Representative Justine Caldwell
Deputy Majority Leader
Chair, House Conduct Committee
Second Vice Chair, House Corporations Committee
Member, House Judiciary Committee
Member, House Small Business Committee
Representative Justine Caldwell (D) was first
elected in November 2018 to serve the residents of District 30 in East
Greenwich and West Greenwich. A Deputy Majority Leader, she is the chair of
the House Conduct Committee, second vice chair of the House Corporations
Committee, and a member of the House Judiciary Committee and the House Small
Business 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 as well as the
safe storage law enacted in 2024. She has 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.
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 2024, she sponsored successful legislation to protect patients' pharmacy
options by banning an insurance practice called "white
bagging."
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outdated parentage statutes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.