Trump's first judicial pick of second term has clerked 'for a full third' of Supreme Court's justices
Whitney Hermandorfer of the Tennessee attorney general’s office speaks before a panel of judges April 4, 2024, in Nashville, Tennessee. She has been nominated to be a judge on the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at Cincinnati. (Photo by George Walker IV/The Associated Press)
President Donald Trump has announced his first judicial nominee of his second term.
Trump announced last week that he is nominating Whitney Hermandorfer for a seat on the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at Cincinnati, report Reuters, the New York Times, Bloomberg Law, Courthouse News Service, the Volokh Conspiracy and the Wall Street Journal.
She would replace Judge Jane Branstetter Stranch, an appointee of former President Barack Obama.
Hermandorfer is the director of the strategic litigation unit for the Tennessee attorney general’s office, where she defended the state abortion ban and challenged Biden administration regulations that interpret Title IX to protect transgender students from discrimination in education.
Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti called Hermandorfer “a lawyer’s lawyer” and “one of the very best litigators in America” in a May 2 press release. She has clerked “for a full third of the justices on the Supreme Court of the United States,” Skrmetti said.
Hermandorfer clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and Justice Amy Coney Barrett and for Justice Brett Kavanaugh when he was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Barrett and Kavanaugh were nominated to the Supreme Court by Trump during his first term.
Hermandorfer is a graduate of Princeton University, where she was co-captain of the women’s basketball team. At the George Washington University Law School, she was first in her class and editor-in-chief of the law review, according to the Volokh Conspiracy.
She formerly worked at Williams & Connolly, which is defending Perkins Coie in its lawsuit challenging Trump’s punitive executive order against it.
The Wall Street Journal called Hermandorfer’s credentials “conventionally conservative.”
The New York Times noted that Trump “is moving more slowly so far” on judicial nominations.
“By this point in Mr. Trump’s first term in 2017,” the New York Times reports, “the Senate had already confirmed a new Supreme Court justice, Mr. Trump had nominated an appeals court judge, and several other prominent judicial nominees were in the queue to be announced within days after he made placing conservatives on the federal courts a centerpiece of his first campaign.”
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