FILE - Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., takes the oath to be the new House speaker from the Dean of the House Rep. Hal Rogers, R-Ky., at the Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, Oct. 25, 2023. The establishment of the Judge Paul Pressler School of Law was supposed to be a capstone achievement for Louisiana College, which administrators boasted would “unashamedly embrace” a “biblical worldview.
“The law school deal was really an anomaly. It was a great idea,” said Gene Mills, a longtime friend of Johnson's. “But due to issues that were out of Mike's hands that came unraveled.” The school’s president and other faculty resigned, and the college was placed on probation by an accreditation agency.
A law firm brought in to conduct an investigation later concluded in a 2013 report that Aguillard had inappropriately diverted funds to a school he hoped to build in Africa, as well as for personal expenses.Meanwhile, the historic former federal courthouse in Shreveport that was selected as the law school’s campus required at least $20 million in renovations.
Little said the school was named after Pressler because he had a close relationship with the institution's leaders. Johnson didn’t stray entirely from the school. He represented the college for six more years in a case challenging a mandate in then-PresidentThe 51-year-old Johnson was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, the eldest of four children in what he has described as a “traditional Christian household.” Tragedy struck when Johnson was 12.
Johnson has said he was the first in his family to graduate college, enrolling at Louisiana State University, where he earned a law degree in 1998. He also worked on the 1996 Senate campaign of Louis “Woody” Jenkins, where he had an early brush with a contested election. Even though Jenkins lost, Johnson drew notice from conservative activists who worked on the campaign.
The group is no longer an upstart. Now known as the Alliance Defending Freedom, or ADF, the organization raised over $100 million in 2022 and conceived the legal strategy that led to the Supreme Court last year overturning the constitutional right to an abortion, among other conservative wins it helped secure from the high court.
He also wrote a semi-regular guest column in the Shreveport Times, where his defenses of “religious liberty” included stridently anti-gay rhetoric, including a prediction that same-sex marriage would be a “dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic.”