Brian Wolfman

Sergeant Jatonya Clayborn Muldrow had spent years in plainclothes with the St. Louis Police Department's Intelligence Division, working public corruption and human trafficking cases and serving on an FBI task force, when a new commander transferred her out. The transfer changed her assignment, credentials, schedule, and work, but neither her rank nor her pay. Her Title VII case challenged the lower courts’ requirement that she show a "materially significant" disadvantage. The statute prohibits discrimination in the terms and conditions of employment without specifying that the harm must be significant.

Brian Wolfman argued the case before the Supreme Court in December 2023. On April 17, 2024, the Court unanimously ruled in Muldrow’s favor, holding in Muldrow v. City of St. Louis that a transferred employee need show some harm, rather than significant harm, from a discriminatory transfer. Two years earlier, he had argued Chambers v. District of Columbia before the en banc D.C. Circuit and persuaded the full court to discard its twenty-three-year-old precedent imposing an "objectively tangible harm" requirement on transfer claims. Georgetown clinic students worked on the briefs in both cases.

An Apprenticeship in Other People's Stakes

After a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and a 1984 law degree from Harvard, Wolfman clerked for Judge R. Lanier Anderson III of the Eleventh Circuit. He then spent five years as a staff lawyer with Legal Services of Arkansas, handling trial and appellate cases for low-income clients in a rural poverty law practice. Those cases affected clients’ homes, benefits, and livelihoods.

In 1990 he joined the Public Citizen Litigation Group in Washington and stayed nearly twenty years, serving as its director and general counsel from 2004 to 2009. He also directed the group's Supreme Court Assistance Project, which pairs experienced high-court advocates with public-interest lawyers whose cases reach the Justices.

The Objector's Chair

At Public Citizen, Wolfman represented class members bound by settlements they had not negotiated. He was counsel for the objectors in Amchem Products, Inc. v. Windsor, the 1997 Supreme Court decision rejecting an asbestos settlement that would have bound future victims whose illnesses were not yet known. As principal co-counsel in Devlin v. Scardelletti, he helped establish that unnamed class members who object to a settlement may appeal its approval without formally intervening. His article "Representing the Unrepresented in Class Action Settlements" appeared in the NYU Law Review in 1996. He later advised the American Law Institute on its Principles of the Law of Aggregate Litigation.

Wolfman also represented injured consumers against federal preemption defenses, through which companies argued that federal regulatory approval displaced state tort remedies. He served as counsel in Medtronic, Inc. v. Lohr and Wyeth v. Levine and wrote a practical monograph on opposing preemption defenses in vehicle-defect cases. He served on an Institute of Medicine committee reviewing the FDA's device-clearance process and spent years as trustee and twice chair of the D.C. Bar's Clients' Security Fund, which compensates clients wronged by their own lawyers.

A Classroom with a Docket

Wolfman has taught a January-term appellate courts workshop at Harvard Law School since 2004. From 2009 to 2014 he taught at Georgetown and directed civil rights work at its Institute for Public Representation; from 2014 to 2016 he was Professor of the Practice at Stanford Law School and co-directed its Supreme Court Litigation Clinic. He argued and won Green v. Brennan, establishing that the limitations period for a constructive-discharge claim begins when the employee gives notice of resignation. He was principal co-counsel in Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District, the unanimous 2017 decision requiring that a disabled child's educational program be "appropriately ambitious" in light of the child's circumstances, rejecting the minimal-benefit standard some circuits had applied.

In 2016, Wolfman returned to Georgetown to establish the Appellate Courts Immersion Clinic, a full-time, semester-long program devoted to public-interest appeals in the federal circuits, the D.C. Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court. Clinic students drafted the briefing in Muldrow. A clinic team, working in just over a month, produced the Sixth Circuit brief that secured habeas relief for Stephen Mitchell, a Memphis man who had served seventeen years for an ammunition offense, more than seven years beyond the lawful statutory maximum. In Balbed v. Eden Park Guest House, the clinic won Fourth Circuit precedent protecting live-in workers under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Students investigate records, shape strategy, write appellate briefs, and sit at counsel table.

That model remained active through the clinic’s 2025 and 2026 docket. Students briefed Driscoll v. Montgomery County, concerning qualified immunity after a police officer shot an unarmed person experiencing a mental-health crisis, and Qashu v. Rubio, involving disability-discrimination, accommodation, and retaliation claims against the State Department. In Perez-Funez v. Department of Homeland Security, a spring 2026 team defended a classwide injunction requiring notice of legal rights for unaccompanied non-citizen minors before a departure from the United States is treated as voluntary. Other recent teams have handled employment discrimination and retaliation, prison disability accommodations, religious-exercise claims, and First Step Act sentencing-credit disputes.

Wolfman has argued seven cases in the Supreme Court and won six. He also serves as faculty director of Georgetown's Blume Public Interest Law Scholars Program, and his scholarship on appellate advocacy includes work on how to conclude a brief and how to prepare a reply. In the immersion clinic, students represent actual parties while mastering records, developing legal theories, drafting and revising briefs, and preparing cases for appellate decision under Wolfman’s supervision.