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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 Hill: The SEC should listen to Sen. Cotton

By: Margaret A. Little December 17, 2018
In the News
Originally published in The Hill on December 17, 2019 On Tuesday Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) asked tough questions to the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Jay Clayton, during a banking committee hearing about an opaque form of regulation which has silenced Americans for far too long. The SEC lawlessly enacted the pernicious “gag rule” in 1972 without going…
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Wall Street Journal: How the SEC Silences Criticism

By: Margaret A. Little November 14, 2018
In the News
One of the strongest rules in free-speech law is that the government may not engage in “prior restraint” of speech except in extreme circumstances. Yet the Securities and Exchange Commission does so routinely. Under a rule adopted in 1972, the SEC demands that parties entering into settlements with the commission be silenced about the prosecution…
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