Sign Up

NCLA Site Search

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.

Of Walpoles in Buicks: Do Courts Owe a Reciprocal Duty of Candor?

By: Margaret A. Little December 25, 2021
Peggy Little
  “Every case lays down a rule, the rule of the case…But a later court can reexamine the case…In the extreme form this results in what is known as expressly ‘confining the case to its particular facts.’ This rule holds only of redhead walpoles in pale magenta Buick cars. And when you find this said…
Read

Back to the Future: Justice Jackson’s Prescient Dissent in Chenery II

By: Margaret A. Little September 24, 2021
Peggy Little
  I give up. Now I realize fully what Mark Twain meant when he said, “The more you explain it, the more I don’t understand it.” Justice Robert H. Jackson, dissenting in Chenery Corp. v. SEC, 332 U.S. 194, 214 (1947) Justice Robert H. Jackson has long been recognized as one of the best writers…
Read

FDRLST Media, LLC v. NLRB

By: Margaret A. Little September 23, 2021
In the News
The Third Circuit Court of Appeals will shortly hear argument on a case involving a light-hearted joke and the heavy hand of the administrative state. The case presents the court with the opportunity to restore actual aggrievement to the labor law’s explicit statutory requirement for bringing down the force of the administrative state upon Americans. It also…
Read