Brett Kavanaugh

Brett Michael Kavanaugh (/ˈkævənɔː/; born February 12, 1965) is an American lawyer and jurist serving as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was nominated by President Donald Trump on July 9, 2018, and has served since October 6, 2018. He was previously a U.S. circuit judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 2006 to 2018.

Kavanaugh studied history at Yale University, where he joined the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. He then attended Yale Law School, after which he began his career as a law clerk working under Judge Ken Starr. After Starr left the D.C. Circuit to become the head of the Office of Independent Counsel, Kavanaugh assisted him with investigations concerning President Bill Clinton, including drafting the Starr Report recommending Clinton's impeachment. He joined the Bush administration as White House staff secretary and was a central figure in its efforts to identify and confirm judicial nominees. Bush nominated Kavanaugh to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 2003. His confirmation hearings were contentious and stalled for three years over charges of partisanship. Kavanaugh was confirmed to the D.C. Circuit in May 2006.

President Trump nominated Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court on July 9, 2018, to fill the position vacated by Justice Anthony Kennedy. Before his U.S. Senate confirmation proceedings began, Christine Blasey Ford accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her in the early 1980s. Three other women also accused Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, one of whom later recanted her story. None of the accusations were corroborated by eyewitness testimony, and Kavanaugh denied them. The Senate Judiciary Committee held a supplemental hearing over the allegations and voted 11–10 along party lines to advance the confirmation to a full Senate vote. On October 6, the full Senate confirmed Kavanaugh by a vote of 50–48.

Since the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2020, Kavanaugh has come to be regarded as a swing vote on the Court. He was the target of an assassination plot in June 2022; the suspect had hoped to disrupt the rulings in Dobbs and Bruen.

Kavanaugh was born on February 12, 1965, in Washington, D.C., the son of Martha Gamble (née Murphy) and Everett Edward Kavanaugh Jr. He is of Irish Catholic descent on both sides of his family. His paternal great-grandfather immigrated to the United States from Roscommon, Ireland, in the late 19th century, and his maternal Irish lineage goes back to his great-great-grandparents settling in New Jersey. Kavanaugh's father was a lawyer and served as the president of the Cosmetic, Toiletry and Fragrance Association for two decades. His mother was a history teacher at Woodson and McKinley high schools in Washington in the 1960s and 1970s. She earned a Juris Doctor degree from American University in 1978 and served from 1995 to 2001 as a Maryland Circuit Court judge in Montgomery County, Maryland.

Kavanaugh was raised in Bethesda, Maryland. As a teenager, he attended Georgetown Preparatory School, a Jesuit boys' college prep school, where he was two years ahead of Neil Gorsuch, with whom he later clerked at the Supreme Court and alongside whom he later served as a Supreme Court justice. He was captain of the school's basketball team and was a wide receiver and cornerback on the football team. Kavanaugh was also friends with classmate Mark Judge; both were in the same class with Maryland state senator Richard Madaleno.

After graduating from Georgetown Prep in 1983, Kavanaugh went to Yale University, as had his paternal grandfather. Several of Kavanaugh's Yale classmates remembered him as a "serious but not showy student" who loved sports, especially basketball. He unsuccessfully tried out for the Yale Bulldogs men's basketball team and later played for two years on the junior varsity team. He wrote articles about basketball and other sports for the Yale Daily News, and was a member of the fraternity Delta Kappa Epsilon. He graduated from Yale in 1987 with a Bachelor of Arts cum laude in history.

Kavanaugh then attended Yale Law School, where he lived in a group house with future judge James E. Boasberg and played basketball with professor George L. Priest, the sponsor of the school's Federalist Society. He was a member of the Yale Law Journal and served as a notes editor during his third year. Kavanaugh graduated from Yale Law with a Juris Doctor degree in 1990.