Trump's Supreme Court List: Potential Candidates Being Considered by the President - WSJ

Judge Bridget Shelton Bade, 54, joined the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2019 after being nominated by President Trump. She previously had served as a federal magistrate judge from 2012 to 2019.

The Arizona native earned undergraduate and law degrees from Arizona State University. After law school, Judge Bade clerked for Judge Edith Jones on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit before joining the Justice Department as a trial lawyer in the environmental torts section. She has also worked in law firms in Phoenix and as an assistant U.S. attorney in Arizona.

Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, 34, may be young, but he has the right political pedigree for a Trump judicial nominee. He served as legal counsel to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.), where he worked on confirming  Mr. Trump’s first Supreme Court nominee , Justice Neil Gorsuch. Mr. Cameron then jumped into electoral politics himself, in 2018 becoming the first African-American elected state attorney general and the first Republican to win the office since 1948.

Raised in Elizabethtown, Ky., he played football at the University of Louisville and earned his law degree from its Louis D. Brandeis School of Law. The GOP sees Mr. Cameron as a rising star, and awarded him a  speaking role at its convention in August . But he has seen controversy during his brief political career,  fighting public-health orders  Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear issued to contain the spread of the new coronavirus and overseeing an  investigation into the March police killing  of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman, that critics say has dragged on too long. On Wednesday, local news reports said a grand jury presentation on the Taylor case was imminent; Mr. Cameron tweeted a statement saying such “rumors do nothing to advance justice” and that his office would seek to “find the truth and pursue justice, wherever that may take us and however long that may take.”

Paul Clement, 54, is the former U.S. Solicitor General, serving in the role during the George W. Bush administration between 2005 and 2008. He is currently a law partner at the firm Kirkland & Ellis where he specializes in appellate work and constitutional law. As solicitor general, Mr. Clement was the government’s top litigator. He is a Supreme Court veteran, having argued more than 100 cases before the high court.

While in private practice in 2011, he was hired by the Republican-led House of Representatives to  defend the federal Defense of Marriage Act . The law defined marriage as being between one man and one woman and was struck down by the Supreme Court in decisions in 2013 and 2016. He also argued before the Supreme Court in a 26-state lawsuit in 2012 against President Obama’s health care law, an effort which was unsuccessful.

A Wisconsin native, Mr. Clement holds an undergraduate degree from Georgetown University, a master’s degree from the University of Cambridge and a law degree from Harvard University.

Sen. Tom Cotton, 43, a first-term Republican senator from Arkansas, has burnished his credentials with social conservatives and military hawks. On domestic policy, he has worked against bipartisan legislation to overhaul the criminal justice system, pushed President Trump to get behind a  policy of reducing family-based immigration , and most recently claimed the mantle of free-speech advocate, criticizing the New York Times for apologizing for publishing one of his op-eds that had called for sending in federal troops to quell violence at protests.

Viewed as having White House ambitions, Mr. Cotton graduated from Harvard Law School and served as a clerk for a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

Sen. Ted Cruz, 49, once clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, where he took a  hard line on death-penalty cases . As the Texas solicitor general, he pursued cases of interest to conservatives nationwide, including working on a gun-ownership rights case that led to a landmark pro-gun ruling from the Supreme Court.

As a senator from Texas, he was in the national spotlight in 2013, when his efforts to stop the implementation of the Affordable Care Act led to the first government shutdown in 17 years. He took on a lower profile after  losing his bid to become the Republican presidential nominee in 2016  and getting criticism for refusing to endorse Mr. Trump at the Republican nominating convention that year. He faced a surprisingly competitive re-election campaign last cycle.

Most recently, Mr. Cruz has emphasized his credentials as a deficit-hawk by opposing a large new coronavirus-aid package and has built a following through his  “Verdict with Ted Cruz” podcast , signs that he may be ready to once again take on a bigger profile.

Mr. Cruz graduated from Princeton University and Harvard Law School.

Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan, 48, has served on the New Orleans-based Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals since 2018, nominated by Mr. Trump in 2017 and confirmed by the Senate in a 50-47 vote. In April, in one of his most high-profile rulings, he voted to  allow Texas to suspend most abortions in the state  during the coronavirus public-health crisis.

