[2] President Ronald Reagan nominated Davis to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on November 1, 1983, to a seat vacated by Judge Robert A. Ainsworth Jr., who died on December 22, 1981.
Reagan at first considered Ben Toledano, a New Orleans lawyer and former Republican political candidate for the slot but withdrew the nomination after opposition surfaced from the NAACP.
[2] Judge Davis was appointed by Chief Justice William Rehnquist as a member of the Advisory Committee on the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure on October 1, 1995.
Davis was one of three judges on a panel that heard the appeal to Hornbeck Offshore Services LLC v. Salazar, a case challenging the U.S. Department of the Interior six-month moratorium on exploratory drilling in deep water that was adopted in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon explosion and the subsequent oil spill.
[4][5] After the circuit deadlocked 8-8 on whether the rehear the case, Davis' judgment was reversed by the unanimous Supreme Court of the United States in Houston Community College System v. Wilson (2022).