FACT SHEET: Information on Jordan e. Pratt, trump's nominee to the u.s. district court for the middle district of Florida

Ties to Extremist Groups, like the First Liberty Institute and the Alliance Defending Freedom

• Pratt worked as senior counsel at the far-right religious legal organization First Liberty, the same institution that cultivated Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, the federal judge who tried to unilaterally rescind the FDA’s approval of the abortion pill mifepristone and gut protections for LGBTQ+ employees.

• Pratt represented a church that successfully knocked down a New York law prohibiting concealed carry in places of worship that had been put in place after a rash of mass shootings in synagogues and churches.

• Pratt represented Turbocam, a manufacturing company accused of discrimination over its exclusion of gender-transition health coverage.

• Pratt was a Blackstone Fellow at the far-right Alliance Defending Freedom. The Blackstone Fellowship is a summer leadership program for Christian law students, which seeks to inspire a “distinctly Christian worldview in every area of law.”  

A Potential Conflict of Interest

• As a trial judge in the Middle District of Florida, Pratt would likely hear cases to which Florida is a party. This would present a conflict of interest given that Pratt’s wife, Christine K. Pratt, is Florida’s assistant solicitor general, as of May 2025.

A Troubling Record on Voting Rights

• As Florida’s deputy solicitor general, Pratt helped defend the state’s Executive Clemency Board, which has been accused of violating felons’ First Amendment rights by refusing to re-enfranchise them after serving out their prison sentences. Florida argued in that case that the Fourteenth Amendment authorized the state to permanently disenfranchise felons, who were disproportionately people of color. A federal judge disagreed and ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. In 2018, nearly two-thirds of Florida voters approved a constitutional amendment to automatically restore the right to vote to most people with prior felony convictions.

• In 2018, the Democratic Executive Committee and Bill Nelson’s Senate campaign filed a lawsuit challenging Florida’s standardless signature matching progress. Pratt represented Florida in the lawsuit. After the district court granted a preliminary injunction and the 11th Circuit declined to pause it, Florida passed a bill providing election reforms, including signature matching training.

Bad on Abortion Rights

• In May 2025, Pratt ruled that a decades-old Florida law allowing minors to have abortions without their parents’ consent is unconstitutional. Pratt wrote that “whatever asserted constitutional abortion rights may have justified Florida's judicial-waiver regime in the past unequivocally have been repudiated by both the U.S. Supreme Court and the Florida Supreme Court,” and that the “constitutional rights of pregnant minors’ parents” were violated.