Dana El-Kurd

As a judge, Ho led a boycott of legal clerks who graduated from Yale Law School to punish that institution for its supposed leftist cancel culture and intolerance of conservative views.

During a speech to the far-right Heritage Foundation, the authors of Project 2025 said,

Ho ridiculed lawyers with, quote, fancy credentials, fancy law schools, fancy clerkships, fancy law firms and government jobs.

He claimed that issued liberal opinions for no other purpose than winning popularity.

He urged young conservatives to assert themselves against the supposed popularity of political correctness.

In addition to serving on the bench, Ho could be considered an activist, particularly on culture war issues like abortion.

He's condemned abortion as the, quote, In 2018, he upheld a Texas law that required the cremation or burial of fetal remains, a potentially costly burden for women receiving medical treatment.

And the state of Texas argued that any potential financial burdens to women or clinics were irrelevant since the Texas Conference of Catholic Bishops made a pledge to bury the remains for low cost or even for free.

Such a promise, of course, was not legally binding.

A district court overturned the law, but Ho and the Fifth Circuit reinstated it, arguing that coerced burial protected religious freedom of the Catholic bishops.

Quote, the First Amendment expressly guarantees the free exercise of religion, including the right of bishops to express their profound objection to the moral tragedy of abortion, Ho wrote.

Texas still requires that fetal remains receive burial or cremation.

As we'll explore later, it's not only on the issue of abortion that Ho has staked out an extreme position.

In Manns v. Sessions, the Fifth Circuit Court, by an 8-7 vote, narrowly avoided overturning a federal gun law that prohibited interstate gun sales.

Ho offered a bitter dissent, quoting his mentor Clarence Thomas and complaining that in spite of the wide open access to firearms in this country, the Second Amendment had become, quote, a second class right.

In his opinion, Ho ridiculed advocates of gun control as suffering from hoplophobia, the irrational fear of guns.

Ho and the entire Fifth Circuit achieved national infamy after the Supreme Court erased almost half a century of abortion rights when it overturned the Roe v. Wade decision in the Dobbs v. Women's Health Organization case on June 24, 2022.

A little more than a year after that landmark case, on August 16, 2023, the Fifth Circuit upheld tightened access for women to mifepristone, the so-called abortion pill, which accounts for more than half of all terminated pregnancies in the United States.

Originally approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2000, but only for prescription by hospitals and other medical facilities, the FDA expanded access to the medication in 2016 and gave doctors the right to directly prescribe mifepristone.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, starting in 2021, women could receive it through the mail.