Attorney Sheria Clarke is a native of Lynchburg, Va. and earned her bachelor’s degree from Liberty University.
COLUMBIA — A Greenville attorney is one step closer to filling a federal judge vacancy — and becoming the sixth racial minority in a half century seated on the U.S. District bench in South Carolina.
The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee voted 15-7 Thursday to advance President Donald Trump’s nomination of Sheria Clarke to the full Senate.
“With extraordinary credentials, an impeccable character and a deep commitment to the rule of law, Ms. Clarke is exactly the kind of person who should be a federal judge,” U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, a committee member, said in a statement after the vote.
She also has the support of fellow South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, who met with Clarke last October and asked if she was interested, according to her written responses to the committee’s questionnaire about her selection. She then met with Graham’s staff and White House attorneys before Trump called her Feb. 9 to say he’d chosen her, she wrote.
The Senate floor vote has not yet been scheduled, but Clarke is expected to get confirmed.
Clarke, however, encountered some bumps during her March 25 confirmation hearing. Two Democratic senators criticized her for not giving straight answers to the question of who won the 2020 and 2024 presidential elections.
Echoing the response of Trump’s other judicial nominees at the hearing, Clarke attempted instead to explain the process, saying the Electoral College certifies the winner. Sens. Richard Blumenthal, of Connecticut, and Sheldon Whitehouse, of Rhode Island, described the nominees’ answers as canned and fed by their White House handlers.
“They’re Orwellian in their denial of reality, and they are a subversion of this process,” Blumenthal said last month about the responses. “They also fundamentally show a complete lack of independence and backbone and impartiality, which are the fundamental requirements of a United States District Court judge.”
Whitehouse added that judicial independence is important, because judges might see the administration that nominated them “bearing down” on them in difficult court cases.
But on Thursday, he voted “yes” to advancing Clarke’s nomination. Blumenthal was among the “no” votes.
The bipartisan vote shows her confirmation is likely a given, said Lee Holmes, a Washington attorney who was the top staff lawyer on the Senate Judiciary Committee when Graham was chairman.
“She will sail through Senate confirmation,” Holmes told the SC Daily Gazette. “The full Senate will vote on her nomination, where Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott will make sure she’s confirmed.”
Trump nominated Clarke to replace Judge Bryan Harwell, who went into semi-retirement (called “senior status”) in June 2024, 20 years after senators confirmed his nomination by President George W. Bush. That created a vacancy among active federal judges in the state.
Experience in Congress and the classroom
Clarke, a native of Lynchburg, Virginia, earned her bachelor’s degree from Liberty University, a private Christian college in Lynchburg, and her law degree from the University of North Carolina.
The 44-year-old became partner this year at Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough, one of South Carolina’s biggest law firms. She was a prosecutor with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Greenville from 2021 to 2024, when she rejoined Nelson Mullin’s Greenville office.
Prior to January 2019, when she first joined the law firm, she worked for 10 years on several committees at the U.S. House of Representatives, according to information she submitted to the committee.
Her roles included staff director with the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and legal counsel for the committee investigating the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans. Both were chaired by U.S. Rep. Trey Gowdy of Spartanburg, who didn’t seek re-election in 2018.
This high-level congressional experience is relatively rare among judicial nominees, Holmes said, and “will give her an edge in handling the wide array of issues that come before federal district judges.”
She worked with Gowdy again at Wofford College from 2020 to 2023, when they co-taught classes titled “Criminal Justice and Due Process” and “Congress and Political Parties.”
“They taught together and kind of would go back and forth, each of them with a different area of expertise,” said David Alvis, chair of Wofford’s government and international affairs department.
Clarke’s colleagues at the private college in Spartanburg had no idea she was interested in becoming a judge, Alvis said, but he thinks her temperament and work ethic are ideal for the role.
“In class, she was really well known for being very, very balanced,” he told the SC Daily Gazette. “She was very detail oriented in class and was really good at organizing the class.”
She also has TV and radio experience.
Her list of media appearances submitted to the Judiciary Committee includes getting interviewed by Gowdy on his weekly Fox News show “Sunday Night in America” and on his Fox News podcast for episodes in June 2020 titled “A Walk Towards Unity” and “Difficult Yet Simple Steps to Heal the Racial Divide.”
The Constitution makes a federal judgeship a lifetime appointment. U.S. District Court judges are paid about $250,000, federal court data shows.
More diversity on the SC bench
If Clarke is confirmed, she will become only the sixth Black judge to sit on the U.S. District Court bench in South Carolina, according to Federal Judicial Center data.
The first was Matthew J. Perry, confirmed in 1979, the namesake of the federal courthouse in Columbia.
It’s highly unlikely that the racial makeup of South Carolina’s bench played any role in Trump’s decision. In a reversal of the last two Democratic presidents, Trump has sought an end to race-based initiatives nationwide.
Still, Clarke would add a third minority to the bench’s 10 active judges, joining Joseph Dawson III, who was also nominated by Trump, and Jacquelyn Austin, who was nominated by President Joe Biden and confirmed in 2024. Roughly a third of South Carolina’s 5.5 million residents are minorities.
South Carolina previously had three Black judges on the bench between 2020, when Dawson was confirmed, and 2022. That year, Margaret Seymour (nominated by President Bill Clinton in 1998) retired and Michelle Childs (nominated by President Barack Obama in 2010) got a promotion.
Childs was a finalist for the U.S. Supreme Court at the urging of U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn. After Biden instead made Ketanji Brown Jackson the first Black female on the nation’s highest court, he nominated Childs to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
While campaigning in South Carolina ahead of the 2024 presidential primary, Biden touted appointing a record number of Black females to the bench. He specifically named Childs as a judge “who’s making South Carolina proud.”
This story was originally produced by SC Daily Gazette, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Virginia Mercury, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
