Lawrence VanDyke

Lawrence VanDyke is a federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Donald Trump nominated VanDyke to the court in 2019. He received a “Not Qualified” rating from the American Bar Association, which sent a letter detailing that multiple judges and attorney VanDyke “lacks humility, has an ‘entitlement’ temperament, does not have an open mind, and does not always have a commitment to being candid and truthful.”

Nine justices on the Montana Supreme Court also opposed his confirmation. A letter from People for the American Way also expressed concern over his assertion that same-sex marriage would hurt society and noted that he had participated in events put on by a notorious anti-LGBTQ group as recently as August 2019. The Alliance for Justice also expressed concern over his record on issues on reproductive rights, education, and civil rights. A letter from the League of Conservation Voters noted that he advocated for repealing rules that protect federal and tribal land from the impact of fracking, and opposed efforts to protect endangered habitats.

During his hearing, when Senators raised the ABA’s concern that VanDyke would not be fair to members of the LGBTQ+ community, he tearfully denied that accusation.

The Republican-controlled U.S. Senate narrowly confirmed him to the bench in 2020, by a vote of 51–44, without a single Democratic vote in favor. Trump later put VanDyke on his shortlist to be appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, a list that LGBTQ advocates called “terrifying.” The American Family Association Action (AFA), a right-wing fundamentalist Christian group and Project 2025 Advisory Board member, rated VanDyke as one of six prospective Trump nominees for the Supreme Court that it approved of.

Since becoming a judge, VanDyke has issued several controversial opinions. For example, in 2023, he ordered Idaho to enforce an abortion ban with no exceptions for medical emergencies, a decision that was overturned when the court reheard the case en banc and blocked the ban.

In another case, he dissented from a denial of a rehearing en banc and accused the panel of judges who made the decision of “mischief” and “judge-jitsu” when they allowed an injunction to a Trump immigration restriction to stand. VanDyke wrote another harsh dissent from a Ninth Circuit panel decision not to rehear a case en banc, alleging that they had misapplied a law and accusing other judges of maneuvering so they had basis for possible future decisions.

In another case, he dissented from a ruling that upheld a California gun regulation and accused the en banc majority of carrying out an attack on the Second Amendment. He also wrote the majority opinion in another Second Amendment case but also filed his own concurrence that offered another argument, ending the 13-page opinion with “You’re welcome.”

Prior to his appointment to the bench, VanDyke worked briefly in the Trump administration as the Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Environmental and Natural Resources Division (ENRD) under climate change denier and fair election denier Jeffrey Clark.

He also previously worked in three Republican state Attorney General offices.

As Montana’s Solicitor General, VanDyke “placed special emphasis” on writing and joining amicus briefs in support of right-wing interests, including gun rights, anti-abortion measures, bans on same-sex marriage, and opposing access to contraceptive under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). For example, he filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in support of an Arizona abortion ban, in which he asked the court to overturn Roe v. Wade.

VanDyke also helped write a brief with then-Montana Attorney General Tim Fox and then-Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine in which they argued for the overturn of Roe v. Wade. He also sought to challenge “buffer zones” that provide a space for patients and providers to enter healthcare clinics without being harassed by protesters and reportedly convinced Fox to join an amicus in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, in which the U.S. Supreme Court captured by Leonard Leo ruled that employers should have a right to refuse healthcare coverage for employees’ contraception if it violated their “religious rights.” He also challenged a rule capping how much prison payphone companies can charge and wrote in opposition to the “ban-the-box” movement regarding people who had served their sentences. He also led a lawsuit against an Obama administration overtime pay rule and sided with water companies against a tribe seeking to enforce its right to the groundwater under their reservation.

He also used Blackstone Fellows to conduct research on legislative prayer policies. While previously interned as a Blackstone Fellow of the Alliance Defending Freedom, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated an anti-LGBTQ+ “hate group,” The goal of those fellowships was to “to train a new generation of lawyers who will rise to positions of influence and leadership as legal scholars, litigators, judges—perhaps even Supreme Court Justices—who will work to ensure that justice is carried out in America’s courtrooms.” Public records show VanDyke also sought out Federalist Society advice on crafting legal arguments for getting around Supreme Court precedent regarding gun regulations laws.

In May 2014, VanDyke resigned as Montana SG due to conflicts with colleagues who accused him of being “arrogant and disrespectful to others” and who claimed “he avoids work [and] does not have the skills to perform, nor desire to learn how to perform, the work of a lawyer.”

