Charles A. Rothfeld

Among his Supreme Court cases, Charles successfully argued before the Court on behalf of the Republic of the Philippines and the Philippine National Bank in their effort to reclaim assets stolen by former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos. His argument in Polar Tankers, Inc. v. City of Valdez was the first since the nineteenth century to persuade the Court to invalidate a state law under the Constitution’s Tonnage Clause. And his arguments in federal courts of appeals led to groundbreaking decisions that set the standard governing the obligations of trustees in the trillion-dollar mortgage-backed securities market; that clarify the rules governing class-action standing and issue preclusion; that recognize protections for lobbying activity under the First Amendment; and that preserve the right to bring federal-court challenges to unconstitutional state fees.

Charles is a founder and co-director of Yale Law School’s Supreme Court Clinic, which is among the largest and most successful appellate advocacy programs in the nation. Over the past seventeen years, students in the Yale Clinic have worked on more than 120 cases in the Supreme Court at the merits and certiorari stages. Charles’ work with the Yale Clinic is part of a substantial pro bono practice in which he has handled civil rights, immigration, voting, and criminal law cases. Charles has argued six of these cases pro bono in the US Supreme Court, among them cases that expanded the right to challenge gender discrimination under the Equal Protection Clause and that required state officials to obtain a warrant before demanding nonconsensual blood draws.

Charles has served as a member of the Board of Advisors of Georgetown University Law Center’s Supreme Court Institute. He is a judge in the National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG) annual “Best Supreme Court Brief” competition. He is a regular participant in moot courts for NAAG, the US Chamber of Commerce, and the Georgetown Supreme Court Institute. He has published widely on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and appellate advocacy, including in the Harvard Law Review Forum and the Yale Law and Policy Review, and is one of the co-authors of Federal Appellate Practice, published by BNA Books. He is a regular source of commentary on the Supreme Court for newspapers and broadcasters.

Prior to joining Mayer Brown, Charles served as Assistant to the Solicitor General in the US Department of Justice, where he had primary responsibility for handling the federal government’s Supreme Court litigation in the areas of banking and securities regulation. He also acted as Special Counsel for the State and Local Legal Center, authoring Supreme Court briefs for the largest national organizations of state and local governments. Earlier, Charles served as a law clerk to Justice Harry A. Blackmun, US Supreme Court (1981–1982) and to Chief Judge Spottswood W. Robinson III, US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (1980 –1981). He is a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School and Cornell University.