James Ho was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit by President Trump on January 4, 2018. During his time on the bench, Ho has consistently authored opinions that support conservative causes and dismantle individual rights.
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Biography
Ho was born in Taipei, Taiwan in 1973, before immigrating to the U.S. as a child. He received a B.A. from Stanford University in 1995 and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School in 1999.
Legal Experience
After finishing law school, Ho clerked for Judge Jerry Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He then joined Gibson & Dunn, where he represented former President Bush in Bush v. Gore. From 2001 to 2003, Ho worked for the Bush administration at the Department of Justice, first with the Civil Rights Division and then with the Office of Legal Counsel. He then served as chief counsel to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee under Sen. John Cornyn. After this role, he clerked for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas from 2005 to 2006.
Following his Supreme Court clerkship, Ho returned to Gibson & Dunn, where his practice focused on appellate litigation. In 2008, Ho became the solicitor general of Texas. Ho then returned to Gibson & Dunn for a third time in 2010, where he remained until his appointment to the Fifth Circuit in 2018. Notably, Ho chose to be sworn in by Justice Thomas at billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow’s private library.
Attacks Individual Rights
In both his government work and private practice, Ho has championed causes that attack minority groups and restrict individual rights. In his judicial opinions, Ho often goes beyond the relevant legal questions and lectures about broad constitutional concepts. Even when he joins the opinion of the court, Ho frequently writes concurrences that read like auditions to be Trump’s next Supreme Court nominee. This practice is consistent with Ho’s eagerness to opine on political topics and wade into hot-button issues, even while he has been on the federal bench. Ho’s favorite hill to die on is the supposed discrimination that conservatives face in law schools and the legal profession at large.
In 2022, Ho announced at a Federalist Society conference that he would no longer hire clerks from Yale Law School due to the school’s tolerance of “cancel culture.” During the pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses across the country, Ho publicly vowed that he would not hire any Columbia law students or undergraduates until the protestors faced “serious consequences.” Ho has also alleged that the Federal Judges Association and many prestigious private law firms are institutionally biased against conservatives. In an interview with Reason, Ho expressed his view that it is judges’ responsibility to lead the “fight” against these “intolerant institutions.”
If appointed to the Supreme Court, Ho’s extreme opinions across a broad range of constitutional issues would push the Court even further to the right.
Anti-LGBTQ+ Rights
While he was Texas’s solicitor general, he zealously defended Texas’s same-sex marriage ban and often challenged the Obama administration’s policies. During his multiple stints at Gibson & Dunn, Ho dedicated thousands of pro bono hours to the First Liberty Institute, a Christian legal advocacy organization that strongly opposes LGBTQ+ and abortion rights.
Anti-Reproductive Rights
- As a circuit judge, he sided with Texas when a women’s health organization challenged a state law that mandated cremation or burial of “fetal remains.” In his concurrence, Ho lamented “the moral tragedy of abortion” and accused the district court of “retaliat[ing] against people of faith for not only believing in the sanctity of life — but also for wanting to do something about it.”
- Ho voted to overturn the FDA’s 20-year-old decision to approve mifepristone, an abortion-inducing drug. In his dissent, Ho argued for an expansive standing framework that would allow anti-abortion groups to sue plaintiffs based on mere ideological objections rather than clear concrete injuries.
Anti-Gun Safety
Ho also has extreme views on the Second Amendment, campaign finance laws, and immigration. Ho subscribes to Justice Thomas’s view that almost all restrictions on gun ownership are unconstitutional. In United States v. Rahimi, Ho held that a federal statute prohibiting possession of firearms by someone subject to a domestic violence restraining order violates the Second Amendment. The Supreme Court later overruled this decision and upheld the statute.
Anti-Campaign Finance
In Zimmerman v. City of Austin, Ho dissented from the court’s decision to uphold a municipal campaign finance restriction. In his dissent, Ho claimed that “big government,” not unchecked corporate political donations, is the real issue facing our country. Ho wrote that “the size and scope of government makes such spending essential.” In the same opinion, Ho criticized the “unfortunate trend in modern constitutional law [to] create rights that appear nowhere in the Constitution, but also disfavor rights expressly enumerated by our Founders.”
Anti-Immigration
Additionally, Ho was the first federal judge to refer to undocumented immigrants crossing the southern border as an “invasion.” He also insists on referring to undocumented immigrants as “aliens” despite broad pushback to practice within the judiciary. In an interview conducted a few days after Trump’s 2024 election victory, Ho cravenly changed his previously expressed views on birthright citizenship to conform with Trump’s push to eliminate birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants. In this interview, Ho argued that “the children of invading aliens” are not entitled to birthright citizenship.