Patrick J. Hayden

A Cooley pro bono team secured an appeal from the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversing a lower court’s decision granting qualified immunity to officers who held Black teenagers looking for a lost dog at gunpoint. The Fifth Circuit held that the officers were not entitled to qualified immunity for stopping the teens because a reasonable jury could find that the officers had no reasonable basis to suspect any criminal activity.

Cooley, alongside the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the ACLU of Georgia, filed a motion on behalf of the National Women’s Law Center to intervene as a defendant in a pending lawsuit against the NCAA that seeks to block transgender women and girls from playing NCAA sports, to bar transgender women and girls from using women’s facilities, and to erase records of past participation by transgender women and girls in NCAA sports.

Cooley, alongside co-counsel from Protect Democracy, filed an amicus brief with the US Supreme Court on April 8, 2024, in the case of Trump v. United States on behalf of 19 retired four-star generals and admirals and former secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force opposing former President Donald Trump’s assertion of presidential immunity from criminal prosecution.

Cooley filed an amicus brief in the New York Court of Appeals on behalf of 47 corporate law professors in support of the continued application of the internal affairs doctrine.

Cooley has filed an amicus brief in Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson, one of the two cases currently before the Supreme Court challenging Texas Senate Bill 8 (SB 8), an unprecedented attempt to nullify the federal constitutional right to receive an abortion recognized in Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Lawyers Kathleen Hartnett, Adam Gershenson, Julie Veroff, Patrick Hayden, Kelsey Spector, Marc Suskin, Rachel Thorn and Alessandra Vittoria Rafalson led the Cooley effort.