Cornelia Pillard

As a judge, Pillard extended the exclusionary rule to require police to knock-and-announce when executing an arrest warrant, over a dissent by Judge Karen L. Henderson. Judge Pillard joined Henderson when they denied a petition by Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri to disqualify his military judges. When in Meshal v. Higgenbotham (2016) Judges Janice Rogers Brown and Brett Kavanaugh threw out a claim by an American that he had been disappeared by the FBI in a Kenyan black site, Judge Pillard dissented, arguing the court should just create a new implied cause of action. When Judge Pillard's panel found that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act did not violate the Constitution's Origination Clause in Sissel v. United States Department of Health & Human Services (2014), Judge Kavanaugh wrote a lengthy dissent from denial of an en banc rehearing.

In May 2013, the New York Times and the Washington Post reported that Pillard was under consideration by the Obama administration to fill one of three vacancies on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

On June 4, 2013, Obama nominated Pillard to serve as a United States Circuit Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, to the seat vacated by Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg, who took senior status on October 14, 2011. On September 19, 2013, her nomination was reported to the floor by the Senate Judiciary Committee by a vote of 10 ayes to 8 nays, the vote falling along party lines.

On November 7, 2013, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid moved to invoke cloture on Pillard's nomination, in an attempt to cut off a filibuster from Republican senators. On November 12, 2013, the Senate rejected the motion to invoke cloture by a vote of 56-41, with 1 senator voting "present". Conservatives attacked her as an extremist and radical feminist, noting her references to compelled maternity as "conscription", among other statements, in objecting to her confirmation.

After the Senate moved forward in November 2013 with a rules change eliminating the filibuster on federal appeals court nominees, the Senate on December 10, 2013, voted 56-42 to invoke cloture on Pillard's nomination. That paved the way for a final floor vote on Pillard's nomination. Shortly before 1 a.m. on December 12, 2013, the Senate confirmed Pillard in a 51-44 vote. On December 17, 2013, Pillard received her federal judicial commission.

Pillard supports fair and efficient private settlement of legal disputes through negotiation, mediation and arbitration. She serves on the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors of the American Arbitration Association, and has been a board member there since 2005.

Pillard returned to Georgetown Law in 2000, where she received tenure. Pillard has taught more than a dozen different courses and seminars, and frequently teaches the core civil procedure and constitutional law courses. Pillard also served as faculty director of Georgetown Law's Supreme Court Institute, a public service program that provides free assistance to attorneys preparing for arguments before the Supreme Court on a first-come, first-served basis. In the 2012 term, the program held moot courts for counsel in 100% of cases argued before the Court.

In 1998, Pillard was named Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel. That office provides authoritative legal advice to the President and all the Executive Branch agencies, including review of all executive orders and orders of the Attorney General.

In 1994, Pillard joined the Office of the Solicitor General of the United States, where she briefed and argued civil and criminal cases on behalf of the federal government before the U.S. Supreme Court. She joined the tenure-track faculty at Georgetown Law in 1997.

Pillard's first permanent legal job was as Assistant Counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, in New York City and Washington, D.C. from 1989 to 1994.

Pillard began her legal career in 1987 as a law clerk for Judge Louis H. Pollak of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania ,. Pollak was a former dean of both Yale and Penn Law Schools.

Cornelia Thayer Livingston Pillard (born March 4, 1961) known as Nina Pillard, is a United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Before becoming a judge, Pillard was a tenured law professor at Georgetown University.

Pillard was born in March 1961 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She graduated from Commonwealth School in Boston in 1978. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree with Distinction in History from Yale College in 1983, where she graduated magna cum laude. She then attended Harvard Law School where she was an editor for the Harvard Law Review. She received her Juris Doctor magna cum laude in 1987.