Katie Jay is a founding partner of Jay & Campbell, PLLC, and the firm’s lead appellate attorney. Her practice centers on the constitutional and administrative questions that surface when families collide with the government — questions about due process, separation of powers, judicial independence, and the limits of agency authority. She litigates these questions in Florida’s District Courts of Appeal, the Florida Supreme Court, the Division of Administrative Hearings, and, when the issues warrant, the federal courts and the United States Supreme Court.

Katie’s appellate work is built on a particular method. She treats every contested question as one that has a right answer recoverable from text, history, and tradition — and she does the research to find it. Her briefs draw on early chancery practice, founding-era statutes, the Florida Constitution’s structural provisions, and the canons of statutory construction with the same seriousness she brings to the modern case law. Opposing counsel and trial courts are sometimes surprised to find a Chapter 39 dependency brief that begins with English chancery treatises. The point of that work is not ornament. It is to give appellate courts the tools to reach principled results in an area of law where shortcuts have hardened into precedent.

Katie second-chairs the firm’s trials so that the constitutional and statutory issues are framed, objected to, and preserved at the trial level — where appellate cases are won or lost. Her courtroom demeanor is measured but direct. She is willing to say plainly what other lawyers hedge, and she has a low tolerance for the procedural gamesmanship that too often substitutes for argument in child welfare litigation.

Background. Before founding Jay & Campbell, Katie served as executive director and general counsel for a multi-state adoption agency, and as a senior prosecutor for the Department of Children and Families in Miami. Earlier in her career, she practiced complex business and insolvency litigation.

Recognition and service. Katie is a Fellow of the Academy of Adoption & Assisted Reproduction Attorneys (AAAA), where she has served as a Trustee on the national board and co-chaired the national Foster Committee. In 2025, Governor Ron DeSantis appointed her to the Judicial Nominating Commission for Florida’s Nineteenth Judicial Circuit. She has represented adoption organizations as amicus curiae in state and federal courts, including the United States Supreme Court, and has trained attorneys and caseworkers for the Department of Children and Families and the National Council for Adoption.

Writing. Katie is published in the Wall Street Journal (“op-ed on stalled Congolese adoptions”), NCFA Adoption Advocate (“When Adoption Agencies Close”), MCBA Sidebar (“November is National Adoption Month”), and The Federalist (“Harvard Attack on Homeschooling Has Nothing to do With Children’s Best Interests”). See also a client profile in the Sun Sentinel (“op-ed on protecting families”). 

Personal. Katie is an adoptive mother and former foster parent. That experience is part of what brought her to this work and part of what sustains it.

Education. J.D., Indiana University Maurer School of Law. B.A. in Government, University of Texas.

Bar Admissions. Supreme Court of the United States; U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit; all Florida state courts; U.S. District Court for the Southern, Middle, and Northern Districts of Florida; U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Florida.

Notable result. Jay & Campbell secured Jamaica’s first return of a child under the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction.

For a list of the firm’s reported appellate decisions, click here.