24 Facts About Cornelia Pillard

Cornelia Pillard served as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General and Assistant to the United States Solicitor General.

At the time of her confirmation to the federal bench, Cornelia Pillard was a prominent US Supreme Court advocates in the United States, having argued nine cases and briefed more than 25 cases before the Court.

Cornelia Pillard has been compared to Ruth Bader Ginsburg for her civil rights advocacy, and has been mentioned as a possible Supreme Court nominee.

Cornelia Pillard was born on March 4,1961, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Cornelia Pillard's father, Richard Pillard, was a professor of psychiatry at Boston University who was the first openly gay psychiatrist in the United States.

From 1983 to 1984, Cornelia Pillard was a researcher and office assistant in the Beijing office of the Asia bureau of Newsday.

Cornelia Pillard then attended Harvard Law School, where she was an editor for the Harvard Law Review.

In 1994, Cornelia Pillard joined the Office of the Solicitor General of the United States, where she briefed and argued civil and criminal cases on behalf of the federal government before the US Supreme Court.

Cornelia Pillard joined the tenure-track faculty at Georgetown Law in 1997.

In 1998, Cornelia Pillard was named Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the US Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel.

Cornelia Pillard returned to Georgetown Law in 2000, where she received tenure.

Cornelia Pillard has taught more than a dozen different courses and seminars, and frequently teaches the core civil procedure and constitutional law courses.

Cornelia Pillard served as faculty director of Georgetown Law's Supreme Court Institute, a public service program that provides free assistance to attorneys preparing for arguments before the Supreme Court on a first-come, first-served basis.

Cornelia Pillard serves on the Executive Committee of the board of directors of the American Arbitration Association, and has been a board member there since 2005.

Cornelia Pillard served as Chair and an active reader on an American Bar Association Reading Committee that evaluated all of the writings of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito for the ABA Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary.

Cornelia Pillard has argued nine cases and briefed more than twenty-five cases before the US Supreme Court, making her one of the nation's most prominent Supreme Court advocates.

Cornelia Pillard represented William Hibbs, a state employee who was fired when he sought to take unpaid leave to care for his injured wife under the FMLA.

In other noteworthy cases representing the United States, Cornelia Pillard sought robust "qualified immunity" protection of law enforcement personnel against lawsuits, shielding officials from the burdens of litigation and liability for reasonable decisions even where, in hindsight, they turned out to be wrong.

Cornelia Pillard successfully argued that the US Constitution reserves the jury right in criminal cases to defendants charged with serious offenses.

In May 2013, the New York Times and the Washington Post reported that Cornelia Pillard was under consideration by the Obama administration to fill one of three vacancies on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

On June 4,2013, Obama nominated Pillard to serve as a United States Circuit Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, to the seat vacated by Judge Douglas H Ginsburg, who assumed senior status on October 14,2011.

On December 17,2013, Cornelia Pillard received her federal judicial commission.

Judge Cornelia Pillard joined Henderson when they denied a petition by Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri to disqualify his military judges.

When in Meshal v Higgenbotham Judges Janice Rogers Brown and Brett Kavanaugh threw out a claim by an American that he had been disappeared by the FBI in a Kenyan black site, Judge Pillard dissented, arguing the court should just create a new implied cause of action.