President Obama took the step of nominating three people at once to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, a key federal court, in a challenge to Republicans who have blocked earlier nominations.
His choices â€" Patricia Ann Millett, Cornelia T.L. Pillard and Robert L. Wilkins â€" share an elite pedigree: a law degree from Harvard. Since law school, their careers have followed different tracks, but they are all distinguished by efforts to bridge the gaps faced by their respective demographic groups. Ms. Millet has broken ground in the legal world for women, while Ms. Pillard has made workplace gender discrimination a signature cause. As a young lawyer, Mr. Wilkins became the face of a prominent racial-profiling lawsuit.
A bit more on their backgrounds, legal and political, along with hints about how they would approach the bench.
Patricia Ann Millett
Ms. Millett, 49, has argued more cases before the Supreme Court than any other woman. She made a number of appearances during a stint as an assistant solicitor general in the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations and now as the top of Akin Gump’s appellate and Supreme Court practices. Ms. Millett was named one of Washington’s 100 most powerful women by Washingtonian magazine in 2011.
She is known for taking cases that span the political spectrum. Last year, she helped Starbucks defend its rule banning workers from wearing more than one pro-union button, and she successfully argued before the Supreme Court that a man, Robert J. Stevens, should not be convicted of animal cruelty charges because he sold dogfighting videos.
“Whatever a person’s politics, lawyers have to understand that we are, for most people, the gateway for them to have access to the third branch of government,†Ms. Millett said in an interview with Law360.
As for the role of judges, Ms. Millett mused on Chief Justice John G. Roberts’s decision to uphold the health care overhaul in an interview with a legal trade publication, Metropolitan Corporate Counsel:
I think the chief justice ruled exactly what he firmly believed in his heart of hearts was the right constitutional answer. He was pretty clear that he might well disagree with the President on policy, but voting on policy is not the job of a Supreme Court justice. The chief justice understood that, while the Court has the duty to enforce the Constitution and to make sure that new laws stay within constitutional bounds, the unelected Supreme Court should be very reluctant to overturn newly enacted legislation and should look for every possible source of constitutional authority for the law. He said that how a provision is labeled â€" “penalty†instead of “tax†â€" is not what matters most to the Constitution. The Constitution looks at substance over form. And that is a good thing.
Ms. Millett’s political leanings are a bit more apparent in her campaign contributions: $52,600 to Democratic candidates and committees, including the president’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns.
When SCOTUSblog asked which case she would argue if she could choose any throughout history, Ms. Millett chose the 1803 case that essentially defined the court’s role: “Marbury v. Madison, of course,†she said. â€Just because if women had broken into the Supreme Court bar back then, we’d dominate it by now!â€
Cornelia Pillard
Known as Nina, Ms. Pillard, 52, is a Georgetown professor perhaps best known for her work on gender discrimination and workplace issues. In 1996, she argued the case that opened the Virginia Military Institute to women, and in a 2003 argument, Nevada Department of Social Services. v. Hibbs, she defended the Family Medical Leave Act against a constitutional challenge.
In that case, Ms. Pillard represented a male employee of the state of Nevada who was fired when he tried to take unpaid leave beyond a federally mandated minimum to care for his sick wife. During oral arguments, she cited statistics showing that women are offered more time off than men, and this can hurt their careers. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, in a decision siding with her client, wrote that “mutually reinforcing stereotypes†of women as primary caregivers and men as lacking domestic responsibility “create a self-fulfilling cycle of discrimination.â€
It’s an idea central in “Against the New Maternalism,†a 2011 paper Ms. Pillard wrote with Naomi Mezey, a colleague at Georgetown Law School. This “celebration of mothers’ domesticity and their role as the default parent,†â€" exemplified by “mommy blogs†and Sarah Palin’s “mama grizzlies†â€" excludes “men, whether willing or reluctant, from engaged parenting’s benefits and responsibilities,†and thus undermines gender equality on a practical level.
At Georgetown, Ms. Pillard directs the Supreme Court Institute, which helps lawyers prepare to deliver arguments to the justices. She was a deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel and an assistant to the solicitor general in the Clinton administration.
Ms. Pillard is married to another Georgetown Law professor: David Cole, who is also the legal affairs correspondent for The Nation, a liberal magazine. She has donated $8,500 to Democrats, including Mr. Obama’s presidential campaigns.
Robert L. Wilkins
Mr. Wilkins, 49, currently sits on the United States District Court in Washington. But before that, he was a public defender â€" and a very public plaintiff.
Mr. Wilkins was driving with some relatives through the mountains of western Maryland in 1992 when state troopers pulled him over for speeding in his rented red Cadillac. When he refused to let them search the car for drugs, the troopers made the family wait in the car, in the rain, until drug-sniffing dogs arrived. The dogs found nothing, and Mr. Wilkins sued.
“I was determined to do something about this because I don’t consider myself a victim; I consider myself a warrior,†he later told reporters.
Though he received a $95,000 settlement from the Maryland State Police in 1995, his case prompted a series of class-action legal battles over racial profiling that are still being waged.
Mr. Wilkins was confirmed as a federal judge in 2010, after an eclectic career. He earned an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering before graduating from Harvard Law School. He worked as a public defender in Washington for 12 years, but later transitioned to defending white-collar and corporate clients at the firm Venable LLP.
In 2008, Legal Times named him one of the 90 Greatest Lawyers of the Last 30 Years, but now he presides over civil and criminal trials in federal court. Mr. Wilkins recently offered to recuse himself in the case that sent Jesse Jackson Jr. to prison for campaign finance violations, citing work as a college student on Jesse Jackson Sr.’s 1988 presidential campaign. The defense declined the offer.
Mr. Wilkins also helped drive the creation of the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian.
Over the years, he has donated $3,352 to Venable’s PAC, which splits its money between Republicans and Democrats. But his remaining $8,850 in political contributions have gone to Democratic candidates and committees, including $250 in 2003 to a Senate candidate named Barack Obama.
