Inside the conservative law firm that played a pivotal role in reshaping America’s judiciary
The day after the ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade was issued, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett attended a party hosted by a partner at the conservative law firm who led an elite practice that argued cases before the court.
Traci Lovitt hosted a 50th birthday in June for her husband, Ara, whom she met while clerking for Supreme Court justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Antonin Scalia, respectively, and she ran a specialized practice group within the international law firm of Jones Day, which represented both of Donald Trump's presidential campaigns, according to excerpts from the forthcoming book "Servants of the Damned" published by the New York Times Magazine.
"Barrett clerked for Scalia in the same session as Ara, in 1998 and 1999, and also became friends with Traci, jogging together around the National Mall after work," wrote author David Enrich."When Trump nominated Barrett to the Supreme Court in 2020, Traci wrote to senators, praising the judge’s fair-mindedness and commitment to the rule of law. But the connection to the court ran deeper than that. Scalia had spent years at Jones Day in the 1960s. And Traci ran an elite practice inside the firm that was focused in part on arguing cases before Barrett and her colleagues."
The justice hobnobbed with Jones Day partner Noel Francisco, who had clerked for Scalia the year before Lovitt and Barrett and left the firm in 2017 to become Trump's solicitor general, where he represented the government before the Supreme Court, and returned in 2020.
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"Now his and Lovitt’s underlings were appearing regularly before the court. In one recent case brought by Jones Day, the court killed the Biden administration’s moratorium on home evictions during the pandemic," Enrich reported. "Less than a week after the Lovitts’ party, in another case Jones Day worked on, the court would severely limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation of power-plant emissions."
Jones Day has employed dozens of former Supreme Court clerks, mostly from conservative justices, and packed the Trump administration with top officials -- including White House counsel Don McGahn, who personally oversaw Trump's judicial picks and selected justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, and whose assistant Rob Luther followed him to the firm after leaving the administration.
“We did it!” Luther told to a Jones Day colleague shortly after joining the firm, according to Enrich. “We reshaped the judiciary! We changed the country!”