Faith, Family, and Judge Justin Walker

Policy

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A gavel sits on the chairman’s dais in the U.S. House Judiciary Committee hearing room on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., June 14, 2019 (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

Earlier this month, I was overjoyed to learn that President Trump had selected my friend and former colleague, judge Justin Walker, to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. In the words of Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, by selecting a jurist born, raised, and holding court in Louisville, Kentucky, the President’s “search took him outside the Beltway and into the Bluegrass.” All Americans should hail this choice, but particularly conservatives who share Judge Walker’s passionate commitment to his family, faith, and community.

To fully appreciate Judge Walker’s nomination, it helps to understand one of his favorite TV shows — the short-lived but critically-acclaimed NBC comedy drama Ed (2000-04). In the show’s pilot episode, the title character starts as a successful attorney at a large New York law firm. But after a series of events forces some personal introspection, he returns to his hometown of Stuckeyville, Ohio. There, he buys and renovates a bowling alley, reconnects with his high-school crush, and starts a local law practice to help his neighbors. He finds enduring meaning in the bonds of family and friends and the opportunities for service provided by his hometown.

Like Ed, Judge Walker started his legal practice at a major coastal law firm — Gibson Dunn LLP in Washington, D.C. (I worked there at the time and was assigned to be his associate “buddy.” We bonded over bowling.) Justin quickly excelled at drafting briefs and delving into records in complex commercial cases. It would have been easy for Justin — whose impeccable credentials include being a summa cum laude graduate from Duke; a magna cum laude graduate from Harvard Law; a notes editor on the Harvard Law Review; and a clerk for then-judge Brett Kavanaugh and Justice Anthony Kennedy — to continue to thrive as a D.C. litigator.

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But Justin ultimately felt called to return to his hometown of Louisville, where he could live closer to his mom and support his wife’s career building Global Game Changers, a non-profit for underserved school children. Once back home, Justin went on to inspire year after year of students as a professor at the University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law. He also served as pro bono legal counsel at the Global Game Changers Student Empowerment Program and volunteered his time teaching writing to high school students.

Conservatives who rightly praise the virtues of family, community, education, and service should find much to admire in Judge Walker’s career. And to these virtues I would also add faith, as Justin’s desire to serve others stems directly from his deeply rooted Catholic beliefs. While he was still in D.C., I met him frequently at church when we were both parishioners at St. Thomas Apostle in Woodley Park, where Justin was also an acolyte. As a former speechwriter, Justin relished a clear, concise, and theologically sound homily. We would compare notes after Mass and share stories of our favorite homilies from home and our involvement with campus ministry in law school.

Through these conversations, I came to appreciate Justin’s commitment to how the Constitution, as originally understood, provides strong protection to religious believers. When I joined a team of Gibson Dunn attorneys in defending the constitutionality of prayer at town meetings before the U.S. Supreme Court, Justin was my biggest supporter. In that case, two citizens of our client, the town of Greece, New York, claimed that the town violated the Establishment Clause by starting its monthly meetings with a prayer. When the Supreme Court took our case, Justin told me, “Congrats! Just don’t lose!” Fortunately, we didn’t: The Court relied on centuries of history and tradition in affirming the right of this predominantly Christian community to pray in its own idiom, invoking Jesus’s name.

Not long afterward, Justin enthused about a chapter in senator Mike Lee’s book, Our Lost Constitution, on how the Supreme Court had strayed from the original meaning of the Establishment Clause. The book explains that, for a century and a half, the Clause “was not interpreted as requiring the government to be completely neutral between religion and atheism.” But since 1947, after Everson v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court “led this nation on a dramatic and distressing detour from this tradition.” The chapter shows how Justice Hugo Black’s anti-Catholic animus contributed to this more hostile and regrettable turn against religion and the Court’s adoption of Thomas Jefferson’s metaphor of a “wall of separation between church and State.”

It therefore did not surprise me when, on Holy Saturday, Judge Walker penned a stirring defense of religious liberty in an order that forbade the Mayor of Louisville from interfering with a local Christian organization that wished to hold drive-in Easter services that complied with CDC guidelines for social distancing during COVID-19. And I am confident that, if confirmed to the D.C. Circuit, Judge Walker would continue to honor his commitment to religious liberty through careful attention to the text and original meaning of the U.S. Constitution. As judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III suggested in his article, “Is There a Distinctive Conservative Jurisprudence?,” the “textual and structural dictates of the Constitution” require “recognizing and reaffirming the role of important intermediate institutions in American life” — our states, churches, civic organizations, and families. Judge Walker knows firsthand how important those mediating institutions are to our shared American experience. He has written eloquently in their defense and prioritized them throughout his own life of service to family and friends, from the Beltway to the Bluegrass.

Thomas M. Johnson Jr. — Thomas M. Johnson, Jr. is an attorney for the federal government in Washington, D.C.  The thoughts expressed herein are his own. He can be reached on Twitter at @TomMJohnsonJr.

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