Brett Kavanaugh

Brett Kavanaugh joined the Supreme Court in October 2018, succeeding Justice Anthony Kennedy, for whom he had once clerked. He was born on February 12, 1965, in Washington, D.C., and grew up in suburban Bethesda, Maryland. His mother, Martha, was a teacher who later became a Maryland state trial judge. He attended Georgetown Preparatory School and graduated from Yale College in 1987 and Yale Law School in 1990. After clerking for two federal appeals judges and for Kennedy, he worked in the office of independent counsel Kenneth Starr, where he helped write the 1998 report that led to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.

Kavanaugh served in the White House under President George W. Bush, first in the counsel's office and then as staff secretary, the official who manages the flow of documents to the president. Bush appointed him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 2006, where he served for 12 years. President Donald Trump nominated him to the Supreme Court in July 2018. The confirmation became one of the most contested in the Court's history after Christine Blasey Ford testified that he had sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers, an allegation he denied. After a supplemental FBI background investigation, the Senate confirmed him 50 to 48 on October 6, 2018, and he was sworn in that evening at age 53.

Kavanaugh is part of the Court's conservative majority, and observers have often described him as one of its members closest to the center; he frequently writes separate concurrences explaining the limits of a ruling. He wrote the majority opinion in Flowers v. Mississippi (2019), which overturned a Black man's murder conviction because the prosecutor had struck Black jurors on the basis of race. He joined the majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022) and wrote a concurrence stressing that the decision left abortion policy to the states and to Congress. In 2023 he joined the Chief Justice's majority opinion in Allen v. Milligan, which required Alabama to draw a second majority-Black congressional district.