Nick Reaves

Nick Reaves is Senior Counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and a Visiting Clinical Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School, where he teaches in the Free Exercise Clinic. His practice focuses on religious freedom litigation in appellate courts. At the U.S. Supreme Court, Nick served as second chair in Catholic Charities Bureau v. Wisconsin and as a member of the legal team in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, both unanimous wins. Earlier, in private practice, he was part of the team representing the American Legion in American Legion v. American Humanist Association.

Nick has filed more than a dozen amicus briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court, serving as counsel of record on briefs cited by a unanimous Court in Groff v. DeJoy and quoted at oral argument in Williams v. Washington. He has argued religious liberty cases in federal district and appellate courts across the country.

His scholarship has appeared in the Yale Law Journal Forum, the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy Per Curiam, the Virginia Journal of Social Policy & the Law, and the Notre Dame Law Review Reflection, among others. Justice Thomas cited an article he co-authored on offended-observer standing, Fruit of the Poisonous Lemon Tree, in a dissent from the denial of certiorari in City of Ocala v. Rojas (2023).

Nick has testified before the President’s Religious Liberty Commission, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and has spoken on religious freedom at institutions including the University of Notre Dame, the University of Virginia, and Princeton Theological Seminary.

Before joining Becket, Nick practiced trial and appellate litigation at Jones Day and clerked for Chief Judge D. Brooks Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

He earned his J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law, where he served on the Managing Board of the Virginia Law Review, was a member of the Supreme Court Clinic, and was elected to the Order of the Coif. He graduated magna cum laude from the University of Notre Dame as a member of the Glynn Family Honors Program.

Nick is admitted to practice in the District of Columbia and Maryland. He is also admitted before the U.S. Supreme Court and numerous federal courts of appeals and district courts.