Nina Pillard

Cornelia Thayer Livingston "Nina" Pillard (US /ˈniːnɑː ˈpɪ.lərd/, born March 4, 1961) is a United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Before becoming a judge, Pillard was a tenured law professor at Georgetown University. She also served as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General and Assistant to the Solicitor General. At the time of her confirmation to the federal bench, she was among the most accomplished Supreme Court advocates in the United States, having argued nine cases and briefed more than twenty-five before the Court. Pillard's nomination to the D.C. Circuit, along with the nominations of Robert L. Wilkins and Patricia Ann Millett, ultimately became central to the debate over the use of the filibuster in the United States Senate, leading to the controversial use of the nuclear option to bring it to the floor for a vote. She was narrowly confirmed by a vote of 51-44, with her detractors labeling her as one of the most liberal nominees to the federal bench in decades.

Pillard was born in March 1961 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She graduated from Commonwealth School in Boston in 1978. She earned a bachelor's degree with Distinction in History from Yale College in 1983, where she graduated magna cum laude. She then attended Harvard Law School where she was an editor for the Harvard Law Review. She received her J.D. magna cum laude in 1987.

Pillard began her legal career in 1987 as a clerk in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania for Judge Louis H. Pollak, a former dean of both Yale and Penn Law Schools.

Pillard’s first permanent legal job was as Assistant Counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, in New York and Washington, D.C. from 1989–1994.

In 1994, Pillard joined the Office of the Solicitor General of the United States, where she briefed and argued civil and criminal cases on behalf of the federal government before the U.S. Supreme Court. She joined the tenure-track faculty at Georgetown Law in 1997.

In 1998, Pillard was named Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel. That office provides authoritative legal advice to the President and all the Executive Branch agencies, including review of all executive orders and orders of the Attorney General.

Pillard returned to Georgetown Law in 2000, where she received tenure. Pillard has taught more than a dozen different courses and seminars, and frequently teaches the core civil procedure and constitutional law courses. Pillard also served as faculty director of Georgetown Law's Supreme Court Institute, a public service program that provides free assistance to attorneys preparing for arguments before the Supreme Court on a first-come, first-served basis. In the 2012 term, the program held moot courts for counsel in 100% of cases argued before the Court.

Pillard supports fair and efficient private settlement of legal disputes through negotiation, mediation and arbitration. She serves on the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors of the American Arbitration Association, and has been a board member there since 2005.

Pillard served as Chair and an active reader on an American Bar Association Reading Committee that evaluated all of the writings of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito for the ABA Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary. The committee found Alito “well qualified” to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Pillard has argued nine cases and briefed more than twenty-five cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, making her one of the nation's most accomplished Supreme Court advocates. Some of her landmark victories are now staples of law school textbooks.

In the pathmarking case United States v. Virginia, Pillard wrote the Solicitor General's brief challenging the men-only admissions policy of the Virginia Military Institute (VMI). In a 7-1 decision, the Court held that VMI’s exclusion of women violated the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution, and that the new, separate and different Virginia Women’s Institute for Leadership did not remedy the violation.

While a member of the Georgetown Law faculty, Pillard successfully defended the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) against constitutional challenge in another landmark case, Nevada Department of Human Resources v. Hibbs. Pillard represented William Hibbs, a state employee who was fired when he sought to take unpaid leave to care for his injured wife under the FMLA. Pillard, together with the United States Justice Department during the administration of President George W. Bush, which intervened to defend the law, argued that state employees should be able to rely on the FMLA. In a decision by then-Chief Justice Rehnquist, the Court ruled for Hibbs and upheld the FMLA’s application to state employees as a valid exercise Congress’s constitutional powers.

Representing the United States in Ornelas v. United States, Pillard won a significant victory for law enforcement, leading to clearer legal guidance to federal, state, and local officials conducting searches and seizures. In an opinion by then-Chief Justice Rehnquist, the Court held that independent review of probable cause determinations by appellate courts was necessary to ensure the development and consistent application of search and seizure rules.

In other noteworthy cases representing the United States, Pillard sought robust “qualified immunity” protection of law enforcement personnel against lawsuits, shielding officials from the burdens of litigation and liability for reasonable decisions even where, in hindsight, they turned out to be wrong. She also successfully argued that the Constitution reserves the jury right in criminal cases to defendants charged with serious offenses.

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President Barack Obama nominates Pillard (center) and two others for the D.C. Circuit Court

In May 2013, the New York Times and the Washington Post reported that Pillard was under consideration by the Obama administration to fill one of three vacancies on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

On June 4, 2013, Obama nominated Pillard to serve as a United States Circuit Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, to the seat vacated by Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg, who took senior status on October 14, 2011. On September 19, 2013, her nomination was reported to the floor by the Senate Judiciary Committee by a vote of 10 ayes to 8 nays, the vote falling along party lines.

On November 7, 2013, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid moved to invoke cloture on Pillard's nomination, in an attempt to cut off a filibuster from Republican senators. On November 12, 2013, the Senate rejected the motion to invoke cloture by a vote of 56-41, with 1 senator voting "present". Conservatives attacked her references to maternity as "conscription", among other statements, in objecting to her confirmation.

After the Senate moved forward in November 2013 with a rules change eliminating the filibuster on federal appeals court nominees, the Senate on December 10, 2013 voted 56-42 to invoke cloture on Pillard's nomination. That paved the way for a final floor vote on Pillard's nomination. Shortly before 1 a.m. on December 12, 2013, the Senate confirmed Pillard in a 51-44 vote. On December 17, 2013, Pillard received her federal judicial commission.

As a judge, Pillard extended the exclusionary rule to require police to knock-and-announce when executing an arrest warrant, over a dissent by Judge Karen L. Henderson. Judge Pillard joined Henderson when they denied a petition by Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri to disqualify his military judges. When in Meshal v. Higgenbotham (2016) Judges Janice Rogers Brown and Brett Kavanaugh threw out a claim by an American that he had been disappeared by the FBI in a Kenyan black site, Judge Pillard dissented, arguing the court should just create a new implied cause of action. When Judge Pillard’s panel found that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act did not violate the Constitution’s Origination Clause in Sissel v. United States Department of Health & Human Services (2014), Judge Kavanaugh wrote a lengthy dissent from denial of an en banc rehearing.

Pillard is the daughter of Boston University psychiatry professor Richard Pillard and Cornelia Cromwell Tierney. She is married to Georgetown law professor David D. Cole and has two children, Sarah and Aidan Pillard.