Covington judge on top of list for U.S. Supreme Court vacancy

Editor’s note: Portions of this story are drawn from a 2018 Courier Journal profile.

Two judges sitting on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit based in Cincinnati are rumored to be near the top of President Donald Trump’s list to succeed Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court.

Joan Larsen, 51, was nominated by Trump to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in 2017. She was confirmed by a 60-38 vote that November.

Amul Thapar, 51, was confirmed to his current post on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit by a 52-44 vote in May 2017.

Amul Thapar (uh-MALL Thuh-PAR) grew up in Toledo, Ohio, with his maternal grandfather, who fought with Mahatma Ghandi for India’s independence and impressed on young Amul how Gandhi had defeated an empire without shedding a drop of blood. 

University of Richmond law professor Carl Tobias, who studies federal judicial selections, said Friday that Thapar will be in the mix because Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been a strong proponent and because he is conservative —McConnell recommended him for the district bench and the appellate court.

But Tobias said Thapar is not well known by many people and has not had the kind of cases heard at the Supreme Court or the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia — the most common feeder for the high court.

Thapar’s father, Raj, has said the family urged Amul to become a doctor, but he had only one dream — to become a justice on the Supreme Court of the United States. 

Now he may realized that dream.  

Thapar, 51, who sits on the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, was one of four finalists to replace Anthony Kennedy when he retired in 2018, but Trump instead nominated Brett Kavanaugh. 

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USA TODAY reported in 2018 Thapar has never written about abortion or other hot-button issues, which could make conservatives fearful. 

But the appellate court judge has railed against “politicians in robes” who substitute their views for the law, and has written that the three branches of governments should "stay in their lanes.” 

Writing earlier this year in the Michigan Law Review, USA TODAY said, Thapar denounced judges who “bend the law” to meet their own goals and ignore the text of statutes and the Constitution to achieve an “equitable outcome.” 

If he is nominated and confirmed to the high court, his rise would be meteoric.  

Those on the right may question whether he will be reliably conservative or if would be the next David Souter, a Republican appointee who reliably voted with the court’s liberal members for 19 years until he retired in June 2009.

But Thapar’s father told The Courier Journal for a 2018 profile his son is so conservative he “nearly wouldn’t speak to me after I voted for Barack” Obama. 

And Thapar is a darling of the Federalist Society, the conservative intellectual group that believes the Constitution should be interpreted as it was written. The organization helped assemble a list of 25 potential nominees for Trump four years ago to which the president added 20 more names earlier this month.

Although Thapar was attacked by liberal advocacy groups as a “far-right judge” when he was considered for the Kennedy vacancy, progressive lawyers in Eastern Kentucky came to his defense. 

Attorney Ned Pillersdorf, who practices in Prestonsburg, said Thapar has been a fair and decent-minded judge. 

Added Beverly Storm, who practices in Boone County, told The Courier Journal, “He is not a caveman.”

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Kent Wicker, a Harvard Law classmate of Michelle Obama, told The Courier Journal in 2018 that he had tried two cases before Thapar and couldn’t tell what his politics were. 

“He is just interested in getting to the right answer,” Wicker said. 

Thapar has been willing to rule for criminal defendants and against the government. 

In April 2018, he joined with two other judges on the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals to affirm the suppression of evidence against a methamphetamine dealer because the police in a warrant application said they would search his house only if he personally took delivery of a suspicious package.

Instead, it was delivered to his fiancée and police searched the home anyway. 

As a trial judge, he also ruled against the Social Security Administration in favor of former clients of Eric Conn who lost their disability benefits after he was accused of obtaining them through fraud. Thapar wrote that they had been afforded fewer rights by the government than a “member of Al Qaeda” and gave them another crack at benefit restoration. 

Still, Thapar is an undeniably tough jurist. “Above the Law,” an irreverent legal blog, once described him as a “guy who doesn’t f**k around.” 

As a U.S. district judge for the Eastern District of Kentucky, he sentenced an 84-year-old Roman Catholic nun to prison for 35 months for breaking into a uranium enrichment plant and defacing it by splashing a storage bunker with human blood. 

He sent another woman to prison for 18 years for helping her jailed daughter get drugs that killed her. 

And despite uncontradicted evidence that a 70-year-old inmate was developmentally disabled, Thapar refused to allow him to reopen his case. An appellate panel reversed him, saying the inmate, described as having the mental capacity of a 2-to-5-year-old child, lacked ability to “monitor the assistance he had been given in even the most basic ways.” 

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In another opinion, he upheld the right of Cleveland-based paint giant Sherwin-Williams to fire an employee who could no longer drive because a stroke had robbed him of peripheral vision. 

“Specialty retailers need to forge strong, in-person bonds with customers,” Thapar wrote. “That is what Sherwin-Williams, a specialty paint retailer, tries to do. Hence it requires store managers not only to oversee store operations, but also to visit off-site locations to make deliveries, conduct sales calls, identify potential customers, and generally provide face-to-face customer service. And in rural areas like Pikeville, Kentucky, that means driving.” 

As a high schooler in Dayton, Amul Thapar got straight A’s, was chess champion and captain of the golf team his father Raj said. The family was culturally Hindu but not devout. 

He went on to Boston College, where he studied economics and philosophy and read Aristotle and Dostoyevsky before earning his law degree at University of California at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall. 

Thapar never sought political office but became involved in local Republican politics in Northern Kentucky in the early 2000s, which allowed him to meet his mentor, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and then-U.S. Sen. Jim Bunning. Both were instrumental in his appointment by President George W. Bush as U.S. attorney and judge. 

The Courier Journal wrote in a 2018 profile that Thapar was married to Kim Schulte, a real estate agent who comes from a large Catholic family, and the they live in Covington.

Thapar converted to Catholicism when they were wed, his father said. They have three children who attended Catholic schools and the family had been regulars at St. Pius X Catholic Church in Kenton County, the profile said.

USA Today contributed.