Before joining the bench, he was a founding partner of Schaerr Duncan LLP in Washington, D.C. He was also general counsel for the conservative Becket Fund for Religious Liberty from 2012 to 2014, during which he was counsel of record representing Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. in the landmark Supreme Court contraceptive case that  extended religious protections to closely held, for-profit firms .

A Baton Rouge native, Judge Duncan earned his law degree from Louisiana State University and worked as an assistant law professor at the University of Mississippi.

Steven Engel, 46, is the head of the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel, a powerful office that serves as the government’s in-house law firm for legal analysis. Mr. Engel previously worked in private practice at the law firms Kirkland & Ellis and Dechert. He also served in the George W. Bush administration, where he also worked in the Office of Legal Counsel.

Mr. Engel has an undergraduate degree from Harvard and a law degree from Yale. He clerked for former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Noel Francisco, 51, served as the solicitor general during the Trump administration between 2017 and 2020. In that role, he frequently defended some of the administration’s most controversial actions in court—including the administration’s restrictions on entry from numerous Muslim-majority nation as well as the administration’s decisions to cancel the Obama-era program that protected nearly 700,000 immigrants brought to the U.S. unlawfully as children. He stepped down from the solicitor general role earlier this year.

Mr. Francisco previously served in the George W. Bush administration in the White House Counsel’s Office and the Justice Department. He also worked in private practice at the law firm Jones Day. Mr. Francisco holds undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Chicago.

Sen. Josh Hawley, 40, a former constitutional law professor, is a first-term Republican senator from Missouri who is seen as having his own presidential ambitions. He has carried himself as an anti-elitist, anti-establishment outsider who defends social conservatives against what he casts as a culture of intolerance among liberals. He once took to the Senate floor to urge the Trump administration to yank funding from his own alma mater, Yale University’s law school, for discriminating against “people of faith.” He also has emerged as one of Washington’s harshest critics of large technology firms, calling for an antitrust investigation into Amazon and complaining that social-media companies discriminate against conservatives.

Mr. Hawley clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts, practiced law at Hogan Lovells and worked at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.

Judge James C. Ho, 47, is a judge on the New Orleans-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. A Trump appointee, he joined the bench in January 2018 based in Dallas. Before becoming a judge, he worked in private practice, including as an appellate lawyer at law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, and in several government roles. Early in his career he worked in the Justice Department’s civil-rights division and office of legal counsel, and as counsel for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.

In Texas, he served as solicitor general from 2008 to 2010, the top appellate lawyer for the state. He clerked on the Fifth Circuit after graduating from the University of Chicago Law School in 1999 and later clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court. Born in Taiwan in 1973, he earned an undergraduate degree at Stanford University.
In 2019, Judge Ho expressed his support for qualified immunity for police officers accused of using excessive force, writing: “If we want to stop mass shootings, we should stop punishing police officers who put their lives on the line to prevent them.” Judge Ho was dissenting from a decision that declined to dismiss a  suit against officers involved in a fatal shooting  after responding to reports of an armed suspect.

Judge Gregory G. Katsas, 56, was a White House attorney when Mr. Trump nominated him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 2017. The Senate confirmed his appointment later that year in a 50-48 vote.

Before his brief stint in the Trump administration, he spent most of his career in private practice at Jones Day, litigating in the Supreme Court, the federal courts of appeals and state appellate courts. He was also a Justice Department official under President George W. Bush and a clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas.

A Boston native, Judge Katsas graduated from Princeton University and Harvard Law School, where he was executive editor of the Harvard Law Review.

A Trump appointee, Judge Barbara Lagoa, 52, has served on the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals since December, after being confirmed by the Senate in a mostly bipartisan 80-15 vote.

A longtime member of the conservative Federalist Society, Judge Lagoa earned her bachelor’s degree from Florida International University and her law degree from Columbia University.

Christopher Landau, 56, is the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, nominated by President Trump in March 2019 and confirmed by the Senate several months later.

Previously, Mr. Landau served in private practice at the firms Kirkland & Ellis and Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, where he argued several cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. He previously has been mentioned as a potential senior Justice Department official or a candidate for the federal bench.

Mr. Landau clerked for two Supreme Court justices, the late Antonin Scalia and Justice Clarence Thomas. He holds undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard University.

