According to reports, Donald Trump has appointed John Gore, the attorney who defended North Carolina’s controversial transgender bathroom bill, HB2, to a key civil rights role in the Department of Justice.
The Administration has not publicly confirmed Gore’s appointment, and there has been no formal nomination. Legal news and gossip blog, Above the Law, included Gore in its list of mega-law firm Jones Day alumni serving in Trump’s administration, and the National Law Journal noted that Gore would serve as a Deputy Attorney General in the Civil Rights division, but did not say if would head up the department.
Gore took over defending the North Carolina law, which nullified local laws protecting transgender individuals who chose to use a bathroom based on their gender identity, after North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper (now the state’s governor) said that his office would not go to court to repel legal challenges to the law.
In that case, Gore represented several higher education clients, including the University of North Carolina, battling the Obama Administration’s claim that enforcing HB2 on university campuses violated Title IX gender discrimination protections. Gore withdrew from that case earlier this week.
While with Jones Day, Gore was also part of a team that successfully defended controversial redistricting plans in New York, South Carolina and Florida. Gore is best known, however, for his work in the area of anti-trust.
If Gore will indeed helm the DOJ’s Civil Rights division, he will likely preside over a number of contentious civil rights cases ahead of the Trump Administration, including likely lawsuits over voter rights and voter suppression, LGBT accommodations, immigrant rights, and the “stop and frisk” crime investigation procedures Trump supported throughout his campaign.
His first challenge is likely to be First Amendment related, as Donald Trump is pledging to sign the First Amendment Rights Protection Act, which preserves “conscience rights” for Americans who refuse to provide certain services based on their closely held religious beliefs, within the first few days of his Presidency.
The position has presided over some of the most controversial civil rights cases in American history, including seminal racial discrimination cases Plessy v. Ferguson, Brown v. the Board of Education, and LGBT rights cases like Lawrence v. Texas and Obergfell v. Hodges, which established a national right to marriage access for gay couples.
