The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is generally considered to be the second most powerful court in America. By virtue of its location in the nation’s capital, it hears more high-profile cases involving government power than any other federal appeals court in the country. In recent months, D.C. Circuit panels have upheld the House’s effort to subpoena President Donald Trump’s tax returns, rejected its effort to compel impeachment testimony from a former White House counsel, and signed off on the first federal execution protocol in nearly two decades.

That prominence (as well as the scarcity of abortion-rights cases that it hears) makes it a common stepping stone for future Supreme Court justices. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Brett Kavanaugh all served on the D.C. Circuit before joining the high court; Bill Clinton also nominated Justice Elena Kagan to it in his second term, but he left office before the Senate acted. Merrick Garland, Barack Obama’s ill-fated nominee to replace Antonin Scalia, was the court’s chief justice at the time. Even Scalia himself had previously served on the D.C. Circuit.

Trump’s latest nominee for the influential court is Judge Justin Walker, who currently serves as a federal trial judge in Kentucky. Walker is an unusual nominee for the D.C. Circuit by any metric: The 37-year-old nominee has been a federal judge for less than six months and graduated from law school just over a decade ago. His nomination speaks volumes about the trajectory of the conservative legal movement—and of the federal courts in the Donald Trump–Mitch McConnell era.



It’s worth noting that federal judges need not follow a certain career or life path to the bench. Kagan, for instance, had never served as a federal or state judge before Obama nominated her to the Supreme Court in 2010. At the same time, she had amassed a wealth of experience elsewhere—most notably as the U.S. solicitor general, which represents the federal government before the Supreme Court, and as dean of Harvard Law School. By the time Obama nominated her, she was highly respected throughout the legal community: After Scalia’s death in 2016, top Obama adviser David Axelrod said the justice had privately lobbied him in 2009 to help send Kagan to the Supreme Court whenever he got the opportunity.

Walker’s only record of government service before becoming a federal trial judge is a yearlong stint as a speechwriter for then–Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in 2004 and 2005. Most of his legal career was spent in private practice, followed by two years as a law professor at the University of Louisville from 2015 to 2017. Trump’s other two D.C. Circuit nominees, Greg Katsas and Neomi Rao, had substantially more experience before their nomination. Katsas held a variety of positions in the Justice Department and worked in the White House Counsel’s Office; Rao was a prominent administrative law scholar at George Mason University and held a top regulatory job in the Office of Management and Budget.