Nick Reaves

Nick Reaves joined Becket as Counsel in 2018. His practice focuses on First Amendment and appellate litigation. While at Becket, Nick has worked on precedent-setting religious liberty cases nationwide. Nick provided crucial support to a Buddhist prisoner who was denied his First Amendment rights in the execution chamber, was counsel of record on an amicus brief supporting the right of a Muslim prisoner to observe Ramadan, and represented a Seventh-day Adventist fired by Walmart for requesting a Sabbath accommodation. Nick’s academic writings have been published by the Yale Law Journal Forum, the Notre Dame Law Review, and the Virginia Journal of Social Policy & the Law, among others.

Before joining Becket, Nick was a litigation associate at Jones Day in Washington, D.C. His practice included both appellate and trial court litigation. While at the firm, Nick argued cases in both the federal appellate and district courts, helped counsel clients in numerous bet-the-company matters, took a religious asylum case to trial, and oversaw a sensitive internal investigation which could have exposed a Fortune 100 company to billions of dollars in liability. Nick also clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

Nick graduated from the University of Virginia School of Law in 2015. He served on the Managing Board of the Virginia Law Review and was elected to the Order of the Coif (graduating in the top 10% of the class). While in law school, Nick published a note on crisis chaplaincy programs which won first prize in a nationwide writing competition. He also participated in the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic at the University of Virginia and studied legal ethics in Germany and Poland as part of the Fellowship at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics. Nick graduated magna cum laude with a double major in Economics and Political Science in the Glynn Family Honors Program at the University of Notre Dame.