Judge Julianna Michelle Childs was born on March 24, 1966, in Detroit, Michigan. She is a U.S. District Court judge in South Carolina. Her mother, Shandra Childs-Thomas, worked as a personnel manager for Michigan Bell, and her father, Ralph Childs, was a former U.S. Junior Table Tennis Champion.
Childs graduated from Detroit’s Columbia High School in 1984. She was the class president and valedictorian in high school. At the University of South Florida, where she also pledged the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., she earned a Bachelor of Arts in management in 1988. She participated in and won the Miss Black Florida pageant during her sophomore year in 1986. Childs filed a lawsuit and prevailed in it after the pageant director failed to deliver the promised awards.
Childs enrolled at the University of South Carolina School of Law after finishing his undergraduate work. In 1991, she graduated from the School of Business with a Juris Doctor and a Master of Arts in people and employment relations. She then began working at Nexsen Pruet in Charleston, South Carolina, where she was made a partner in 2000, making history as the first African American woman to hold that position at a prestigious South Carolina legal firm. Childs wed Floyd Angus, a doctor with a practice in Sumter, South Carolina, in August 2000. Julianna is their daughter, and they are her parents.
Childs served as the deputy director of the division of labor with the Department of Labor, Licensing, and Regulation for the state of South Carolina from 2000 until 2006. Later on, she worked as a commissioner for the Workers’ Compensation Commission and for a short time, an acting justice for the South Carolina Supreme Court.
Childs was nominated by President Barack Obama for a position on the federal trial court in 2010, and the U.S. Senate confirmed her. Senate. Four years later, in 2014, she served as the judge in the case of Bradacs v. Haley, in which the plaintiffs Katherine Bradacs and Tracie Goodwin sued the governor Nimrata (Nikki) Randhawa Haley to overturn a state statute and constitutional amendment that denied same-sex unions equal protection and legal recognition. The two ladies who had gotten married in Washington, D.C., won Childs’ decision.
In Durham, North Carolina’s Duke University School of Law, Childs resumed formal judicial studies in 2014. She earned a master’s degree in law there in 2016. J. Michelle Childs was one of the three candidates President Joseph Biden considered for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022. After Associate Justice Stephen Breyer’s retirement was announced, Biden eventually proposed Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson from the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia to fill the vacancy.