Judge Robert Wilkins
D.C. Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals
Robert Leon Wilkins was born in October 1963 in Muncie, Indiana. He earned an undergraduate degree from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. He earned a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School. He clerked for a judge in the U.S. District Court for Southern California.
Wilkins worked at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, then entered private practice at a law firm in Washingon, D.C. He was part of President George W. Bush’s commission to establish the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museam of African American History and Culture.
Wilkins was nominated by President Barack Obama in May 2010 to serve as a judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. He was confirmed by the Senate and received his commission in December 2010. President Obama nominated Judge Wilkins to the District of Columbia U.S. Court of Appeals in June 2013. The Senate confirmed him and he was commissioned in January 2014.
In the News…
A panel of the District of Columbia U.S. Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s injunction against the U.S. military ban issued by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on current transgender service members. However, two judges on the panel vacated the injunction as applied to prospective recruits and narrowed the injunction to the named plaintiffs rather than making its scope universal.
Judge Robert Wilkins wrote for the majority, “[T]he record shows that the purpose of the Hegseth Policy is to target applicants and servicemembers who express what the Administration believes is a ‘false gender identity,’ and the Policy goes far beyond disqualifying persons currently or recently suffering from gender dysphoria.”
Judge Wilkins continued in the opinion, “The sharp contrast to the Mattis Policy, adopted in the first Trump Administration, which allowed servicemembers who were transgender or who had suffered from gender dysphoria to remain in the military, appears to be driven by the bare desire to harm a politically unpopular group: persons who identify as transgender. As such, at this preliminary stage, I conclude that the Hegseth Policy is both arbitrary and based upon animus, and for those reasons the Policy violates Plaintiff-Appellees’ constitutional right to equal protection of the law.”
Contact this Leader…
Did you pray for Judge Wilkins today? You can let him know at:
The Honorable Robert Wilkins
U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit
E. Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse
333 Constitution Ave NW
Washington, DC 20001
