style on display in a dissenting opinion opposing the majority’s backing of Minnesota’s “implied consent” law.
• Diane S. Sykes
Judge Diane Sykes, 58, who sits on the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, was nominated to the bench by President Bush in 2004. The Marquette University Law School graduate is the former wife of Charlie Sykes, an influential conservative radio host.
Republican Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker called her “one of our favorite jurists,” but her opinions have sometimes crossed ideological lines. In 2014, she upheld Wisconsin’s voter-identification law that some civil rights groups said disproportionately burdened minorities. In 2012, she authored an opinion blocking part of an Indiana law that cut public funding to abortion providers. “The defunding law excludes Planned Parenthood from Medicaid for a reason unrelated to its fitness to provide medical services, violating its patients’ statutory right to obtain medical care from the qualified provider of choice,” she wrote.
• Don R. Willett
Texas Supreme Court Justice Don R. Willett, a 49-year-old Republican, was elected to the state bench in 2006 and re-elected in 2012. A former aide to then-Texas Attorney General and now Gov. Greg Abbott and former President Bush, he’s a conservative with a libertarian streak. His punchy opinions captured the attention of conservative pundit George Will, who floated him as a potential U.S. Supreme Court justice in a column last year. One of his best known opinions was a 2014 dissent tearing into the state’s asset forfeiture laws. Justice Willett is also one of the very few tweeting judges in the country with a big following. The Texas State House of Representatives recently recognized him as the “Tweeter Laureate of #Texas.” A few of his tweets have poked at fun at Mr. Trump (see here and here for examples).
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