Carrie Severino

Carrie Campbell Severino (née Campbell) is an American lawyer and conservative political activist. She is the head of the Judicial Crisis Network (JCN), where she has played a leading role in the campaigns to support the Supreme Court nominations of Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh. She is the co-author (with Mollie Hemingway) of Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court.

Severino, born Carrie Campbell, grew up in Michigan. Her father is an oncologist, and her mother is a nurse. Severino attended Duke University, graduating in 1999 with a B.A. in biology. In 2001 she received a master's degree in Linguistics from Michigan State University. While attending Harvard Law School, she met her future husband, Roger Severino, two years ahead of her there. Both were active with the law school's Society for Law, Life and Religion, a conservative anti-abortion group.

In 2004, after receiving her JD from Harvard Law School, Severino worked as a law clerk for Judge David B. Sentelle of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

She was a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for a year (2007–2008). She later spent time at Georgetown University Law Center with an Olin/Searle Fellowship, an award funded by the Federalist Society that "offers top young lawyers with a scholarly bent the opportunity to spend 1-2 years to write and develop their scholarship with the goal of entering the legal academy."

Severino is the coauthor (with Mollie Hemingway) of Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court (2019). According to The Washingtonian, the book "hit the bestseller list" in the summer of 2019. The book attracted both positive and negative comments.

James R. Copeland in the Washington Post called the book "a must-read for those who follow the politics of the federal judiciary," saying that "Hemingway and Severino frame the Kavanaugh story in the broader judicial confirmation context" beginning with 1987's fight over Robert Bork and covering what he calls "the campaign against Severino’s mentor [Justice Clarence] Thomas four years later."

John Kass in the Chicago Tribune called it a "highly readable bestseller" that "starts out like a thriller — with the fate of the republic in the balance." Lara Bazelon in Politico criticized the book as "so one-sided that it read more like a legal brief written by two very competent and fiercely committed advocates" but added that "Hemingway and Severino do make important points" concerning the presumption of innocence.