Moynahan’s public service anchors appeals court bid

Judge Will Moynahan’s entire career has been in pub­lic ser­vice — first for his coun­try, and, for the past year and a half, for the commonwealth. 

After 12 years as a fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tor and 24 as a naval avi­a­tor and flight instruc­tor, Moynahan was appoint­ed to the Kentucky Court of Appeals ear­ly last year by the gov­er­nor to fill a vacan­cy cre­at­ed by the elec­tion of Judge Pamela Goodwine to the Kentucky Supreme Court. 

Now, after 18 months on the bench, Moynahan is seek­ing a full, eight-year term. 

His oppo­nent is Fayette Circuit Judge Lucy VanMeter, the wife of for­mer Chief Justice Larry VanMeter. 

VanMeter is tout­ing her 25 years of expe­ri­ence in the state courts and ques­tion­ing whether Moynahan is famil­iar enough with state law and Kentucky’s judi­cial sys­tem. But the incum­bent says he’ll let the vot­ers be the judge of that. 

“I’ve been doing it for a year and a half. There was some ramp-up time, but I’m cer­tain­ly up to speed now. I enjoy work­ing with my col­leagues, and I think I’m doing the job well,” he said. 

Although he may not have as many years of state court expe­ri­ence as VanMeter, he argues that he does have appel­late court expe­ri­ence. He was a clerk for Judge Eugene Siler Jr., “the most renowned fed­er­al appel­late judge in Kentucky.” 

While in law school, Moynahan worked for a fed­er­al court of appeals in the armed forces. And he’s been a state Court of Appeals judge since April 2025. 

“If you add it all up, I have close to five years of appel­late expe­ri­ence,” he said. 

“I was nev­er a tri­al judge, but I think it’s fair to say that I don’t believe being a tri­al judge is any kind of pre­req­ui­site for being an appel­late judge. They’re two dif­fer­ent things,” he said. 

He men­tioned that not all of the cur­rent judges on the Kentucky Court of Appeals have been tri­al court judges. 

Moynahan is the grand­son of the late Judge Bernard Moynahan, who was the last fed­er­al dis­trict judge appoint­ed by President John F. Kennedy, in 1963. He, too, served in the mil­i­tary, as a B‑17 bomber nav­i­ga­tor in World War II, and was a fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tor before he became chief judge of the U.S. District Court for Eastern Kentucky. 

Will Moynahan’s par­ents and grand­par­ents were from Jessamine County, but he grew up in London, where his father was a pedi­a­tri­cian. After grad­u­at­ing from South Laurel County High School as vale­dic­to­ri­an, he earned a degree with hon­ors in eco­nom­ics from Harvard University, then joined the Navy through offi­cer can­di­date school. 

He com­plet­ed flight train­ing just as the Sept. 11, 2001 ter­ror­ist attack occurred, earned his wings in January 2002 and was assigned to fly the F‑18 Hornet. 

He served with a strike-fight­er squadron in California, com­plet­ing two six-month deploy­ments on air­craft car­ri­ers, and flew 40 com­bat mis­sions in sup­port of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He also served as a flight instruc­tor before tran­si­tion­ing to the Navy Reserve in 2009. 

Under the G.I. Bill, Moynahan attend­ed night class­es at George Washington University Law School and worked dur­ing the day as a law clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces. After grad­u­at­ing with high hon­ors in 2013, he returned to Kentucky to clerk for Siler on the U.S. 6^th Circuit Court of Appeals and con­tin­ued his ser­vice in the Navy Reserve. 

In 2014, Moynahan was hired by the U.S. Department of Justice and assigned to the Antitrust Division in Washington. Two years lat­er, he was recalled to active duty in Djibouti. After 12 months, he returned to the DOJ and became an assis­tant U.S. attor­ney for the Eastern District of Kentucky, pros­e­cut­ing fraud, finan­cial crime, and pub­lic cor­rup­tion. He also con­tin­ued his ser­vice in the Navy Reserve, was pro­mot­ed to cap­tain, held mul­ti­ple com­mands, and earned sev­er­al dec­o­ra­tions. In 2024, he grad­u­at­ed from the U.S. Army War College, earn­ing a master’s degree in strate­gic studies. 

