Monday, Feb. 07, 2005

Jay Sekulow

The Almighty's Attorney-at-Law
If God is heading to an appeals court, Jay Sekulow is likely to be sitting at the counsel table. His Washington-based American Center for Law & Justice has argued and won several high-profile religious-freedom cases, including Supreme Court decisions that allowed Bible-study clubs on public-school campuses and that protected the right of antiabortion demonstrators to rally outside abortion clinics.

Sekulow, 48, who was raised Jewish but converted to Christianity in college and now considers himself a "Messianic Jew," formed the law center with a group of other conservative litigators in 1990. Today the 700,000-member center has become, with a budget of $30 million, a powerful counterweight to the liberal American Civil Liberties Union.

The group's latest battles are supporting the congressional ban on partial-birth abortions and pushing, in an unusually bold and public way, for President Bush's judicial appointments. "The President has shown the kind of nominees he likes for the courts," explains Sekulow, "and I'm very comfortable with that."