Politics

EXCLUSIVE: Lawyer Who Helped Take Down Roe V. Wade Joins Forces With Rising Conservative Firm

(Photo via Kelly Sikkema / Unsplash)

Constitutional lawyer Erin Hawley is joining forces with a rising conservative law firm to launch their appellate portfolio.

Hawley, who was instrumental in advancing pro-life victories like reversing Roe v. Wade at the religious liberty focused Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), will now chair Lex Politica’s Supreme Court and appellate litigation team.

“They’re friends, and I’m looking forward to joining them as colleagues to hopefully do some of the most important political law work of of our time,” Hawley told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “They represent folks from all around the country that are trying to move the country in the right direction.”

Lex Politica launched in 2025 to take on conservative cases “BigLaw” ignores. Hawley said her team will announce additional hires in the next few weeks as they build out a “top notch appellate shop.”

Hawley is the wife of Republican Missouri Senator and former attorney general Josh Hawley.

One element of her work at Lex Politica will be representing state attorneys general, who she said are on the “front lines” but often not as well staffed as “the massive law firms that they are up against.”

“You might have an office of four or five litigating attorneys, sometimes a few more, that are up against the biggest law firms in the country,” she said.

Republican attorneys general have led the charge at the Supreme Court on cases touching major cultural issues in recent years.

Tennessee Attorney General Anthony Skrmetti secured a ruling in June upholding his state’s ban on child sex change procedures. Attorneys general in Idaho and West Virginia defended their states bans on men in women’s sports before the Supreme Court in January.

During her time at ADF, Hawley served as senior counsel and vice president of the Center for Life and regulatory practice.

She was a key part of the team that overturned Roe v. Wade and argued before the Supreme Court in 2024 on behalf of doctors challenging the abortion pill in U.S. Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine. The Supreme Court held that the doctors did not have standing to sue over the FDA’s decision to roll back safety regulations for mifepristone.

In December, Hawley argued at the Supreme Court on behalf of a New Jersey pregnancy center challenging a subpoena seeking information about their donors.

Though she is taking on a new role, Hawley will continue working with ADF on pro-life cases as of counsel.

Along with her husband, she also launched a new group in December called the Love Life Initiative. The nonprofit’s launch reportedly sparked tension with some Trump White House advisors who view abortion as a losing issue ahead of midterms, according to Axios, but Hawley noted it has been “really well received from the pro-life community.”

“I think that issue is not at the forefront of everyone’s minds,” she told the DCNF.

The FDA quietly approved a new manufacturer to sell a generic version of the abortion pill in September. Meanwhile, the agency has not yet delivered on its promised mifepristone safety study.

The abortion pill can be easily ordered “for future use” online without speaking to a doctor to verify key eligibility requirements, a DCNF investigation found.

At the grassroots level among people like pastors and friends, “there’s just been this sense of, ‘oh, good, like someone is going to focus on this,'” Hawley said.

“We’re really excited to to work with folks to to not only bring sort of a greater awareness of the value of unborn life and participate things like the ballot initiative that’s coming up in Missouri, but just this idea of family flourishing,” she said, highlighting the need for “family friendly” culture.

It’s an “exciting time to be a conservative lawyer,” Hawley told the DCNF, pointing to “the sense that we have a Supreme Court that is really committed to constitutional principles, to originalism, to reading statutes and text as it was written, rather than importing their own policy preferences.”

“[This] is just fantastic news for all of the issues that we care about,” she said. “Everything from the First Amendment, when you’re talking about the freedom to speak, the freedom to vote, to contribute to those you want to support, to religious liberty, to see state attorney generals really stepping in and protecting minors from gender transition surgeries and the like.”