This was our first amicus brief filed in the U.S. Supreme Court, helping win a 5–4 decision ruling that energy company Kerr-McGee's compliance with federal regulations did not preempt — i.e. wipe out — punitive damages claims against it for Karen Silkwood's plutonium contamination and death. We have been actively involved in preemption cases before the Supreme Court ever since.

Read more about Silkwood v. Kerr-McGee here.

With the assistance of the public interest law firm National Gay Rights Advocates, Public Justice brought the nation's first case against a private AIDS-testing clinic for failing to follow proper testing procedures and providing false positive results. The company compensated Brogan and adopted stringent new testing and disclosure procedures.

Read more about Brogan v. Kimberly Services here.

We represented a class of homeowners who had defective and failing plumbing systems installed in their homes. We were part of a team that negotiated a groundbreaking settlement that actually fixed the pipes and installed proper systems in more than 320,000 homes at no cost to the class members.

Read more about Cox v. Shell here.

In a case lasting almost more than two decades, we sought to hold Brown University accountable for violating Title IX when demoting its women's gymnastics and volleyball teams from university-funded to donor-funded varsity status. We won rulings that Brown had violated Title IX in the trial court and then on appeal, and won a precedent that would be widely cited and influential in shaping strong protections for women athletes. We ultimately also won substantial changes where Brown reinstated the women’s teams that had been cut.

Read more about Cohen v. Brown University here.

We successfully represented West Virginia citizens in a challenge to the practice of mountaintop removal, which literally tore the tops off of entire mountains and destroyed neighboring streams and killed all life that had once lived there. The case led to substantial reforms in how the practice was regulated in the future.

Read more about Bragg v. Robertson here.

Our client was killed by a defectively designed boat propeller, and she sued the manufacturer under Illinois law. The defendant argued that a federal statute and regulations preempted – wiped away – the state law dealing with defective products. The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously agreed with us, and permitted the case to go forward. This landmark ruling shaped the law to help protect the rights of people injured and even killed by other types of defective products as well.

Read more about Sprietsma v. Mercury Marine here.

We sued the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), when a minimum test score requirement for freshman eligibility had a sharply disproportionate impact on African-American student-athletes, even though the NCAA’s own studies showed that this requirement was not necessary to improve educational outcomes. The lawsuit was eventually dismissed (after a U.S. Supreme Court decision in another case undermined a requirement of the cause of action), but the NCAA subsequently changed the rule as we had argued it should.

Read more about Cureton v. NCAA here.

We represented a class of consumers whose credit card company promised in writing it would “never” raise their interest rates over 24% — and then did. Twice the trial court dismissed the case (once because of the bank's forced arbitration clause and once because of a federal preemption defense), but we prevailed in the state's high court and overturned these barriers to justice. Ultimately we won a $16 million settlement and cleared improper debts off the consumers' credit reports. It was one of the first times in the nation that a bank’s arbitration clause was defeated.

Read more about Wells v. Chevy Chase Bank here.

We joined a team of consumer advocates to take on three payday lenders in North Carolina who were exploiting consumers with interest rates as high as 500%. Not only did our team recover $45 million for class members, we were able to clear their credit histories of illegal debts the payday lenders claimed were from consumers. It was the largest settlement that any class of consumers had won from a payday lender in the U.S.

Read more about Kucan v. Advance America here.

We secured a huge victory in our lawsuit against mega dairies in Washington State's Yakima Valley for their role in dumping tons of manure onto the ground and contaminating the local water supply. A landmark court ruling found that livestock manure should be regulated under the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, resulting in clean drinking water for Yakima residents for the first time in decades.

Read more about Yakima Valley Dairy Cases here.

We secured a $4.48 million settlement ensuring that an upstate NY school district would enact broad reforms following the events in which a group of former Jewish students were victims of pervasive, anti-Semitism in the schools. We won an important federal district court decision recognizing that anti-Semitic harassment is a form of race discrimination prohibited by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This settlement serves as a blueprint for what school districts across the country can do to prevent and address harassment.

Read more about T.E. Pine Bush Central School District here.

We represent more than 100 survivors of sexual abuse by Ohio State University doctor Richard Strauss, who preyed on male students and others while employed at the university from 1978-1998. We filed Title IX suits to hold the university accountable for facilitating and concealing the abuse for decades. A district court dismissed the survivors’ claims as untimely, but we successfully argued on appeal that the survivors are entitled to proceed with their claims.

As we argued, most survivors—typically abused during medical examinations—weren’t aware that Strauss had abused them until 2018, when the university publicly announced it was opening an investigation into allegations of abuse by Strauss. And none of the survivors understood before 2018 that the university had known about Strauss’s predation from early on, could have prevented their assaults, and actively concealed the abuse. Our clients are still fighting for justice in these ongoing cases.

Read more about Snyder-Hill v. The Ohio State University & Moxley v. The Ohio State University here.

We sued Amazon on behalf of workers and their families at the company's Staten Island fulfillment center for failing to prevent the spread of COVID-19 at the facility and in the workers' communities. In a tremendous victory, the Second Circuit rejected the district court's dismissal of our clients' claims, affirming their power to vindicate their rights through the court and hold employers like Amazon accountable for maintaining their safety practices.

Read more about Palmer v. Amazon here.

In this important case, the U.S. Supreme Court held that where a corporate defendant chooses to litigate a case in court, it may waive and lose its right to later try to take the case to arbitration. We were lead counsel in the Supreme Court and one of our attorneys argued the case, and the opinion may reshape a lot of law that has built up that created artificial doctrines favoring forced arbitration clauses over other types of contracts.

Read more about Morgan v. Sundance here.