President Trump Taps Justice Joan Larsen For 6th U.S. Circuit

WASHINGTON, DC — President Donald Trump on Monday appointed Michigan Supreme Court Justice Joan Larsen to the federal appeals court bench. Larsen was a short-lister for the Supreme Court vacancy now occupied by Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch, and her appointment to the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals bench further tracks the jurist's rising stature in the Republican Party.

Larsen, 48, was among 10 judges the president appointed to various federal court vacancies. “These highly respected people are the kind of scholars that we need to preserve the very core of our country and make it greater than ever before,” White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said during Monday’s press briefing.

If confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Larsen will replace Michigan judge David McKeague, who is transitioning to “senior status,” a form of semi-retirement on the Cincinnati-based court that has jurisdiction in Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee. Larsen’s appointment swings the 16-member 6th Circuit Court — which has seven Republicans, six Democrats and three vacancies – farther to the right.

Larsen had been on the Michigan Supreme Court bench for less than a year when Trump put her on the short list to fill the vacancy created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. Larsen clerked for Scalia and considered him her mentor.

Writing in “What I Learned From Justice Scalia,” an op-ed for The New York Times after Scalia’s sudden death last year, Larsen wrote that her “proudest moment” was when she convinced him, after two sleepless nights poring over precedents, “that a criminal defendant should win a case that none of the justices originally thought he should win.”

“I’m pretty sure that was the moment he was most proud of me, too,” Larsen wrote.

Larsen wrote that Scalia taught her “a simple principle: The law came to the court as an is not an ought” — a philosophy reflected on her campaign website, where she describes herself as a “Constitutional, rule-of-law judge” and espouses the philosophy that “judges should interpret the laws according to what they say, not according to what the judges wish they would say.”

“Judges are supposed to interpret the laws; they are not supposed to make them,” she wrote.

Larsen graduated at the top of her Northwestern University Law School class. Before clerking for Scalia, she clerked for Judge David Sentelle of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. After a brief stint in private practice, she was appointed deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department under President George W. Bush. Working in the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel, she and other lawyers authored legal opinions giving advice to Bush and the executive branch on waterboarding and other interrogation techniques, according to SCOTUSblog.com.

She also taught at top-tier law schools, including her alma mater and the University of Michigan, before Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder appointed her in September 2015 to fill a vacancy on the state Supreme Court.

Larsen won election to the partial two-year term in 2016 by a comfortable, 58 percent majority. During that campaign, she won multiple newspaper endorsements, including one from the Detroit Free Press, which praised her “reputation for intellectual prowess and integrity” in what is the increasingly partisan world of Michigan’s appellate courts.

During her time on the Michigan Supreme Court, she has been a liaison to and advocate of the state’s 179 “problem-solving courts,” which mete out treatment for underlying problems such as drug or alcohol addiction rather than “just locking them up in jail and letting them out to reoffend,” Larsen told Bloomberg Law, adding the program is “a win-win not just for the offenders, but for their families and the community as a whole.”

With so little time on Michigan’s high court, Larsen’s judicial record on the court is unremarkable and sparse.

Her most public moment came after Trump put her on the Supreme Court short list and she recused herself from two appeals on failed Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein’s request for a recount of Michigan’s presidential votes, saying her “appearance on the president-elect’s list and his presence as a party in these cases creates a conflict requiring my disqualification.”

The Federalist Society, a conservative legal group, lists her as an expert and touts her experience in constitutional law, criminal procedure, statutory interpretation and presidential power. She has also been a panel moderator for the group but said after her nomination to the Michigan high court that she wasn’t sure if she is a member of the group, according to SCOTUSblog.

She criticized the U.S. Supreme Court’s use of foreign and international laws to interpret the U.S. Constitution, which the high court did in Lawrence v. Texas, which invalidated sodomy laws in Texas and 13 other states. Writing in the Ohio State Law Journal, she said that without “a thoughtful and thorough justification” by the majority for using foreign law to decide U.S. cases, “it seems we are better off to abandon this particular use of foreign and international law.”

Larsen’s broad view of presidential powers meshes well with Trump’s emerging leadership style. In an op-ed for The Detroit News in 2006, the then-U-M professor defended President George W. Bush’s use of presidential statements asserting his independent authority to reject or ignore some parts of statutes he had signed into law, including one that barred U.S. officials from torturing detainees.

The “president’s independent vision of what the Constitution requires is critical,” she wrote, noting that “if circumstances arose in which the law would prevent (President Bush) from protecting the nation, he would choose the national over the statute.”

Larson and her husband, U-M law professor Adam Pritchard, live in Scio Township near Ann Arbor with their two children.

Justice Joan Larsen of the Michigan Supreme Court and a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia speaks at his memorial service at the Mayflower Hotel March 1, 2016 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Susan Walsh-Pool/Getty Images News/Getty Images)