Representative Justine Caldwell
Deputy Majority Leader
First Vice Chair, House Small Business Committee
Second Vice Chair, House Corporations Committee
Member, House Education Committee
Member, House Judiciary Committee
Representative Justine Caldwell (D) was first elected in November 2018
to serve the residents of District 30 in East Greenwich and West
Greenwich. She was named a Deputy Majority Leader in January 2023. She
is the first vice chair of the House Small Business Committee, second
vice chair of the House Corporations Committee, and is a member of the
House Education Committee and the House Judiciary Committee.
She has been a strong proponent of legislation to curb gun violence
since her first term, having sponsored the 2022 law prohibiting high-capacity
gun magazines and cosponsored laws prohibiting
untraceable firearms and ensuring gun
sales applications are reviewed by the police in the
purchaser’s own community. She continues to work toward a ban on assault
weapons and a safe-storage bill.
In her first year in the House in 2019, she successfully sponsored new
laws aimed at the opioids crisis: one requiring pharmacies to place warning
signs near pharmacy counters about the dangers associated
with opioids, and another to prohibit insurers from denying or limiting
life insurance to people based on their having a prescription for the overdose-reversal
drug naloxone, which many people possess for the sake of
saving others.
In 2021, she was the sponsor of a law prohibiting
new high-heat waste processing facilities, which helped to
prevent a proposal to build a facility on the West Warwick-East
Greenwich border to burn medical waste from around the region. In 2023,
she cosponsored successful legislation that strengthened the state’s
wage theft law, as well a new law
to prohibit polystyrene foam food containers in Rhode Island
beginning in 2025, and legislation that established a commission to
study ways to
discourage plastic bottle waste.
Matters of equality have been a focus of Representative Caldwell’s
efforts in the General Assembly and before she was elected. In 2021, the
Assembly enacted her legislation to remove a roadblock for women running
for office by allowing
child care during campaign and officeholder activities as a
campaign expenditure. She cosponsored a 2020 law that updated Rhode
Island’s outdated parentage statutes
with more inclusive laws that recognize the many ways people become
families. Prior to her election to the House, she worked in Rhode Island
on efforts to pass legislation to support women's issues and to curb gun
violence. She also worked as an organizer in the 2012 referendum that
established gay marriage rights in Maine. While studying for her PhD in
Bowling Green, Ohio, she was a leader in a successful effort to defend
against a voter initiative that would have stripped protections for
lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people from a city
non-discrimination ordinance.
Representative Caldwell was born on November 30, 1982. She is a graduate
of Pilgrim High School in Warwick and earned a PhD in American Studies
from Bowling Green State University in 2013, a master’s in English from
University of Rhode Island in 2007 and a bachelor’s in English from URI
in 2005. She and her husband David have two children, Escher and Luna,
and live in East Greenwich.