Image CreditImage courtesy of Lex Politica
A key member of the legal team that convinced the Supreme Court to overrule Roe v. Wade has joined a new law firm to pursue a broader range of appellate and Supreme Court victories. Erin Hawley told The Federalist in a Zoom call Tuesday she’s joining Lex Politica to chair its Supreme Court and appellate litigation team.
“We’ve got a court that’s committed to originalism,” Hawley noted. “We’ve got a court that’s committed to sort of staying in its own constitutional lane. If you think about the Casa decision that held federal district courts can combine the parties before them, but not everyone in the entire world. And they’re looking at the text of statutes, what’s actually written. And I think it’s a real time of opportunity for conservative lawyers on a wide variety of issues.”
The New Republic describes Hawley as “the lawyer who killed Roe” and says she’s “one of the most effective culture-war litigators in the country.” It named her as a contender for a federal appellate court judgeship.
A Politico profile in 2024 noted Hawley has worked part-time for several years to prioritize her three young children and brought her baby to meetings. That hasn’t impeded her from career achievements any lawyer would envy.
Hawley has successfully argued several cases at the Supreme Court, including Dobbs v. Jackson to overturn Roe, 303 Creative v. Elenis to secure religious liberty protections for creative professionals, U.S. Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine to challenge abortion pill safety, Moyle v. United States to protect health workers from being forced to administer abortions, and First Choice Women’s Resource Centers v. Platkin to protect pregnancy resource centers from doxxing their donors. (The Supreme Court declined to rule on the merits in Moyle and Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine.)
In Moyle, Hawley represented Idaho as counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a top nonprofit First Amendment law firm. She said Tuesday her new role will allow her to come alongside state attorneys general in a similar way to defend constitutional policies such as protections for children from transgender mutilation surgeries. Hawley is the wife of Republican U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, who was Missouri’s attorney general before he moved to the Senate.
Attorneys general “sometimes have an office of just a few attorneys, and they are often up against the biggest law firms in the country,” Hawley noted. “If you look at just the pro-life cases, most of those are litigated by huge firms with literally unlimited resources. They have associates, they’ve got the research capacity, the writing capacity, you name it. And so Lex [Politica], I think, is sort of trying to step into that void and say, ‘We’ll come along Republican attorney generals, we’ll come along Republican governors, and support those policies.’”
Big law firms do tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars in free legal work each year to advance leftist causes through U.S. courts. Anyone who disagrees with leftists, including conservative state legislatures, has to contend with this massive legal power disparity. The disparity is why law firms like ADF and Lex Politica exist.
Hawley, who clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts, said she thinks the pro-Constitution status of the current Supreme Court makes now an ideal time to pursue fresh, Constitution-protecting precedents. Her new team will announce further hires in the next several weeks to build a “top-notch appellate shop,” she told The Daily Caller. Hawley will also remain of counsel at ADF, where she was senior counsel and vice president of its Center for Life and Regulatory Practice.
