Gov. Spencer Cox selected Jay Jorgensen and Stephen Dent to fill two new vacancies on the Utah Supreme Court. The men will face Senate confirmation amid an unprecedented overhaul of the state’s high court by the Legislature.
“I feel just incredibly blessed that we had such amazing, qualified people who care deeply and were interested in this position — and that the two of them rose to the top,” Cox said of the nominees at a news conference announcing his selections Tuesday morning.
Jorgensen is currently senior counsel for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, where he has worked since 2025, when he returned from three years as a mission president in Chile. Before that, he was executive vice president, global chief ethics and compliance officer for Wal-Mart, Inc. from 2000 to 2019, which he left to become chief compliance officer for Coupang, a South Korean e-commerce company.
In 2002, Jorgensen ran for the Republican nomination for Congress. He was a partner at Sidley Austin, LLP, clerked for former Chief Justice William Rehnquist and for Samuel Alito while the now-justice sat on the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals. He received his law degree from Brigham Young University.
Dent is an assistant U.S. attorney who has prosecuted drug, immigration and murder cases, and is a graduate of the University of Utah. He worked at the Washington, D.C., firm of Gibson Dunn before joining the Department of Justice as a federal prosecutor. Dent clerked for U.S. District Judge Robert Shelby in Utah and Judge Scott Matheson on the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Both nominees described their judicial philosophy as “originalists” and “textualists.” Jorgensen said he has modeled his approach on that of Rehnquist and Alito — two justices nominated by Republican presidents.
Read the full article by Robert Gehrke at sltrib.com.
This article is published through the Utah News Collaborative, a partnership of news organizations in Utah that aims to inform readers across the state.