After leaving the AG’s office, VanDyke entered the race for a seat on the Montana Supreme Court. During his campaign, six former Montana Supreme Court justices wrote in opposition to his candidacy and the influx of dark money into the judicial races: “Montanans deserve fair, impartial, independent and non-partisan judges and justices elected by Montana voters–not political hacks, bought and paid for by out of state dark money.” In what was the most expensive judicial race in Montana’s history, VanDyke received out-of-state donations from far-right entities, such as $400,000 from the Republican State Leadership Committee which received funding from Leo’s Judicial Crisis Network (JC) and $170,000 from Charles Koch’s Americans for Prosperity, along with the maximum contributions allowed from Montana Gas & Oil PAC, former Trump Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia, Carrie Severino (who leads Leo’s JCN) and her husband Roger Severino, as well as staffers at ADF’s Arizona branch.

After VanDyke lost the election, Leo allegedly made at least one call on VanDyke’s behalf to land him a job.

VanDyke then joined the Nevada Attorney General Office as the Solicitor General in 2015, under Leo ally Adam Laxalt, despite never having lived in the state and needing a special practice rule to be admitted to the state bar. There, VanDyke opposed deferring the expulsion of undocumented immigrants who arrived as children, argued against indigenous claims to reservation groundwater, and led a 21-state lawsuit attempting to block an Obama-era Labor Department rule that expanded overtime pay to 4 million workers. He also joined litigation against the EPA’s expansion of the Clean Water Act, opposed land use restrictions applied by the Interior Department, and supported the challenge of the Clean Power Plan that would have “cut the electric sector’s carbon pollution by 32 percent nationally,” saved the United States $20 billion, and delivered between $14-34 billion in health benefits.

VanDyke then worked as Texas Assistant Solicitor General under Jonathan Mitchell, the architect of Texas SB 8, which turned citizens into anti-abortion vigilanties.

VanDyke also spent several years in private practice at the law firm Gibson Dunn, where he reportedly worked under Gene Scalia, the son of Antonin Scalia. In his judicial questionnaire, VanDyke disclosed that he represented large corporations as a commercial litigation attorney, including Chrysler, Walmart, Ticketmaster, Microsoft, UPS, and others. He also represented, on a pro bono basis the Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, the Free Market Foundation (now First Liberty) and Senator Mitch McConnell.

Since 2005, VanDyke has been active in the Federalist Society, which Leonard Leo co-chairs. Leo has reportedly mentored VanDyke who has been part of its Federalism and Separation of Powers Practice Group, the Regulatory Transparency Project, the Religious Liberties Practice Group, and the State and Local Government Working Group and has received honoraria for Federalist Society events. VanDyke’s contribution page on the Federalist Society’s website boasts 29 events and more than a dozen contributions to articles and videos. Since becoming a judge he has continued to frequent its events. For example, in 2021, he reported trips to Federalist Society events in Las Vegas, Nevada, San Francisco, California and Washington, D.C. In 2022, he reported five trips paid for the group to Simi Valley, California, Washington, D.C., Austin, Texas and Moscow, Idaho.

Similarly, the George Mason University’s (GMU) Antonin Scalia Law School paid for numerous trips, including a judicial seminar held in London, England in 2022. In 2021 and 2022, VanDyke also attended a private event held by the GMU law school at a “luxury Montana resort” near Yellowstone National Park. (Leo helped raise $30 million for the GMU in 2016 and played a central role in renaming the school after the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.) The Council for National Policy, where Leonard Leo has sat on the board of governors, also paid for VanDyke to speak in D.C. in 2022.

Early in his career, VanDyke clerked for Judge Janice Rogers Brown of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit; she was once regarded as “one of the most ideologically extreme federal judges in the United States.”

During law school, he wrote an article for the Harvard Law Record attacking “gay parenting” and another complaining about courts supposedly “forcing same-sex marriage on the populace,” and claiming that real “trend of intolerance” is directed not at homosexuality, but towards religion “as homosexual ‘rights’ become legally entrenched” overseas and domestically. VanDyke also wrote a book note for the Record–that a fellow student opined was a “scholarly fraud”–in which VanDyke argued for the teaching of creationism in public schools to break the supposed “pedagogical monopoly” of evolutionary theory.