Vincent Wagner
Senior Counsel
Vincent Wagner serves as senior counsel with the Center for Parental Rights at Alliance Defending Freedom where he safeguards parents’ rights to direct the upbringing, education, and care of their children.
In Figliola v. School Board of the City of Harrisonburg, for example, he represented a group of educators and parents who challenged a Virginia school district’s policy that required staff to treat students as the opposite sex—at times, without notifying parents or seeking their consent. The school district ultimately settled that case on terms favorable to ADF’s clients. Wagner also represents multiple parents who have sued school districts that treated their daughters as boys behind their backs or even against their clear instructions.
Before joining ADF in 2022, Wagner served the state of Arkansas as deputy solicitor general. There he represented Arkansas at all levels of the state and federal judiciary, including leading thirty states in an unclaimed-property dispute before the U.S. Supreme Court, and defending Arkansas’s pro-life laws before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. Prior to his government service, Wagner was an associate with Baker Botts L.L.P.
Wagner earned his B.A., summa cum laude, from Harding University and his J.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a Chancellor, a distinction given to the students with the sixteen highest GPAs in each graduating class. He is a 2012 Blackstone Fellow. Immediately after law school, he clerked for then-Chief Judge Ed Carnes of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. Wagner is admitted to the state bars of Arkansas, Texas, and Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court, and various lower federal courts.