# William Pryor Chief judge of the [[Eleventh Circuit]] since 2020, and one of the longest-running figures in the modern fight over judicial confirmations. He is covered here for three reasons: how he got his seat, what he has ruled on elections, and the fact that he presides over the court that reviews Florida. ## How he got the seat The sequence is the point, and it is a template. | Date | Step | |---|---| | **Apr 9, 2003** | George W. Bush nominates him to the Eleventh Circuit. The nomination receives no Senate vote | | **Feb 20, 2004** | Bush gives him a **recess appointment**, seating him without confirmation, to the seat vacated by Emmett Ripley Cox | | **Mar 12, 2004** | Renominated. Again no vote | | **Feb 14, 2005** | Nominated a third time | | **Jun 9, 2005** | **Confirmed**, after the "Gang of 14" agreement guaranteed an up-or-down vote. Commission issued June 10 | | **2020** | Becomes chief judge, succeeding Edward Earl Carnes | Before the bench he was **Attorney General of Alabama** from 1997 to 2004 — appointed by Governor Fob James, then elected in 1998 and 2002, and at the time the youngest state attorney general in the country. He clerked for Judge John Minor Wisdom of the Fifth Circuit, one of the judges who enforced desegregation in the Deep South, which is a sharper piece of biography than it first appears given what his own voting-rights rulings would later hold. Trump put him on the eleven-name Supreme Court list released in May 2016, and he was reported in December 2016 as one of the two finalists for the Scalia vacancy before the nomination went to Neil Gorsuch. ## The election-law rulings This is the part with the longest reach, because it governs Alabama, Florida and Georgia. - ***Jones v. Governor of Florida*** (en banc, 2020) — upheld Florida's requirement that people with felony convictions pay outstanding fines, fees and restitution before their voting rights are restored. Florida voters had passed a re-enfranchisement amendment in 2018; the ruling let the financial conditions stand. See [[Voter Suppression]] and [[Felony Disenfranchisement]]. - ***Common Cause/Georgia v. Billups*** (2009) — upheld Georgia's voter photo-ID law. - ***Alabama Legislative Black Caucus v. Alabama*** (2015) — his three-judge district court opinion was vacated by the Supreme Court, 5–4, in a racial-gerrymandering challenge. ## The Trump cases - ***Trump v. United States*** (2022) — an Eleventh Circuit panel **vacated [[Aileen Cannon]]'s order** appointing a special master and shielding the seized Mar-a-Lago documents from investigators. It is the clearest instance recorded here of the circuit overriding the district judge below it. See [[Mar-a-Lago Documents Case]]. - ***Georgia v. Meadows*** (2023) — a panel denied Mark Meadows's attempt to move his Georgia prosecution into federal court. See [[Mark Meadows]]. ## Why it matters Pryor answers a question that keeps recurring here: what does a judicial appointment actually buy, and for how long? Blocked for two years, seated by recess appointment, confirmed only through a Senate truce, he has now spent more than two decades on the bench and six years running the circuit — long enough to review a former president's documents case and to set the terms of felon re-enfranchisement for three states. The confirmation fight lasted twenty-six months; its consequences are into their third decade. > [!warning] Scope > This page records his offices, his path to confirmation and the holdings of published opinions. Criticism of his record exists and is noted in the sources; it is not adjudicated fact and is not characterized here. ## See Also - [[Eleventh Circuit]] — the court he presides over - [[Aileen Cannon]] — the district judge whose Mar-a-Lago order his court vacated - [[Mar-a-Lago Documents Case]] · [[Mark Meadows]] - [[Voter Suppression]] · [[Felony Disenfranchisement]] - [[United States Sentencing Commission]] · [[Judicial Conference of the United States]] - [[How a Nominee Becomes a Federal Judge]]