As the Supreme Court considers Tuesday whether it should overturn part of a federal gun law, it will hear opposing arguments from the Biden administration’s top lawyer and a lesser-known federal public defender representing the criminal defendant at the center of the case.  

James Matthew Wright, an attorney with the Federal Public Defender’s Office in Amarillo, Texas, will urge the justices to declare unconstitutional the federal gun law in what will be his most consequential Supreme Court case to date. 

Wright previously participated in just two cases before the high court, he said in an interview last year with the Texas Appellate Law Podcast. Though he didn’t present oral arguments in those cases – both of which dealt with criminal law – the Supreme Court ruled against his team in the first one and in favor of his team in the second. 

“Even though I wasn’t the one who was going to stand up and argue, I was filled with an odd mix of pride, anxiety, fear, excitement, and hope,” Wright wrote in a 2011 blog post after oral arguments in the first case, noting he was admitted to the Supreme Court bar the day the case was heard. 

Wright represented Zackey Rahimi, the man at the center of Tuesday’s case, before both the appeals court – in which he won – and the Texas trial court in which Rahimi was convicted. 

He’s set to tell the conservative-majority court Tuesday that the gun law at issue should be struck down in light of a 2022 landmark Second Amendment case that changed the test courts must use when examining the nation’s gun laws. 

“Section 922(g)(8)’s automatic and categorical ban criminalizes and severely punishes constitutionally protected conduct. It is a historical outlier,” he told the justices in court papers. 

A graduate of the University of Arkansas School of Law, Wright clerked for a federal judge in Houston after school and briefly worked in private practice before becoming a public defender in Amarillo.