ABOUTBiographies
Rory Gray
Rory Gray, Esq., serves as senior counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom, where he plays a strategic role on the Center for Conscience Initiatives.
Since joining ADF in 2011, Gray has worked diligently on key cases to preserve religious freedom in America. He helped draft the brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court in Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. v. Sebelius, which ensured that Christian for-profit businesses could not be forced, under threat of heavy penalties, to provide abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization, and contraception through their health plans. In the related Southern Nazarene University case, he also wrote a successful cert. petition that resulted in the high court protecting Christian universities and other religious employers from having to authorize the inclusion of life-terminating drugs and devices in their employees' health plans. In the Supreme Court case of Reed v. Town of Gilbert, he helped with the brief that resulted in a unanimous decision in favor of free speech and religious expression. Additionally, Gray wrote an amicus brief in Newdow v. Congress of the United States, in which the Second Circuit upheld the use of the national motto, "In God We Trust," on U.S. currency.
Gray earned his J.D. from Washington and Lee University School of Law, graduating magna cum laude in 2007. Before graduating, he completed the ADF leadership development program to become a Blackstone Fellow in 2005. After law school, Gray clerked for the Hon. Bobby R. Baldock on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit from 2007-2009 and for the Hon. G. Steven Agee on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit from 2009-2011.
A member of the state bars of Georgia, Arizona, and Virginia, Gray is also admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court and various federal district and appellate courts.