Jonathan F. Mitchell

Mitchell was raised in a religious Christian home in Pennsylvania.[4] He had six brothers.[4] He attended Wheaton College, graduating in 1998 with a Bachelor of Arts summa cum laude.[5][4] He then attended the University of Chicago Law School, where he was an articles editor for the University of Chicago Law Review. He graduated in 2001 with a Juris Doctor with high honors and Order of the Coif membership.

After graduating from law school, he clerked for Judge J. Michael Luttig of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit from 2001 to 2002, and for Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court from 2002 to 2003. After clerking, he served as an attorney-adviser in the Office of Legal Counsel of the United States Department of Justice.[6] He was appointed as Solicitor General of Texas in 2010. He was a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution from 2015 to 2016.

After his tenure as Solicitor General of Texas, Mitchell sought out academic appointments, but failed to find a tenure-track position.[4] After Donald Trump became president, Mitchell sought positions in the Donald Trump administration.[4] Trump unsuccessfully nominated Mitchell to serve as the chairman of the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS).[7][6] In 2018, Mitchell founded his own one-person law firm.[4]

In 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Texas anti-abortion bill that Mitchell helped to write.[4] In 2021, the Supreme Court declined to enjoin the enforcement of the Texas Heartbeat Act. The Texas bill bans abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detectable and is still being challenged in the court system.[4][8][9][10]

Mitchell has argued cases and written briefs before the Supreme Court of the United States.[11][12] In Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, Mitchell and a colleague authored an amicus brief on behalf of Texas Right to Life, arguing that overturning Roe v. Wade could lead to the reversal of other "lawless" court decisions such as those establishing a right to same-sex marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges), while distinguishing and defending the right to interracial marriage recognized in Loving v. Virginia.[13]

• The Writ-of-Erasure Fallacy, 104 Va. L. Rev. 934 (2018).
• Textualism and the Fourteenth Amendment, 69 Stan. L. Rev. 1237 (2017).
• Remembering the Boss, 84 U. Chi. L. Rev. 2291 (2017).
• Commentary, Capital Punishment and the Courts, 120 Harv. L. Rev. Forum 269 (2017).
• Judicial Review and the Future of Federalism, 49 Ariz. St. L. J. 1091 (2017).
• Stare Decisis and Constitutional Text, 110 Mich. L. Rev. 1 (2011).
• Reconsidering Murdock: State-Law Reversals as Constitutional Avoidance, 77 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1335 (2010).
• Legislating Clear-Statement Regimes in National-Security Law, 43 Ga. L. Rev. 1059 (2009).
• Apprendi’s Domain, 2006 Sup. Ct. Rev. 297.

• List of law clerks of the Supreme Court of the United States (Seat 9)

• Biography at Stanford Law School
• Jonathan Mitchell on C-SPAN
• Appearances at the U.S. Supreme Court from the Oyez Project
• Jonathan F. Mitchell's SSRN page