Julie Rikelman is arguably the nation’s preeminent legal professional representing the reason for abortion rights. She is nearly definitely crucial pro-abortion rights litigator of her technology. And now she is going to function a federal appellate choose.
Among different issues, Rikelman made a doomed effort to avoid wasting Roe v. Wade from a hostile Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center (2023). Three years earlier, in June Medical Services v. Russo (2020), she unexpectedly satisfied conservative Chief Justice John Roberts to protect abortion rights for a number of years earlier than the Court’s new 6-3 Republican majority eradicated the constitutional proper to an abortion in Dobbs.
On Tuesday, the Senate voted 51-43 to substantiate Rikelman to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, making her one of many few attorneys with important expertise representing abortion rights causes to be confirmed to the federal bench. Prior to her affirmation, Rikelman served as senior litigation director for the Center for Reproductive Rights for a couple of dozen years.
That stated, it’s removed from clear that Rikelman can have a lot impression on abortion jurisprudence as a federal choose. Abortion-related instances make up a tiny share of the federal docket. And the First Circuit hears appeals from federal court docket selections in Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Puerto Rico, and Rhode Island — which implies that Rikelman won’t have jurisdiction over crimson states recognized for his or her hostility to abortion rights.
Still, her appointment is a vital symbolic win for abortion rights advocates. For a very long time, a historical past of abortion rights advocacy was poisonous to presidential nominees as long as Republicans had sufficient votes within the Senate to dam such a nominee.
During President Barack Obama’s first time period, for instance, Republicans successfully filibustered Dawn Johnsen’s nomination to guide the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, a strong place that interprets the Constitution and federal legal guidelines for government department companies and the White House. Johnsen had beforehand served as a lawyer at NARAL Pro-Choice America. Republicans took challenge with a footnote in a short she authored, which stated that forcing a girl to bear a baby in opposition to her will is “disturbingly suggestive of involuntary servitude, prohibited by the Thirteenth Amendment.”
In 2013, nevertheless, the Senate largely eradicated the filibuster for many presidential nominees, permitting these nominees to be confirmed by a easy majority of senators — beforehand, a 60-vote supermajority was required for affirmation. That allowed presidents of each events to substantiate judges over the opposition of the opposite occasion, at the least when the president’s occasion additionally managed the Senate.
Former President Donald Trump, for instance, appointed many outspoken opponents of abortion to the federal bench, together with former attorneys at Christian Right advocacy retailers, resembling Kyle Duncan and Matthew Kacsmaryk, who’ve continued to have interaction in such advocacy from the bench.
Still, few of Trump’s judges had been as distinguished as Rikelman, who argued a few of the most consequential abortion-related Supreme Court instances of the final decade.