The anti-Brett Kavanaugh crowd has worked hard to paint the judge President Donald Trump has nominated for the Supreme Court as an anti-women figure who would threaten their rights and rule from the bench against their best interests.
But the three women who spoke last week at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC, about working as law clerks for Kavanaugh conjured up a very different portrait of a man who not only has pro-women rulings in his considerable case history but who has also has gone out of his way to not only hire women but to allow them to work at the highest legal levels while honoring the personal lives.
Sarah Pitlyk clerked for Kavanaugh on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 2010 and 2011 after graduating from Yale Law School.
She spoke of the excitement she felt about the opportunity to clerk for Kavanaugh but also concern about balancing the demanding job as the mother of a toddler.
“I got a call from Judge Kavanaugh, and he just put it out there: ‘You’re a mom coming to clerk,’” Pitlyk said.
“Let’s figure out what we need to do to make the clerkship just as rewarding for you as it would be otherwise, and also to make it possible for you to be a mother while you’re doing it,” Kavanaugh said to Pitlyk.
“He asked for my ideas. He didn’t tell me what would work for me. He didn’t prescribe the best solution based on his infinite wisdom,” Pitlyk said, adding that they worked out an arrangement that allowed her to do her best work while still spending the needed time with her young son.
The panelists pointed out Kavanaugh has hired more women as clerks than any of his peers and that he takes a deep interest in helping them succeed and flourish at the mostly male-dominated job.
Breitbart News asked Pitlyk and the other two women on the panel —Rebecca Taibleson and Porter Wilkinson Wall — about Kavanaugh’s critics claiming he is a threat to women and their rights.
Taibleson, who clerked for Kavanaugh in 2010 and 2011, cited a domestic violence case Kavanaugh ruled on that reversed a decision against a woman.
“I talked in my earlier remarks about his support for women personally, and that is so true,” Taibleson said. “His personal characteristics are relevant to his jurisprudence in that regard.”
“You can look at his body of cases — he’s got a long record on the D.C. circuit — and find examples of him applying the law impartially often to the benefit of female litigants,” Taibleson said.
She recalled the case of a woman who had appealed to Kavanaugh’s court after her criminal conviction.
“Judge Kavanaugh wrote an opinion reversing the trial court and holding that the trial court inappropriately limited the women’s ability to present evidence about battered women’s syndrome,” Taibleson said.
The woman argued that the repeated beatings by her boyfriend had contributed to her criminality.
“Judge Kavanaugh wrote an opinion over a dissent from a judge often viewed as conservative, saying, yes, the trial court did err, and this woman should have been able to present this evidence,” Taibleson said.
“That’s an example of Judge Kavanaugh taking each case as it comes, applying the law impartially, and, unsurprisingly that often does result in an outcome that favors women,” Taibleson said.
“I just wanted to add that I think any special interest group that is looking at the judge and trying to evaluate what he is going to do for them when he is on the bench is just looking at this question the wrong way and misunderstanding Judge Kavanaugh,” Pitlyk said. “As we discussed at length that is just not the way he approaches cases.”
“He has a long record of not approaching cases from the point of view of which constituency the outcome will serve,” Pitlyk said. “I think probably every special interest group will find something to like in his record and probably something to dislike.”
“I think that is kind of a distraction from what the real conversation should be,” Pitlyk said.
Roman Martinez, who clerked for Kavanaugh in 2008 and 2009, also praised Kavanaugh as an outstanding former boss and his “fair-minded” approach as a judge.
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