James Ho

James Ho is a Trump-appointed federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Ho was on Trump’s shortlist for Supreme Court nominees, and has been pushed as a potential Supreme Court nominee by right-wing legal groups if Trump were to become president again. Ho is regarded as one of the most radical judges on the most radical court in the federal judiciary. His rulings have routinely ruled in favor of anti-abortion groups and against campaign finance restrictions. Ho clerked for Clarence Thomas and has been a member of the Leonard Leo-led Federalist Society. The American Family Association Action (AFA), a right-wing fundamentalist Christian nonprofit and Project 2025 Advisory Board member, rated Ho as one of six prospective Trump nominees for the Supreme Court that it approved of.

As a private practice attorney, Ho did pro bono work for the First Liberty Institute, a Project 2025 Advisory Board member and Christian Right nonprofit law firm founded by anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-choice attorney Kelly Shackelford. FLI specializes in cases to destroy the wall between church and state and litigation to enshrine discrimination against LGBTQ+ individuals as an exercise of “religious liberty.”

Ho was also a partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. His spouse, Allyson Ho, is currently the co-chair of the firm’s nationwide Appellate and Constitutional Law practice, and has litigated/won cases against union workers, regulatory agencies, and environmental protections. The firm’s attorneys have argued more than 100 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Over the years, its lawyers have been sanctioned for litigation misconduct and harassing witnesses.

From 2008 to 2010, Ho was the Solicitor General of Texas and he worked as an attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice from 2001-2003. His work was cited in the infamous “torture memo” that “paved the way for waterboarding potential terrorism suspects.” In 2003, Ho co-authored an article with John Yoo, arguing that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to anyone the U.S. considered a member of the Taliban or Al-Qaeda.

In 2017, Trump nominated Ho to the federal circuit court of appeals, and he was supported by Senator Ted Cruz. Ho was sworn in by Clarence Thomas at the private library of billionaire Harlan Crow. After ProPublica revealed in 2023 that Clarence Thomas failed to disclose multiple gifts, trips, and property deals from Crow, Ho tried to portray Thomas as a victim of “hypocritical double standards,” at a Dallas Federalist Society event.

Ho’s views are far outside of the legal mainstream. James LaRock for a Balls and Strikes series called “the worst Trump judge in America” wrote, “[Ho] frequently begins opinions with an attempt at a pithy one-liner that elegantly summarizes his decision… Like many of Trump’s judges, Ho is also committed to advancing right-wing culture war grievances on the bench. In Wittmer and two other cases about transphobic discrimination, Ho either refused to use the plaintiffs’ preferred pronouns and names or actively dead-named the litigants before his court.”

Shortly after joining the 5th Circuit, Judge Ho argued against certain campaign finance restrictions as unconstitutional. Ho has demonstrated a longstanding hostility to any limits to big money being pumped into elections; in 1997, he wrote that he opposed campaign finance reform altogether as the “end of free speech.” Before becoming a judge, Ho litigated a case opposing campaign finance laws that protect against corruption.

Ho also joined the 5th Circuit majority in U.S. v Rahimi, a case about whether domestic abusers could be prevented from owning firearms (even after a court deems they are “a credible threat to the physical safety of such intimate partner or child.”) Ho wrote separately to argue an even more extreme position, as detailed by Elie Mystal in The Nation, “Ho wrote that men who are subject to restraining orders should still keep their guns because, he contends, spurned women sometimes use restraining orders as a ‘tactical device’ to harass their exes.”

Ho has also routinely ruled in favor of anti-abortion groups. For example, in 2019 before Roe v. Wade was overruled, Ho was part of a three-judge panel of the 5th circuit that struck down Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, but Ho issued his own concurring opinion. As one group summarized: “Although he conceded that the ban is unmistakably unconstitutional under Supreme Court caselaw, he tarred those cases as illegitimate. He also castigated district court judge Carlton Reeves for not allowing discovery on the issue of fetal pain, even though that would have had no effect on the legal analysis or the outcome under clear Supreme Court precedent… Judge Ho also used the concurrence as an opportunity to echo Justice Clarence Thomas’s spring 2019 screed linking abortion health providers to racist supporters of eugenics. Thomas had cited a number of unreliable and inflammatory sources, including an amicus brief authored by now-Judge Sarah Pitlyk that all but accused Planned Parenthood of engaging in eugenics and genocide.”

In August 2023, Ho notably issued his own opinion as part of a three-judge panel that declared that the FDA’s 2000 approval of mifepristone, also known as the abortion pill, should be revoked. In order to justify this extreme legal position he suggested that litigants could claim a novel “aesthetic injury,” an approach found in environmental law. Ho wrote, “Doctors delight in working with their unborn patients–and experience an aesthetic injury when they are aborted…Pregnancy is not a bad or unhealthy condition of the body–it’s a natural consequence of a healthy and functioning reproductive system.”

The case was brought by a shell group called the “Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine,” but was really led and argued by the anti-LGBTQ nonprofit litigation giant Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), an SPLC-designated hate group. According to Judge Ho’s financial disclosures his spouse regularly participated in paid speaking engagements for ADF. Despite this financial connection, Ho did not recuse himself from the case after he purportedly “consulted the judiciary ethics advisor” and claimed his wife donates the honoraria to “charity.” ADF helped draft Mississippi’s abortion ban which was central in Dobbs and through Erin Hawley, the spouse of Senator Josh Hawley, coordinated the legal efforts to get the case to the Supreme Court to overrule Roe.

In a 2022 speech at a Federalist Society conference in Kentucky, Ho further inserted himself into the culture wars and declared that he would not hire law clerks from Yale because the school engages in “cancel culture,” citing student protests against speakers including Kristen Waggoner, who leads Alliance Defending Freedom. Stanford and Columbia were later added to Ho’s clerk hiring ban.