John J. Nielsen was confirmed by the Utah Senate on Wednesday. He is Gov. Spencer Cox’s third appointment to the court.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) John Nielsen answers a question about em dashes during a hearing for his nomination to the Utah Supreme Court at the Utah Capitol in Salt Lake City on Thursday, Oct. 30, 2025.
Judge John J. Nielsen will be the next justice of the Utah Supreme Court, joining the bench as a self-described constitutional “originalist” at a time of intense friction between the judiciary and the state’s overwhelmingly Republican leadership.
Senators confirmed his nomination on a 19-6 party-line vote Wednesday, with Republicans praising him as a capable, intelligent jurist, while Democrats who opposed the nomination did so because of highly politicized causes that Nielsen had represented before he was confirmed as a 3rd District judge last year.
In brief remarks after the vote, Nielsen thanked the senators and Cox for their support, and that he loves the state and the court and “will do my utmost to ensure a legacy of trust.”
“I find him to be incredibly intelligent, but his background does not inspire much confidence with litigants or the public that we are selecting someone who will be fair, neutral and unbiased,” said Democratic Sen. Stephanie Pitcher, D-Salt Lake City. “Instead, this appointment feels like we are injecting politics into the appointment process, and that is not our role.”
Sen. Brady Brammer, R-Pleasant Grove, who attended law school at Brigham Young University with Nielsen, said the criticism against Nielsen was not about his qualifications or ability to be impartial but partisanship.
“If you represent the wrong person in a partisan issue, you are no longer qualified to serve on our court? That is the standard we’re going with?” Brammer asked.
The senator said Nielsen is patient and balanced in his tone, willing to listen and weigh both sides of an argument. “That is exactly what our state needs right now,” Brammer said, “to cool the waters between the Legislature and the courts.”
Nielsen will take the place of Associate Chief Justice John Pearce, whose retirement takes effect Dec. 1. Pearce has not heard arguments in a case since he announced his retirement in May.
Nielsen’s confirmation to the bench comes at a time of considerable tension between Republican legislators and the Supreme Court, which has stymied the GOP’s efforts to ban abortion, repeal an anti-gerrymandering ballot initiative and an attempt to amend the Utah Constitution to overturn the court’s initiative ruling.
Republican legislators recently took away Supreme Court justices’ power to choose their own chief justice, giving that authority to Cox. And at the news conference announcing Nielsen’s nomination, Cox said it is “worth exploring” whether it makes sense to add justices to the current five-member court.
Cox has now appointed three of the five justices. If the court is expanded to seven, that number will rise to five.
When asked by Republican senators during his confirmation hearing whether abortion was a right guaranteed in Utah’s Constitution, Nielsen declined to answer, saying it would be inappropriate to comment on issues that he might be called to rule on if confirmed.
Nielsen started his career as a prosecutor in Utah County and spent years handling appeals at the Utah attorney general’s office before becoming partners with former Utah Supreme Court Justice Thomas Lee, the brother of U.S. Sen. Mike Lee.
Lee and Nielsen were hired by the state to defend a law banning transgender high school girls from competing in girls’ high school sports. The suit was dismissed in October because the plaintiffs who challenged the law would graduate from high school before the case was decided.
They filed an amicus — or “friend-of-the-court” — brief on behalf of Pro-Life Utah when a law that sought to ban most abortions in the state was challenged. The brief laid out an “originalist” argument, which Nielsen told senators last month is key to his judicial philosophy, drawing on newspaper articles written between the 1850s and 1940s to make the case that, during the period the Utah Constitution was ratified, Utahns did not envision it including a right to abortion.
Lee and Nielsen also filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham should not have to testify before a grand jury in Georgia over his involvement in efforts by the Trump campaign to influence the outcome of the 2020 election in that state.
After Lee and Nielsen disbanded their firm, Nielsen joined another politically conservative firm where he wrote a brief arguing that the state Supreme Court was wrong when it voided an attempt by the Republican Legislature to amend the Utah Constitution and ensure legislators the ability to repeal any citizen-passed ballot initiative.
The justices in that case ruled unanimously that the question lawmakers put on the ballot was deceptive and would have misled voters, and also that the Legislature failed to publish the text of the amendment as required by the constitution.
Note to readers • This story has been updated to correct a typo.