Josh Hawley. Credit: Wiki commons

Josh Hawley, the Republican soon-to-be U.S. senator from Missouri, will be the fourth former U.S. Supreme Court law clerk in the Senate.

Hawley clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. in 2007 and 2008, as did his future wife Erin Morrow. Both Yale Law School alums, they married in 2010. She now teaches at the University of Missouri School of Law and is of counsel at Kirkland & Ellis. Previously, she clerked for Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, and Josh Hawley clerked for then-Tenth Circuit Judge Michael McConnell.

Hawley joins former court clerks Sens. Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut, a 1974-1975 clerk to Justice Harry Blackmun; Ted Cruz, R-Texas, a 1996-1997 clerk to Chief Justice William Rehnquist; and Mike Lee, R-Utah, who clerked for Justice Samuel Alito Jr. in 2006 and 2007.

In a Facebook video last month, Hawley talked about his clerkship:

“It was an incredible year. All of these important issues that are so critical to our country, like immigration, like Second Amendment. In fact, probably the biggest case the year I was there was the huge Second Amendment case. It's called the Heller case. That was when the Supreme Court said for the first time that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right protected by the Constitution. Of course that always was true, but the court had never said that, and they made it very clear the year that I clerked there at the U.S. Supreme Court. As I look back at that, just to be part of that, showed me the significance of what goes on at the Supreme Court and led to my desire to practice at that court and to be involved there ever since.”

That involvement included his participation in the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores case in 2013, challenging the contraceptive mandate in the Affordable Care Act. Hawley was a professor at the University of Missouri School of Law at the time. His name was on the merits brief, along with Kyle Duncan, general counsel of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and now a judge on the Fifth Circuit, and former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement, now with Kirkland & Ellis.

“I was privileged to collaborate with Josh Hawley on the Hobby Lobby case,” Clement wrote at the time. “Josh was a valued member of the Hobby Lobby team, as reflected by the fact that his name was featured on the front cover of the brief.” Hawley also worked at Hogan Lovells from 2008 to 2011, according to his LinkedIn account.

Erin Hawley also wrote amicus briefs in Affordable Care Act cases including Little Sisters of the Poor Home for the Aged v. Burwell in 2015 and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores. Together, Erin and Josh Hawley participated in a brief in 2016 for the General Council of the Assemblies of God in the case Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v. Comer.

When he became Missouri's attorney general in 2017, Hawley recused himself from the Trinity Lutheran case, in which Missouri had withheld funds from a religious preschool because of a state constitution provision barring the grant of public money to religious institutions. Hawley opposed Missouri's provision, as did the Supreme Court.

 

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