Jeffrey Brown

On March 11, 2019, President Trump nominated Jeffrey V. Brown to the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas for the seat previously held by Judge Melinda Harmon. Brown is currently a justice on the Supreme Court of Texas, a position he has held since 2013. He previously acted as a state court judge for the Texas Fourteenth Court of Appeals and 55th District Court. He has been a member of the conservative Federalist Society since 1997.

Read more on Brown’s background.

On March 11, 2019, President Trump nominated Jeffrey V. Brown to the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas for the seat previously held by Judge Melinda Harmon. Brown is currently a justice on the Supreme Court of Texas, a position he has held since 2013. He previously acted as a state court judge for the Texas Fourteenth Court of Appeals and 55th District Court. He has been a member of the conservative Federalist Society since 1997.

LGBTQ
Equality

• As a state court judge, Brown has consistently ruled
  against marriage equality. In June 2017, Brown
  joined the Texas Supreme Court
  majority in Pidgeon v.
  Turner, which held that cities in Texas could defy Obergefell v. Hodges and deny married same-sex couples
  the rights of marriage. The opinion stated that Obergefell “did not hold that states must provide the
  same publicly funded benefits to all married persons, and . . . it did not hold
  that the Texas DOMAs are unconstitutional.”
• Brown also expressed
  his personal disdain for Obergefell’s
  holding. In In re State of Texas, the state attorney general challenged a
  court order blocking enforcement of a Texas law
  stating that marriage in Texas can
  only be between one man and one woman. The Texas
  Supreme Court dismissed the attorney general’s petition as moot after Obergefell. Brown concurred, stating
  that he “cannot dispute” Obergefell’s
  binding holding, but emphasized his opinion that marriage was historically
  limited to opposite-sex couples for “all of pre-21st-century American
  history and all of Western Civilization
  from the beginning of Christendom to
  the modern day.”
• After Houston’s city council passed an ordinance that
  prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity,
  Brown joined
  an opinion suspending
  the ordinance and forcing
  it to go to a popular vote.
  Ultimately, the ordinance failed, leaving LGBTQ Houstonians without legal
  protections against discrimination.
• Brown joined
  a majority opinion that restricted same-sex sexual harassment claims. As one
  author noted, the
  opinion “totally misunderstands homosexuality.”

Women’s Health Care

• In a speech to the Tea Party, Brown bragged about his involvement in increasing restrictions placed upon minors seeking abortion care in Texas. After the legislature enacted constitutionally-required bypass procedures under the state’s parental consent law, the Texas Supreme Court unanimously amended the rules to allow judges to deny a minor’s application for bypass by refusing to take any action on the petition. Previously, failure to rule on a minor’s application amounted to an automatic granting. By inserting the “denial” language, the Texas Supreme Court “creat[ed] substantive law.”
• In a 2017 speech, Brown referred to IUDs and emergency contraceptives as “potentially life-terminating drugs and devices” and “abortifacients.”
• Brown tweeted quotes from dissenting opinions in Roe v. Wade on the 40th and 43rd anniversaries of the decision. From Justice White’s dissent, which he describes as “eloquent and pithy,” Brown quoted, three times, “I find nothing in the language or history of the Constitution to support the Court’s judgment.” Brown also linked to what he described as Justice Rehnquist’s “elegant originalist” dissent.
• On Brown’s Supreme Court campaign website, a now-deleted page detailed Texas Right to Life’s endorsement of his campaign. His statement, which was blacked out on the webpage, said: “I’m proud and honored to receive the endorsement of the largest pro-life organization in Texas. Texas Right to Life is one of the strongest grassroots organizations of its kind in the country. They are devoted to championing life at every stage, and this is a cause I applaud and support.”

Workers
and Consumers

• As a trial judge, Brown barred a lawsuit brought by a
  former Navy officer who had developed mesothelioma from asbestos products. He held
  that a statute that limited certain corporations’ liability for
  asbestos-related claims applied retroactively. Brown was
  overruled by the Texas Supreme Court. Texas Civil
  Justice League, an anti-consumer and anti-worker protections organization,
  filed an amicus curiae brief
  in support of affirming the circuit court and Brown’s trial court
  decisions. Brown delivered a campaign speech to this group in 2018.
• On the Texas Supreme
  Court, Brown voted
  to overturn a jury verdict for a railroad employee who contracted West Nile Virus after the railroad company,
  which knew about the existence of mosquitoes infected with the virus in the area,
  failed to adequately warn workers or provide mosquito repellant. Against a strong
  dissent, the majority held that common law doctrine about wild animals applied,
  eliminating the railroad’s duty to the employee.
• Brown has delivered speeches to organizations, backed by the wealthy and powerful, that fight
  to keep Americans from holding
  corporations accountable. In 2017 he spoke to the Civil Justice Reform Group, a secretive
  funder of corporate-backed anti-consumer and anti-worker associations.

Criminal
Justice

• As a judge for Texas’s Fourteenth Court of Appeals, Brown wrote an opinion allowing the prosecutor to comment in court about a criminal defendant’s silence in response to police questioning, holding it did not violate the right against self-incrimination. Although this decision was ultimately affirmed 5-4 in the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Breyer in dissent wrote that, “to allow [the prosecutor to] comment on silence directly or indirectly can compel an individual to act as ‘a witness against himself’—very much what the Fifth Amendment forbids.”
• On the Texas Supreme Court, Brown authored an opinion allowing evidence found after an illegal police seizure to be introduced at a civil-forfeiture proceeding. As a matter of first impression, the Court held that the evidentiary exclusionary rule does not apply in civil-forfeiture cases.
• Brown, while on the Fourteenth Court of Appeals, wrote an opinion on the Fourth Amendment’s right against unreasonable searches and seizures that was reversed. Brown had determined that the defendant was not detained when the police officer had partially blocked the defendant’s vehicle with his car, turned his car’s spotlight on, and demanded identification in a loud voice. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals disagreed, finding that the defendant had been detained because a reasonable person in his position would not have felt free to terminate the police encounter.