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Margaret A. Little

Senior Litigation Counsel


Peggy Little, Senior Counsel, comes to NCLA with over three decades of experience as a trial and appellate litigator in complex, high-stakes regulatory, mass-tort, class-action, products liability, securities, commercial and civil rights litigation representing individuals and high-profile litigants including Fortune 50 companies, financial institutions, public companies, and universities in state and federal courts, including the United States Supreme Court.

Peggy is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School, where she was awarded the Potter Stewart Prize. She was a law clerk to the Hon. Ralph K. Winter on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Prior to starting her own trial and appellate law firm in 1997, where she was appellate consulting counsel to the New Haven firefighters in Ricci v.DeStefano, a landmark 2009 United States Supreme Court decision, Peggy was a partner at Tyler, Cooper & Alcorn in New Haven, Connecticut. From 2004 to early 2018, Peggy directed, part-time, the Federalist Society Pro Bono Center.

Peggy has participated in many national conferences and symposia addressing issues of current importance in constitutional law – specifically state and federal constitutional questions regarding the separation of powers and the first amendment – and regularly speaks, blogs and publishes on the topic of the unconstitutional exercise of governmental power. In May of 2017, she presented her paper, Pirates at the Parchment Gates, to a conference of state and federal judges at the Law and Economics Center at the Antonin Scalia Law School. Her work has been published by law reviews, legal publications, the Federalist Society, the Wall Street Journal, Law and Liberty and the Manhattan Institute.

Not licensed in Virginia; admitted to practice in Connecticut, D.C., and select federal jurisdictions.

The Supreme Court's Jarkesy decision is about keeping promises

By: Margaret A. Little July 9, 2024
John Roberts’s opinion of the Court in Jarkesy correctly describes its application of law as “straightforward question.” It follows clear precedent (Granfinanciera “decides this case”), distingiuishes irrelevant precedent (Atlas Roofing), and admirably confines the erroneous expansion of the “public rights” doctrine to its narrow origins so that it no longer would be the exception that…
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What is the SEC so afraid of?

By: Margaret A. Little February 9, 2024
The New Civil Liberties Alliance filed an amicus curiae brief in Elon Musk v. Securities and Exchange Commission, urging the Supreme Court to strike down SEC’s “Gag Rule.”
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Will Relentless and Loper Bright take Occam’s Razor to Chevron and its Barnacles?

By: Margaret A. Little January 26, 2024
Blogs
I’d like to talk about just one distinctive aspect of the body of law that has followed in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Chevron—that it has spawned a boatload of complex and comically inscrutable doctrines. Here’s counsel for the boat Relentless at argument: “You…need a secret decoder ring to figure out what…
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