George Mason Tops Harvard, Yale as Trump Judge Law School Source

A Virginia law school renamed for the late Justice Antonin Scalia and known for its embrace of conservative judicial philosophies has emerged as a top feeder school to the federal bench during President Donald Trump’s second term.

Trump has tapped more graduates from George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School to be judges in his second term than from any other law school in the nation, according to a Bloomberg Law analysis of federal judiciary data on judicial appointments.

Three Scalia Law graduates were confirmed last year to federal district court judgeships, while two other alumni were announced as nominees earlier this month. If confirmed, those five Scalia Law alumni will outnumber Trump’s second-term judicial appointees from Harvard and Yale’s law schools combined.

The new appointments show the administration is starting to turn to a school historically known as being more conservative than others, and is putting less of an emphasis on elite academic credentials when it comes to picking future judges.

George Mason’s law school gets “higher quality students who end up being attractive to judges as clerks and being attractive to law firms as associates, attractive to government agencies as people to work at them,” said Mike Fragoso, former chief counsel for then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). “Because of that, the stock keeps rising.”

The public school in Arlington, Virginia has increased in judicial representation from Trump’s first term, too during which he appointed the first two Scalia Law grads to join the bench. Additionally, Judge Liam O’Grady of the Eastern District of Virginia, a George W. Bush appointee, earned his law degree from the International School of Law school, which later merged with George Mason.

White House counsel David Warrington, who oversees judicial nominations, also earned his law degree from George Mason’s law school.

In a statement, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said, “The President seeks to appoint judges who will faithfully apply the law in the mold of Justices Thomas and Alito and the late Justice Scalia.”

Scalia Law has filled a gap in the Washington legal market for a law school that’s unafraid to emphasize conservative ideologies and trains lawyers “willing to take on the hard cases,” said Robert Luther III, a professor there who worked on judicial nominations at the White House during Trump’s first term.

“That’s the kind of background that gets noticed by leaders in communities and elected officials,” Luther said.

Many of the leading law schools that might be traditional launching pads for future jurists are pretty left-leaning, said Maya Sen, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School who writes about federal judges.

“There aren’t that many conservatives graduating from those universities, so it’s quite hard to make all your judicial appointments only looking at the top elite law schools,” Sen said. Groups like the Federalist Society have focused on cultivating young conservative lawyers, “but at some point, it becomes a numbers issue” when it comes to having enough potential attorneys to pick judges from, she said.

GMU’s increase in national stature coincides with the rising popularity of originalism, the legal doctrine Scalia championed that calls for laws to be interpreted as they would have been at the time they were adopted.

“It takes some time to develop a network of capable lawyers around the country. But I think that particularly in the last decade, we’ve really broken through and solidified ourselves as a national law school,” Luther said.

The increased judicial representation could further boost the standing of the relatively young law school, which has risen in prominence since it was established fewer than 50 years ago. A year before it officially changed its name to honor Scalia after the conservative justice’s death, the school landed the No. 43 spot in the 2016 US News & World Report rankings. This year, the law school is tied with four other schools for 31st.

Nontraditional pipelines

Though only a year in, the increase in judicial appointments of GMU law graduates may also reflect a shift in priorities for the second Trump administration when it comes to judicial selection, compared to past presidential administrations.

Of the 33 people confirmed to the bench since Trump returned to office, more than half earned their law degrees at public universities, including Scalia Law. Five attended Ivy League law schools, including three from Yale, one from Harvard, and one from the University of Pennsylvania.

Those more varied academic backgrounds reflect that the administration is “less interested in where you went and more interested in how you did,” a value that dates back to Trump’s first term, Fragoso said.

Of the 11 other judicial nominees still in the pipeline, two attended Columbia, one of the five Ivy League law schools, and eight went to a public law school. Thirty-nine of the 235 judges appointed by President Joe Biden attended Harvard or Yale’s law schools, according to judiciary data.

“We can at least infer that pedigree does not drive them as much as it has other presidents,” Howard Wasserman, a law professor at Florida International University who studies federal courts, said of Trump administration officials.

Judge Kyle Dudek of the US District Court for the Middle District of Florida, a recent Trump appointee who attended GMU’s law school, said he remembered being interested in the program because of its location in the DC metropolitan area and discounted tuition rate for in-state students.

Dudek, who was appointed to the bench five months ago, said he’s already hired one law clerk from his alma mater.

“I had great professors, regardless of what their ideologies were at the time,” Dudek said. “I thought it gave you a good cross-reference to how people interpret the Constitution, one way or the other.”