Some background on the architect of SB 8
- Click here for the entry.
Mitchell was raised in a religious Christian home in Pennsylvania.[4] He had six brothers.[4] He attended Wheaton College, an Evangelical liberal arts college in Illinois.[4] Mitchell received a Juris Doctor from the University of Chicago Law School in 2001. He was an articles editor of the University of Chicago Law Review and a member of Order of the Coif.
Career
After graduating from law school, he clerked for Judge J. Michael Luttig of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit from 2001 to 2002, and for Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court from 2002 to 2003. After clerking, he served as an attorney-adviser in the Office of Legal Counsel of the United States Department of Justice.[5] He was appointed as Solicitor General of Texas in 2010. He was a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution from 2015 to 2016.
After his tenure as Solicitor General of Texas, Mitchell sought out academic appointments, but failed to find a tenure track position.[4] After Donald Trump became president, Mitchell sought positions in the Donald Trump administration.[4] Trump unsuccessfully nominated Mitchell to serve as the chairman of the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS). In 2018, Mitchell created his own one-person law firm.[4]
In 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Texas anti-abortion bill that Mitchell helped to write.[4] In 2021, an increasingly conservative Supreme Court issued an order declining to enjoin the enforcement of a Texas anti-abortion bill (the Texas Heartbeat Act) from going into effect, pending the resolution of constitutional challenges to the bill. The challenged Texas bill bans abortion after cardiac activity is detectable.[4][7][8][9]
Mitchell has argued cases and written briefs before the Supreme Court of the United States.[10][11] In Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, Mitchell and a colleague authored an amicus brief on behalf of Texas Right to Life, arguing that overturning Roe v. Wade could lead to the reversal of other "lawless" court decisions such as those establishing a right to same-sex marriage, while distinguishing and defending the right to interracial marriage recognized in Loving v. Virginia.[12]
Here's a bit more on him from ScotusBlog;
- Click here for the source.
The law is largely the brainchild of Mitchell, a lawyer who served as a law clerk to the late Justice Antonin Scalia and as the solicitor general of Texas. Like the other “heartbeat” bans, S.B. 8 prohibits abortions starting around the sixth week of pregnancy. But unlike the other states’ laws, S.B. 8 delegates the sole power to enforce the law to private individuals, rather than state officials. The law allows anyone, including people who do not live in Texas, to bring a lawsuit in state court against anyone who performs an abortion or helps to make one possible. That means that someone who drives a patient to an abortion clinic or a family member who pays for the abortion could be sued under S.B. 8. A plaintiff in a successful lawsuit can receive at least $10,000 in damages, along with costs and attorney’s fees.
For Mitchell and other supporters of S.B. 8, the law’s unusual enforcement scheme is a feature, not a bug. By stripping the state of any role in enforcing the law, and instead outsourcing enforcement to private individuals, S.B. 8’s supporters hoped to make it harder to challenge the constitutionality of the ban in court, particularly before the law went into effect on Sept. 1. And by creating such broad liability, with the potential for hefty damages, the law’s proponents also wanted to deter virtually all abortions – even those that would occur before the sixth week of pregnancy.
