It’s a cliche that people hate lawyers. But Patrick Wright, who gets paid to sue the government for a living, hopes you’ll make an exception for lawyers at the Mackinac Center Legal Foundation.

“For years, the Mackinac Center operated more as a traditional think tank, but eventually we realized that even if you get the right public policy, someone has to defend it in court,” said Wright.

He has been at the Mackinac Center since 2005, first as a senior attorney, and then, starting in 2009, as the founding director of the Mackinac Center Legal Foundation.

Wright was raised as a military kid, with his aviator father doing search and rescue work for the U.S. Coast Guard. The family moved a lot: Corpus Christi, Texas. Port Angeles, Washington. New Orleans, Louisiana. Kodiak, Alaska. And elsewhere.

“We lived in seven places before I got to high school and settled in Traverse City,” Wright said.

He went to the University of Michigan and then to George Washington University, where he graduated from the law school with honors. After a clerkship with a federal judge in Anchorage, Alaska, he came back to Michigan. He first worked for the Michigan Senate before moving to the attorney general’s office and then the Michigan Supreme Court commissioner’s office.

This gave him an eclectic mix of policy and legal experience in multiple branches of government, making him perfect for the Mackinac Center. The Center had dabbled in legal work for years and recognized a need for a lawyer.

“After a while, we decided to start being the ones in charge of bringing some cases,” said Wright. “And as we were looking to start the Mackinac Center Legal Foundation in 2009, Sherry Loar walked in the door.”

Loar was a Michigan day care owner with an amazing story. In a scheme set up by the Granholm administration, money was being withheld from her paycheck and given over to the United Auto Workers. She had been forced into a union against her will, along with tens of thousands of others, through a dues-skimming operation.

The Center filed suit on behalf of several small day care owners, resulting in court cases and ultimately, legislation to stop the skim. It was the first of three forced unionization cases; the others were on behalf of home caregivers and graduate students at a public university. The legal and legislative activities of the Mackinac Center stopped the forced unionization attempts and helped set the stage for a state right-to-work law.

Mackinac also filed the suit, on behalf of a patient and three medical centers, against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s COVID-19 executive orders in 2020. The Michigan Supreme Court ruled that those orders were illegal and unconstitutional, in a major win for the separation of powers. One ongoing case is on behalf of three airline employees who are forced to pay money to a union, with a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court a possibility. (See the article here.)

When not representing clients against an intrusive state government, Wright enjoys playing sports and spending time with his family. His wife, Bobbi, is a medical doctor, and his sons are students in high school.