In an op-ed for the Courier Journal, Winchester writer Bill McCann asked how mil­i­tary ser­vice is rel­e­vant to Moynahan’s can­di­da­cy to be an appel­late judge. 

“What being in the mil­i­tary does is give you a per­spec­tive that’s a lot dif­fer­ent than you would have if you went straight from col­lege to law school, and straight to a job” where you most­ly deal with attor­neys, he said. 

He had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to lead 18- and 19-year-olds from all over the coun­try who enlist­ed right out of high school, he said. 

“If you’ve led peo­ple, it shows char­ac­ter,” he remarked. 

Moynahan said that when the Court of Appeals judge­ship opened up, he went and talked with Goodwine about the job and got a bet­ter under­stand­ing of it from her experience. 

“Also, I was con­cerned about the direc­tion the Justice Department was going, and I thought it might be a good time to leave that, to be quite frank about it,” he said. 

Moynahan didn’t spec­i­fy what he meant about the direc­tion of the depart­ment, but there have been accu­sa­tions that, under President Donald Trump, the DOJ has been used to car­ry out polit­i­cal vendet­tas, and that career lawyers have been replaced by loyalists. 

There has been some con­cern that the Court of Appeals race has become a par­ti­san bat­tle­ground. According to Louisville Public Media, a non­par­ti­san watch­dog group raised the issue of Beshear attend­ing a fundrais­er for Moynahan and the governor’s polit­i­cal action com­mit­tee con­tribut­ing to the judge’s cam­paign. At the same time, how­ev­er, Republican state leg­is­la­tors and their lead­ers, includ­ing Senate President Robert Stivers and House Speaker David Osborne, have giv­en mon­ey to VanMeter’s campaign. 

Although he had met Gov. Andy Beshear a time or two, Moynahan said, he didn’t know the gov­er­nor before he was appointed. 

A judi­cial nom­i­nat­ing com­mis­sion sub­mit­ted his name to Beshear along with that of VanMeter and a third can­di­date, and the gov­er­nor chose Moynahan. 

One thing he and VanMeter have in com­mon is that they say pol­i­tics should play no role in how judges do their jobs. 

“That’s one of the rea­sons we have non­par­ti­san judges,” Moynahan said. 

The par­ty affil­i­a­tion of judi­cial can­di­dates is not list­ed on ballots. 

Moynahan said Kentucky has a good sys­tem for elect­ing judges and for fill­ing vacan­cies through appoint­ment. But only about 15–20 per­cent of those who go to the polls vote in judi­cial elec­tions because they say they don’t know enough about the candidates. 

“I would encour­age vot­ers to edu­cate them­selves, to get involved, to ask” friends who work in the legal sys­tem, he said. 

Asked to describe his judi­cial phi­los­o­phy, Moynahan ref­er­enced two judges who have influ­enced his think­ing. One is U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who, he said, takes a prag­mat­ic view of legal interpretation. 

“What was the intent of the peo­ple who passed that law? What were they think­ing? What prob­lem were they try­ing to solve?” 

That is a view to which he gen­er­al­ly sub­scribes, Moynahan said. 

The oth­er influ­ence is his for­mer men­tor, Siler. 

“His phi­los­o­phy about gen­er­al appel­late writ­ing is to try to decide a case based on the most nar­row grounds,” he said. “We as judges are not philoso­pher kings. We are not leg­is­la­tors. We’re not try­ing to make law. We are try­ing to decide mat­ters, but some­times you can decide a case on a fair­ly nar­row ground with­out hav­ing to get into anoth­er area of law . . .” 

Asked why he believes he is the bet­ter can­di­date, Moynahan respond­ed: “I sort of rely on my record of pub­lic ser­vice for peo­ple to look at. Why did I make the choic­es? . . . You real­ly have to believe that the per­son is doing the job for the right rea­sons. And I have a career of kind of show­ing that.” 

Moynahan and his wife, Elizabeth, live in Lexington, where she is a phar­ma­cist for a hos­pi­tal. They have two daugh­ters, ages 13 and 10, who attend pub­lic school. He has been a vol­un­teer at Rosa Parks Elementary School, served as a par­ent-teacher asso­ci­a­tion trea­sur­er, and on the site-based deci­sion-mak­ing coun­cil. The Moynahans are mem­bers of First United Methodist Church of Lexington.