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Kelly jumped out of Army airplanes as a paratrooper and defended soldiers accused of capital crimes as a JAG captain. Then she came home and made drug companies pay back millions they'd stolen from Texas Medicaid. In 2018 she unseated a sitting Republican appeals judge — the first Democrat to win that court in a decade.
She's a justice on the 3rd Court of Appeals in Austin, has taught at UT Law for more than ten years, and has led the Austin Bar Association. Her opponent, James Sullivan, was Abbott's own general counsel until Abbott put him on the Supreme Court in 2025; he has never faced voters for it. When the State Bar polled Texas lawyers on this race, Kelly beat him by six hundred votes. She lives in Austin with her husband and their toddler daughter.