Justice Carlos G. Muñiz, 51, has been a judge in the Florida Supreme Court since last year, when Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed him to the state’s highest court.

Before joining the bench, he worked in the Trump administration as general counsel of the U.S. Department of Education under Secretary Betsy DeVos. Previously, he had stints in private practice, most recently at McGuireWoods LLP, and occupied several state posts, including as a top official in the Florida attorney general’s office and as deputy chief of staff and counsel in the speaker’s office of the state House of Representatives.

A Tallahassee resident, he grew up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia and his law degree from Yale Law School. In the late 1990s, he clerked for Judge José A. Cabranes of the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Judge Peter J. Phipps, 47, has served on the Philadelphia-based Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals since 2019, after he was nominated by Mr. Trump and confirmed by the Senate in a 56-40 vote. The year before, Mr. Trump appointed him to the federal bench as a U.S. District Judge for the Western District of Pennsylvania.

For the bulk of his career, he worked in the federal programs branch of the Justice Department’s civil division, representing federal agencies and officials in Republican and Democratic administrations. Among the major cases he handled for the Justice Department was defending the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development against claims of racial discrimination in a long-running and since-settled class-action lawsuit brought by Baltimore public-housing residents.

Born at Dyess Air Force Base in Texas, Judge Phipps graduated from Stanford Law School and clerked for Judge R. Guy Cole Jr., of the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Judge Sarah E. Pitlyk, 43, was sworn in on the U.S. District Court in St. Louis in December 2019. Before that, she worked as special counsel for the Thomas More Society, an antiabortion legal group.

Earlier in her career she worked at Clark & Sauer in St. Louis and Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C. She clerked in 2010 for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, then a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

The American Bar Association gave Judge Pitlyk a “not qualified” rating after her nomination, citing her lack of trial or litigation experience. Judge Pitlyk received her law degree from Yale, a master’s in philosophy from Georgetown, an undergraduate degree from Boston College and a master’s from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium.

Judge Martha M. Pacold, 41, sits on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, a position she began in August 2019 after being nominated by President Trump. Judge Pacold has worked as a lawyer in several government agencies, including the U.S. Justice Department and Treasury Department, and in the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Virginia. She also spent a decade at Bartlit Beck LLP, a litigation firm in Chicago.

She holds degrees from the University of Chicago Law School and Indiana University and clerked for judges on two federal appellate courts as well as for Justice Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court.

Judge Allison Rushing, 38, sits on the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. President Trump nominated her to the court in August 2018, and she was confirmed by the Senate the following March. Born in 1982, the North Carolina native was the  youngest federal judge in the nation  at the time of her confirmation. She holds a B.A. degree from Wake Forest University and a law degree from Duke University School of Law.

At the time of her nomination, a coalition of civil-rights organizations criticized her as a “ young, ideological extremist .” In a 2018 letter, they noted that she clerked for three conservative judges—Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Neil Gorsuch, and U.S. Circuit Judge David Sentelle—and had interned at the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian nonprofit. The White House called Judge Rushing “ one of the best young appellate lawyers in the country .” She is a member of the Federalist Society.

As deputy counsel to the president, Kate Comerford Todd, 45 is one of the most senior lawyers at the White House. She previously served as the chief counsel of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s litigation arm. She was also an associate counsel at the White House during the George W. Bush administration.

She clerked for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and graduated from Harvard Law School, where she was the executive editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Judge Lawrence VanDyke, 47, has served on the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals since January. He was nominated by Mr. Trump the year before and confirmed by the Senate in a 51-44 vote.

A former solicitor general of Nevada, Judge VanDyke previously worked as a commercial litigator in private practice at Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, handling antitrust, labor and employment, products liability, bankruptcy and contractual disputes for a number of major companies. He also litigated constitutional and religious liberty issues pro bono for Alliance Defending Freedom and the ACLU of Texas.

Born in Midland, Texas, Judge VanDyke graduated from Montana State University and from Harvard Law School magna cum laude in 2005. He clerked for Judge Janice Rogers Brown on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

—Siobhan Hughes, Deanna Paul, Byron Tau, Jacob Gershman, Corinne Ramey, Sara Randazzo, Jess Bravin and Andrew Restuccia