The New York Times asked EKLJ partner Ilene Jaroslaw about her 2015 abortion rights trial in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana, in which her adversaries were U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson and now-U.S. Circuit Judge for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals S. Kyle Duncan. (Ilene won the case at trial, which the Fifth Circuit reversed, a decision that the U.S. Supreme Court reversed, reinstating the victory at the district court.)
“As challenges to both states’ laws wended their way through the federal courts, Mr. Johnson, by then in private practice, joined the legal team defending Louisiana’s statute, working closely with a lawyer named Kyle Duncan, a fellow Louisianian and religious-liberty advocate. Mr. Duncan — who would later be appointed to the federal appeals court for the Fifth Circuit, a font of hard-right rulings — ‘did all the intellectual work on the case,’ recalled Ilene Jaroslaw, a New York lawyer who represented the plaintiffs in June Medical. ‘Mike had the connections to the various witnesses in the anti-abortion movement.'”