Five of the potential nominees are on state supreme courts: Allison Eid of Colorado, Thomas Lee of Utah, David Stras of Minnesota, Joan Larsen of MI and Don Willett of Texas. Six of the candidates now serve on US courts of appeal and the other five serve on state Supreme Courts.
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The Republican senator said in a statement Wednesday that the people he knows on Trump’s list of 11 potential U.S. Supreme Court justices would all be great choices but “one name on that list stands head and shoulders above the rest”. Appointed to her position in 2015 by Gov. Rick Snyder, Larsen is a former law professor and once clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia.
“I’m going to submit a list of justices, potential justices of the United States Supreme Court that I will appoint, from the list – I won’t go beyond that list”, Trump said at a news conference in Washington in late March.
Pryor, a Catholic Republican, served as editor-in-chief of the Tulane Law Review as a law student in Louisiana before clerking for Judge John Minor Wisdom of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and then entering private practice.
Veteran court watcher Peter Knapp, a professor at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law, called Stras “a very principled, very thorough, very intelligent judge”. The move was seen as an effort to assuage Republican suspicions that he would not choose genuine conservatives to fill Supreme Court vacancies, one of which exists right now.
Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, released an all-white list of 11 conservative judges as potential Supreme Court picks Wednesday. Gruender received undergraduate, law and business degrees from Washington University in St. Louis. She left the court in 2004 when she was nominated to the federal bench by President George W. Bush.
The associate justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court was elected to a six-year term in 2012.
But Trump is working to assure conservatives in his own party that, if elected president on November 8, he would not appoint a liberal or moderate to the court.
Don Willett is a justice on the Texas Supreme Court.
The stalemate over the Supreme Court vacancy and Obama’s Garland nomination has become a rallying point for both parties.
Stras, Eid, and Lee also clerked for Justice Thomas, who dissented in Kelo.
Eid is married to Troy Eid, a former US attorney for Colorado and nationally recognized expert on Native American tribal law.
“Instead of trying to massage case law to reach (specific) results, he’s a little more committed to abstract principles and really trying to apply those across the board”, Sampsell-Jones said. While every member of the current court studied law at either Harvard or Yale, most of Trump’s picks studied at schools such as Michigan, Northwestern and Tulane, with only one having attended Yale.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said at his daily briefing that he would be surprised if any Democrat would describe any of Trump’s picks “as a consensus nominee”.
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Last summer, Willett used his Twitter account, @JusticeWillett, to take a swipe at Trump’s conservatism, tweeting: “Can’t wait till Trump rips off his face Mission Impossible-style & reveals a laughing Ruth Bader Ginsburg”.
