Brett Kavanaugh
Brett Michael Kavanaugh (/ˈkævənɔː/; born February 12, 1965) is an American lawyer and jurist serving as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was nominated by President Donald Trump on July 9, 2018, and has served since October 6, 2018. He was previously a U.S. circuit judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 2006 to 2018.[2]
Brett Kavanaugh
Raul Yanes
February 12, 1965
Washington, D.C., U.S.
2
Yale University (BA, JD)
Kavanaugh studied history at Yale University, where he joined the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. He then attended Yale Law School, after which he began his career as a law clerk working under Judge Ken Starr. After Starr left the D.C. Circuit to become the head of the Office of Independent Counsel, Kavanaugh assisted him with investigations concerning President Bill Clinton, including drafting the Starr Report recommending Clinton's impeachment. He joined the Bush administration as White House staff secretary and was a central figure in its efforts to identify and confirm judicial nominees.[3] Bush nominated Kavanaugh to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 2003. His confirmation hearings were contentious and stalled for three years over charges of partisanship. Kavanaugh was confirmed to the D.C. Circuit in May 2006.[2][4][5]
President Trump nominated Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court on July 9, 2018, to fill the position vacated by Justice Anthony Kennedy. Before his U.S. Senate confirmation proceedings began, Christine Blasey Ford accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her in the early 1980s.[6][7][8] Three other women also accused Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, one of whom later recanted her story.[9][10][11][12] None of the accusations were corroborated by eyewitness testimony, and Kavanaugh denied them. The Senate Judiciary Committee held a supplemental hearing over the allegations and voted 11–10 along party lines to advance the confirmation to a full Senate vote.[13] On October 6, the full Senate confirmed Kavanaugh by a vote of 50–48.[14][15]
Since the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2020, Kavanaugh has come to be regarded as a swing vote on the Court.[16][17] He was the target of an assassination plot in June 2022; the suspect had hoped to disrupt the rulings in Dobbs and Bruen.[18]
Early life and education
Kavanaugh was born on February 12, 1965, in Washington, D.C.,[19] the son of Martha Gamble (née Murphy) and Everett Edward Kavanaugh Jr.[20][21] He is of Irish Catholic descent on both sides of his family. His paternal great-grandfather immigrated to the United States from Roscommon, Ireland, in the late 19th century,[22][23] and his maternal Irish lineage goes back to his great-great-grandparents settling in New Jersey.[22] Kavanaugh's father was a lawyer and served as the president of the Cosmetic, Toiletry and Fragrance Association for two decades.[24] His mother was a history teacher at Woodson and McKinley high schools in Washington in the 1960s and 1970s. She earned a law degree from American University in 1978 and served from 1995 to 2001 as a Maryland Circuit Court judge in Montgomery County, Maryland.[25][26]
Kavanaugh was raised in Bethesda, Maryland. As a teenager, he attended Georgetown Preparatory School, a Jesuit boys' college prep school, where he was two years ahead of Neil Gorsuch, with whom he later clerked at the Supreme Court and eventually served with as a Supreme Court justice.[27][28] He was captain of the school's basketball team and was a wide receiver and cornerback on the football team.[29] Kavanaugh was also friends with classmate Mark Judge; both were in the same class with Maryland state senator Richard Madaleno.[30][31][32][33] In his yearbook Kavanaugh called himself a "Renate Alumnius", a reference to a female student at a nearby Catholic school.[34]
After graduating from Georgetown Prep in 1983,[34] Kavanaugh went to Yale University, as had his paternal grandfather.[35][36] Several of Kavanaugh's Yale classmates remembered him as a "serious but not showy student" who loved sports, especially basketball.[37] He unsuccessfully tried out for the Yale Bulldogs men's basketball team and later played for two years on the junior varsity team.[37] He wrote articles about basketball and other sports for the Yale Daily News,[37] and was a member of the fraternity Delta Kappa Epsilon.[38][39] He graduated from Yale in 1987 with a Bachelor of Arts cum laude in history.[37]
Kavanaugh then attended Yale Law School, where he lived in a group house with future judge James E. Boasberg and played basketball with professor George L. Priest (sponsor of the school's Federalist Society).[40] He was a member of the Yale Law Journal and served as a notes editor during his third year. Kavanaugh graduated from Yale Law with a Juris Doctor degree in 1990.[41]
Teaching and scholarship
Kavanaugh taught full-term courses on separation of powers at Harvard Law School from 2008 to 2015, on the Supreme Court at Harvard Law School between 2014 and 2018, on National Security and Foreign Relations Law at Yale Law School in 2011, and on Constitutional Interpretation at Georgetown University Law Center in 2007. He was named the Samuel Williston Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School in 2009.[290] In 2008, Kavanaugh was hired as a visiting professor by Elena Kagan, then the dean of Harvard Law School. According to The Boston Globe, he was generous with his time and accessible, and quickly became a student favorite. He often dined in Cambridge with students and offered references and career advice.[291][292] Kavanaugh received high evaluations from his students, including J. D. Vance.[293] After the allegations of sexual misconduct against him, Harvard Law School graduates petitioned Harvard to rescind Kavanaugh's position as a lecturer. Shortly thereafter, Kavanaugh voluntarily withdrew from teaching at Harvard for the 2019 winter semester.[294] In the summer of 2019, he joined the faculty of George Mason University's Antonin Scalia Law School as a visiting professor, co-teaching a summer course in Runnymede, England, on the origins and creation of the United States Constitution.[295]
In 2009, Kavanaugh wrote an article for the Minnesota Law Review in which he argued that Congress should exempt U.S. presidents from civil lawsuits while in office[296] because, among other things, such lawsuits could be "time-consuming and distracting" for the president and would thus "ill serve the public interest, especially in times of financial or national security crisis".[297] Kavanaugh argued that if a president "does something dastardly", they may be impeached by the House of Representatives, convicted by the Senate, and criminally prosecuted after leaving office.[296] He asserted that the U.S. would have been better off if President Clinton could have "focused on Osama bin Laden without being distracted by the Paula Jones sexual harassment case and its criminal investigation offshoots".[296] This article garnered attention in 2018 when Kavanaugh was nominated to the Supreme Court by Trump, whose 2016 presidential campaign was at the time the subject of a federal probe by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.[297]
When reviewing a book on statutory interpretation by Second Circuit Chief Judge Robert Katzmann, Kavanaugh observed that judges often cannot agree on a statute if its text is ambiguous.[298] To remedy this, he encouraged judges to first seek the "best reading" of the statute, through "interpreting the words of the statute" as well as the context of the statute as a whole, and only then apply other interpretive techniques that may justify an interpretation that differs from the "best meaning", such as constitutional avoidance, legislative history, and Chevron deference.[298]