As a judge, Pillard extended the exclusionary rule to require police to knock-and-announce when executing an arrest warrant, over a dissent by Judge Karen L. Henderson.[27] Judge Pillard joined Henderson when they denied a petition by Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri to disqualify his military judges.[28] When in Meshal v. Higgenbotham (2016) Judges Janice Rogers Brown and Brett Kavanaugh threw out a claim by an American that he had been disappeared by the FBI in a Kenyan black site, Judge Pillard dissented, arguing the court should just create a new implied cause of action.[29] When Judge Pillard's panel found that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act did not violate the Constitution's Origination Clause in Sissel v. United States Department of Health & Human Services (2014), Judge Kavanaugh wrote a lengthy dissent from denial of an en banc rehearing.[30]