Amul Roger Thapar
29 April 1969
**Amul Roger Thapar** was born on April 29, 1969, in Troy, Michigan, to parents who had immigrated from India. He grew up in Toledo, Ohio, and pursued his undergraduate education at Boston College, graduating in 1991. He went on to earn his Juris Doctor from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law in 1994. Following law school, Thapar served as a law clerk to Judge S. Arthur Spiegel on the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio and then to Judge Nathaniel R. Jones on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit — the very court on which he now sits. He subsequently entered private practice at two prominent firms, Williams & Connolly in Washington, D.C., and Squire, Sanders & Dempsey in Cincinnati, Ohio, and served as an Assistant United States Attorney in both the Southern District of Ohio and the District of Columbia. Thapar's prosecutorial career reached its apex when he was appointed United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Kentucky, a post he held from 2006 to 2008. In that role, he served on the Attorney General's Advisory Committee, chaired its Controlled Substances and Asset Forfeiture subcommittee, and participated in the Terrorism and National Security, Violent Crime, and Child Exploitation working groups. His judicial career began in 2007 when President George W. Bush nominated him to serve on the Eastern District of Kentucky, making him the first South Asian Article III judge in American history. He served with distinction on that court for nearly a decade before being elevated to the appellate bench. In 2017, he became President Donald Trump's first Court of Appeals appointment and second judicial appointment overall, after Justice Neil Gorsuch. He was confirmed by the Senate on a 52–44 vote. A committed originalist and textualist, Judge Thapar has become one of the most intellectually prominent conservative jurists of his generation. He was included on President Trump's shortlist for the Supreme Court vacancy in 2018, when Justice Anthony Kennedy retired. Throughout his judicial career he has taught at the University of Cincinnati College of Law, Vanderbilt University Law School, the University of Virginia School of Law, and Northern Kentucky University, and has contributed scholarly articles to the Yale Law Journal, the Michigan Law Review, and the Catholic University Law Review. He joined the University of Notre Dame's Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government as a Distinguished Teaching Scholar in 2023–24. In 2023, Judge Thapar published *The People's Justice: Clarence Thomas and the Constitutional Stories That Define Him*, a study of twelve illustrative cases in which he demonstrates the coherence of Justice Thomas's judicial philosophy and the profound humanity on which it rests. Judge Thapar is married to Kim Schulte. They have three children and reside in Kentucky.
