Dobbs Abortion Lawyer Confirmed to US Appeals Court in Boston

Julie Rikelman, whose reproductive rights advocacy culminated in a Supreme Court loss that overturned Roe v. Wade, won bipartisan confirmation as a federal appellate judge.

The Senate voted 51-43 on Tuesday to confirm Rikelman to the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. She will be the first immigrant woman and Jewish woman to sit on the court.

She won the support of Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.), who voted against three Biden judicial nominees criticized by GOP members for their progressive legal careers. Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) also voted for Rikelman in the Democratic-led chamber.

Rikelman faced Republican questions at her confirmation hearing last September about whether she could be impartial after spending more than a decade as a reproductive rights advocate.

Attorneys who have worked with her during a career—which has also included time at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett and NBC Universal—say they have no doubt about her ability to shift to the role of judge.

“Everybody who goes on the bench has some type of expertise, whether it be intellectual property, antitrust, or criminal law,” said Jeffrey Fisher, a professor at Stanford Law School who worked with Rikelman on two abortion cases before the Supreme Court.

“Can she be impartial on cases dealing with reproductive rights? My answer would be the same as asking whether somebody who’s a former prosecutor can be impartial on criminal justice issues,” Fisher said. “I don’t have the slightest concern.”

Immigrant Background

Rikelman was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, and immigrated to the US with her parents and sister in 1979.

The family settled in Brookline, Massachusetts, and learned English together as a second language, Rikelman said in her opening statement before the Senate Judiciary Committee last September.

“They came to escape communism and antisemitism and they chose the United States because of its commitment to the law and individual freedoms,” Rikelman said of her parents.

Rikelman graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School, and then clerked for Alaska Supreme Court Justice Dana Fabe and US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit Judge Morton Greenberg.

She worked first at Feldman & Orlansky and then at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. She joined NBC Universal in 2006, where she ultimately served as vice president of litigation.

Reproductive Rights

Rikelman left NBC for the Center for Reproductive Rights in 2011, where she had earlier done a fellowship. She started as a senior staff attorney, before serving a management role as US litigation director.

She worked on three of the four Supreme Court cases the Center for Reproductive Rights has been involved in since 2016.

“That’s an absurd run of action at the court for any public interest organization,” said Joel Dodge, who worked with Rikelman on two of the cases and is now director of public interest professional and pro bono programs at Columbia Law School.

Rikelman remained calm, careful, and detail-oriented in what would otherwise be a “recipe for chaos and burnout,” Dodge said.

She invited other lawyers to help her craft her arguments in what was the blockbuster on abortion, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. They ranged “from the most junior attorneys to the most senior people in the department,” said Michelle Moriarty, pro bono counsel at Proskauer Rose who served as a senior staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights.

In 2020, Rikelman successfully challenged a Louisiana law that required physicians providing abortions to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital in June Medical Services v. Russo.

Less than two years later, Rikelman was one of two lawyers who tried to persuade the justices to rule against Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban as council for the abortion clinic at the center of Dobbs,

Judicial Nominee

As Dobbs advanced, Rikelman was simultaneously pursuing a federal judgeship.

In April 2021, a month before the justices decided to hear Dobbs, Rikelman applied for a US District Court judgeship in Massachusetts with a selection committee set up by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D) and Ed Markey (D). Roughly a year later, Rikelman also expressed interest in the First Circuit vacancy, according to her Senate Judiciary Questionnaire.

Biden announced Rikelman’s nomination to the Boston-based First Circuit in July 2022, just over a month after the Supreme Court issued its decision in Dobbs overturning the constitutional right to abortion.

Rikelman faced Republican opposition at her confirmation hearing for her advocacy work and past criticism of crisis pregnancy centers for misleading women about what services they provided.

“You have spent the majority of your professional life as an extreme zealot advocating for abortion. That is clearly a heartfelt and personal passion,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said to Rikelman.

She committed to following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs “faithfully” if confirmed.

“What defines her both as a lawyer and as a person is a sense of commitment to principle, fairness, and integrity,” said Jeffrey Feldman, a professor at University of Washington School of Law who gave Rikelman her first full time job as a law firm associate. “That comes from the world that she left to come to America.”

Manchin signaled his support for Rikelman in advance of her confirmation for her “commitment to upholding what was settled precedent by defending Roe v. Wade,” he said in a June 15 statement.