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Justin Ross Olson
Confirmed Trump 2.0
Confirmed to the United States District Court for the Southern District of Indiana.
On November 14, 2025, President Trump nominated Justin Ross Olson to the United States District Court for the Southern District of Indiana. He was confirmed on February 5, 2026.
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Trump Judicial Nominee Promotes January 6 Misinformation and the Subjugation of Wives
Biography
Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1987, Justin Olson studied at Stendhal University (2008–2009) and Ivy Tech Community College (2009) before earning his B.A. from Grove City College in 2010. He earned his J.D. from Indiana University in 2013.
Legal Experience
Olson began his legal career as a summer law clerk at Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath in 2012. After law school, he clerked for Chief Justice Loretta Rush at the Indiana Supreme Court (2013–2015).
He then joined Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath as an associate (2015–2019), before serving as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Civil Division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Indiana (2019–2024). Olson later joined Kroger Gardis & Regas, working as an associate (2024–2025) before becoming counsel, a role in which he currently serves (2025–present).
Key Facts
- Member of Alliance Defending Freedom (2025–present), the Federalist Society (2024–present), and the Republican National Lawyers Association (2024–present).
- Olson describes himself as a “specialist” in Title IX litigation initiated to force transgender athletes out of participating in collegiate sports. Olson has represented several different current and former NCAA athletes who challenged the NCAA’s policies allowing transgender students to participate in gender-aligned sports teams. Olson regularly misgenders transgender athletes in his legal materials, further demeaning the population he seeks to exclude and harm.
- Specifically, Olson argued that allowing a transgender athlete to participate in the 2022 NCAA Division I Women’s Swimming and Diving Championship violated Title IX and the Fourteenth Amendment by “taking athletic opportunities and places from women.” Olson also argued various officials at University of Georgia and the University of Georgia Tech Athletic Association played a role in the supposed “harm” by allowing their facilities to be used to “deprive women of equal opportunity” and “violate the bodily privacy of the female athletes” at the swimming championships. The case will likely decide if Title IX has applicability to the NCAA. (Riley Gaines, et al. v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, et al., No. 1:24-cv-01109-TRJ (N.D. Ga.))
- Additionally, Olson argued that the officials from Mountain West Conference and the Board of Trustees of California State University violated Title IX, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the First Amendment when the SJSU Women’s Volleyball team rostered a transgender athlete, when the MWC’s policy permitted the University to do so, and when the MWC awarded losses to the MWC teams who forfeited volleyball matches against the university in protest against the transgender athlete’s participation in the sport. Olson sought a preliminary injunction to bar the participation of the athlete in the end of season conference and any enforcement of the MWC’s policy allowing transgender athletes to participate in sports. The Court denied his request for this injunction. (Brooke Slusser, et al. v. Mountain West Conference, et al., No. 1:24-cv-03155-SKC- MDB (D. Colo.)).
- Olson argued that controversial and harmful statutes, which require physicians to tell a woman seeking an abortion that fetal life is human life and that abortion terminates that life, do not violate the Establishment Clause. The Establishment Clause requires legislatures refrain from enacting laws that advance religious purposes, but Olson argues that courts should ignore any personal, religious motives by individual legislators enacting these statutes because statutes that define fetal life “do not articulate anything beyond a scientific conclusion.” (Justin Olson, Defining Fetal Life: An Establishment Clause Analysis of Religiously Motivated Informed Consent Provisions, 88 IND.L.J. 113 (2013).