Circuit, along with the nominations of Robert L. Wilkins and Patricia Millett, ultimately became central to the debate over the use of the filibuster in the United States Senate, leading to the controversial use of the nuclear option to bring it to the floor for a vote.
[1] Pillard has been compared to Ruth Bader Ginsburg for her civil rights advocacy, and has been mentioned as a possible Supreme Court nominee.
[3] Her father, Richard Pillard, was a professor of psychiatry at Boston University who was the first openly gay psychiatrist in the United States.
[5] After her clerkship, Pillard was a lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, in New York City and Washington, D.C., from 1988 to 1994.
[4] In 1994, 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 U.S. Supreme Court.
While a member of the Georgetown Law faculty, Pillard successfully defended the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) against constitutional challenge in another landmark case, Nevada Department of Human Resources v. Hibbs (2003).
[14] 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 a decision by then-Chief Justice Rehnquist, the Court ruled for Hibbs and upheld the FMLA's application to state employees as a valid exercise of Congress' constitutional powers.
In other noteworthy cases representing the United States, 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.
[17] In May 2013, the New York Times and the Washington Post reported that 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.
According to ThinkProgress, conservatives attacked her as an extremist and radical feminist, noting that a paper she had authored analogized compelled maternity to "conscription,"[20] in objecting to her confirmation.
[31] When Judge Pillard's panel found that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act did not violate the Constitution's Origination Clause in Sissel v. United States Department of Health & Human Services (2014), Judge Kavanaugh wrote a lengthy dissent from denial of an en banc rehearing.