Brantley Starr
Brantley Starr is a Trump-appointed judge on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas in the Dallas Division. The Leadership Conference on Human and Civil Rights opposed his confirmation, stating: “As a top legal advisor since 2015 to far-right Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, [Starr] has worked to restrict voting rights, LGBTQ equality, immigrant rights, and reproductive freedom…. [He lacks] the independence and fair-mindedness that are necessary for such lifetime positions.”
As a federal district judge since 2019, Starr has issued several controversial rulings. Starr is perhaps “most famous for ordering attorneys for Southwest Airlines to attend a class put on by an anti-LGBTQ hate group, the Alliance Defending Freedom,” as described by James LaRock in Balls and Strikes. LaRock noted that “Brantley did so to punish Southwest’s lawyers for their supposed intransigence at the tail end of a long, incredibly stupid case… This was a weird order for a lot of reasons. First, it’s bizarre to order anyone to take a ‘class’ on a contentious, evolving area of law from an organization that’s clearly on one side of that fight. That’s not legal training; that’s indoctrination. But second, it was especially strange that the ADF—which wasn’t representing anyone in the case, let alone a party to it—was suddenly involved at all. How did Brantley know that anyone from the ADF would even be willing to ‘teach’ this ‘class’… Brantley stayed his order pending appeal, and then took it back, mocking Southwest for complaining.”
In 2023, Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, a nonpartisan judicial watchdog group, filed a judicial misconduct complaint against Starr, saying, “under no circumstances should a sectarian organization such as ADF, or any sectarian organization of any faith, be responsible for carrying out any aspect of attorney sanctions… Starr’s order sets a dangerous precedent.”
Starr has used his judicial office to roll back the rights of gay and transgender Americans. For example, as described by James LaRock in Balls and Strikes. “[W]hen a trans woman filed a lawsuit in 2019 against Dallas County, Texas, alleging that their jails discriminated against trans people, and Brantley was assigned to the case, she filed a motion for a different judge, arguing that his work on behalf of an anti-trans client would lead to him not taking her claim seriously. The defendants didn’t even oppose her motion. But Brantley rejected it anyway. In a 10-page opinion that studiously refused to refer to her with female pronouns, he whined that his past advocacy didn’t mean he wouldn’t be fair in this case. She was right to be worried: A few months later, he dismissed her case, which claimed that Dallas County jails subject transgender inmates to humiliating strip searches that cis people aren’t subject to.”
In another case involving a religious objection to the COVID-19 vaccine, Starr opened his opinion with a rant asserting that “[r]eligious discrimination in modern America is becoming socially acceptable. But it is legally intolerable.” In a footnote, he cited a keynote address to the Federalist Society by Justice Samuel Alito lamenting that supposedly religious liberty is “in danger of becoming a second class right” and “is not a cherished freedom.” Starr is a longtime member of the Federalist Society and has claimed that participating in the Federalist Society is an example of “serving the disadvantaged.”
In May 2024, Starr and other Trump appointees like James Ho and Matthew Kacsmaryk declared they would not hire Columbia Law School students for clerkships, attacking the university for not sufficiently clamping down on student protests. That hiring ban has been described as “wildly unethical.”
Over the course of the 15 years he practiced law, Starr spent several years in the Office of the Texas Attorney General, working under Ken Paxton and then-Attorney General Greg Abbott. Shortly after graduating from law school, he clerked for Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willett, who Trump later appointed to the 5th Circuit, and then worked for Senator Ted Cruz, when Cruz was briefly Solicitor General before running for the U.S. Senate.
Before becoming a judge, Starr was a central figure in Texas’ efforts to restrict access to the ballot box. For example, in 2018 he urged the Texas legislature to pass a raft of voter suppression measures, including stricter Voter ID and voter roll purges. He also defended Texas’ Voter ID restrictions in *Abbott v. Veasey, *which courts ruled was passed with discriminatory effect and intent. He defended Texas against lawsuits claiming that redistricting plans intentionally diluted the votes of African-American and Latino communities, in violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He also reportedly falsely testified in a Texas Senate hearing that a deceased judge voted three times after his death.
Starr also has a long record of hostility to reproductive rights. For example, in 2017 he supported a Texas House bill that aimed to prevent the state from intervening when adoption agencies deny services to same-sex couples based on “sincerely held religious beliefs.” Opponents of the bill argued it would give “religious based groups a license to discriminate, allowing them to refuse to place foster children with gay couples of families with different religious backgrounds.”
A month later, Starr testified on behalf of Texas SB892, which would have authorized child welfare providers to use religion to deny reproductive health care to a teen in their care, regardless of whether the teen shares those religious beliefs, and gives the providers access to civil remedies. He also pushed to terminate Medicaid agreements with Planned Parenthood that allows the healthcare nonprofit to perform vital health services, including screening for breast cancer and cervical cancer. In this case, the defense included secretly recorded videos from the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), an anti-abortion group, that were found to be doctored. (Notably, in 2015, Federalist Society Vice President Leonard Leo and his right-hand man, Jonathan Bunch, advised CMP on “how to ensure successful prosecutions” against Planned Parenthood.
Similarly, in the wake of the Obergefell ruling, which guaranteed the right to marriage for same-sex couples, Starr continued to contend county clerks had the right to refuse to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
Starr also defended Trump’s muslim ban in a 2018 article, asserting that “this was a facially neutral order. The order did not discriminate. It did not say that Muslims cannot come into the country because they are Muslim.” The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately upheld the temporary ban.
Starr also argued that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) was unconstitutional in an attempt to eliminate protections for Dreamers. A year earlier, Starr argued that “sanctuary cities” were illegal while speaking at the 2017 Federalist Society Texas Chapters Conference. He also praised a Texas law modeled after the Arizona “show me your papers” law–the part of S.B. 1070 that survived the U.S. Supreme Court–that encouraged racial profiling. In 2015, Starr also pushed for the criminalization of undocumented immigration under state law, enabling Texas to detain and prosecute immigrants independently of the federal government. Even though the Constitution specifies that the federal government set rules for immigration, Starr claimed Texas has “the ability to create state-level offenses that have an immigration element to them, as long as they are sufficiently unique.”
Years earlier Starr also supported the Texas’s’ crusade against so-called “censorship” of hate groups on college campuses, asserting that “we know that now there’s a running trend that college students should be protected from ideas that they find to be offensive or unpopular, and the means to accommodate that is to censor speech.”
Starr is the nephew of Ken Starr, who was a member of Donald Trump’s legal defense team during his first impeachment and who led the controversial investigation of President Clinton that led to his impeachment by the House. Neither were convicted by the Senate.