- Source: Jeremy Kernodle
Jeremy Daniel Kernodle (born 1976) is an American lawyer and jurist serving since 2018 as a United States district judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas.
Early life and education
Kernodle was born in 1976 in Memphis, Tennessee. He graduated from Harding University in 1998 with joint Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Business Administration degrees, summa cum laude. He then attended the Vanderbilt University Law School, where he was an articles editor of the Vanderbilt Law Review. He graduated in 2001 ranked first in his class with a Juris Doctor with highest honors.
Legal career
Upon graduation from law school, Kernodle was a law clerk to Judge Gerald Bard Tjoflat of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit from 2001 to 2002. He then practiced appellate and commercial litigation at Covington & Burling as an associate. After his stint at Covington & Burling, he served in the United States Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel as an attorney-advisor.
Before becoming a judge, he was a partner at Haynes and Boone, where he founded the False Claims Act practice group and worked on healthcare litigation.
Federal judicial service
On January 23, 2018, President Donald Trump nominated Kernodle to the seat on the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas vacated by Judge Michael H. Schneider Sr., who assumed senior status on January 7, 2016. On May 9, 2018, a hearing on his nomination was held before the Senate Judiciary Committee. On June 7, 2018, his nomination was reported out of committee by a 14–7 vote. On October 11, 2018, his nomination was confirmed by voice vote. He received his judicial commission on November 2, 2018.
= Notable rulings
=In December 2020, Texas Republican congressman Louis Gohmert and others filed a suit in Kernodle's court, naming vice president Mike Pence as a defendant in arguing he constitutionally has "sole discretion in determining which electoral votes to count for a given State, and must ignore and may not rely on any provisions of the Electoral Count Act that would limit his exclusive authority." Pence and the Justice Department asked that the suit be dismissed, with the DOJ arguing that the suit "does not properly lie against the Vice President, and
plaintiffs’ suit can be resolved on a number of threshold issues," and that the suit was not filed in a timely manner to justify "expedited declaratory judgment and emergency injunctive relief against the Vice President." Kernodle dismissed the suit on January 1, 2021, ruling that Gohmert and the other plaintiffs lacked standing, and that Gohmert "suffered no legally recognizable injury".
References
External links
Jeremy Kernodle at the Biographical Directory of Federal Judges, a publication of the Federal Judicial Center.