Jeffrey Stuart Sutton (born October 31, 1960) is an American lawyer and jurist serving as the chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

[1] Sutton worked as a paralegal in Washington, D.C., and spent a summer at an archaeological dig site in Jordan as part of a United States Department of State cultural exchange program, then returned to Ohio to be a high school history teacher and varsity soccer coach at the Columbus Academy, a private school in Gahanna, Ohio.

[5] Sutton was first nominated by President George W. Bush on May 9, 2001, to a seat on the Sixth Circuit vacated by David A. Nelson, who assumed senior status on October 1, 1999.

[8] In 2007, Sutton dissented in part when the Sixth Circuit held that a police officer did not have qualified immunity for arresting a speaker for using foul language at a town meeting.

"[15] On July 8, 2023, Sutton temporarily halted a lower court injunction[16] on Tennessee's law banning gender affirming care for minors.

2024), Chief Judge Sutton authored a majority opinion that upheld a Tennessee law that “treats the sex listed on a birth certificate as a historical fact unchangeable by an individual’s transition to a different gender identity.” The opinion described biological sex as “a medical fact of birth collected by the State about everyone” and rejected arguments that the U.S. Constitution “require[s] Tennessee to change the biological sex listed on the birth certificates of transgender individuals to match their gender identities.” Judge Helene White authored a dissenting opinion arguing that Tennessee impermissibly “classifies individuals based on the State’s generalizations of what it means to be truly male and female.”[26] Since joining the bench, Judge Sutton has been one of the most prolific feeder judges, sending a number of his law clerks to the Supreme Court.

[28] On a podcast with Harvard Law School professor Noah Feldman, Judge Sutton, a conservative originalist, expressed the view that the United States Supreme Court's December 2000 decision in Bush v. Gore was wrongly decided.