William H. Pryor Jr. serves as Chief Circuit Judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. In 2013–18, he served on the U.S. Sentencing Commission and, in 2017–18, as Acting Chair. He served as Attorney General of Alabama from 1997 to 2004.
Chief Judge Pryor graduated magna cum laude from Tulane Law School where he finished first in the common-law curriculum and served as editor in chief of the Tulane Law Review. Afterward, he served as a law clerk for Judge John Minor Wisdom of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
Chief Judge Pryor is a member of The American Law Institute and an Adviser for the Restatement of the Law Third, Conflict of Laws. He is a coauthor with Bryan Garner, Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, and several other judges of a treatise, The Law of Judicial Precedent. He has published in many law reviews, including the Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Notre Dame Law Review, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, and Yale Law & Policy Review. He has published op-eds in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and National Review.
Chief Judge Pryor teaches a course on the interpretation of legal texts.