As a legal organization dedicated to defending the rights of LGBTQ+ people and people living with HIV, Lambda Legal has long understood the need for fair and impartial courts to uphold these rights. When judges have a set of beliefs about a person, group of people, or legal issue before they appear in court, there is serious risk of prejudice that may impact the outcome of cases. As part of Lambda Legal’s work to reduce bias in the justice system, we monitor and track federal judicial nominees. These candidates for the federal bench are nominated by the President and must be confirmed by the Senate. Once confirmed, these judicial appointees have lifetime roles as judges or justices and preside over many types of cases from criminal to civil rights.
During the Trump administration (2017- 2020), the Senate confirmed 234 federal judges nominated by former President Trump, including three of the nine current U.S. Supreme Court Justices. Many of these judges had a history of litigating against LGBTQ+ civil rights, publishing legal articles that criticize our fight for equality, and some even denying our existence and humanity. After thorough research into Trump’s picks, Lambda Legal formally opposed 34 judicial nominees who we, due to evidence of anti-LGBTQ+ bias in their past, believed were not capable of being impartial and making decisions based on the facts and the law.1 Of those 34 we opposed, 30 were confirmed by the Senate.
In January 2021, we provided the first analysis of the impact the Trump administration had in creating a nationwide judicial climate of hostility towards LGBTQ+ people and people living with HIV.
One key finding of this analysis was that at the end of Trump’s term, close to 40 percent of the judges he had nominated to the courts of appeal had a previously demonstrated history of bias against the LGBTQ+ community.
Since then, the decisions of many judges nominated by former President Trump have clearly shown their hostility to LGBTQ+ people and to civil rights protections more broadly. The 30 confirmed judges Lambda Legal opposed have now made thousands of decisions on legal issues across the spectrum. As Lambda Legal predicted, many of those decisions have been harmful to our rights and some have shattered decades of bedrock, relied-upon precedent in ways that were unthinkable in the past. In this report we share examples from 19 of these 30 judges.² Lambda Legal’s opposition letters for each judge are found at the links included with each judge’s name.