Jennifer D. Bennett

Two Records Reach Washington

Bennett represented respondents in two Supreme Court arguments during the 2025 Term. The first arose from forced-labor claims at a private immigration detention facility in Colorado. The second concerned a delivery driver’s wage claims against a national bakery. The Court unanimously affirmed in The GEO Group, Inc. v. Menocal on February 25, 2026, and in Flowers Foods, Inc. v. Brock on May 28, 2026.

Bennett served as counsel of record and presented oral argument in both matters. The cases posed separate threshold questions — when a government contractor may appeal a denied defense before trial, and when an intrastate delivery driver falls within the Federal Arbitration Act’s transportation-worker exemption — and in each, the Court adopted her client’s position without a single dissenting vote.

Menocal’s Forced-Labor Claims

Menocal began after Alejandro Menocal’s detention at the Aurora Immigration Processing Center, which GEO operates under contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The plaintiffs challenged two labor practices. They alleged that detainees had to clean common areas without pay under threat of sanctions that could include solitary confinement for as long as seventy-two hours, and that a voluntary work program paid one dollar a day for work including food service and laundry. The claims invoked the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act and Colorado unjust-enrichment law.

After discovery, the district court examined GEO’s contracts with ICE and concluded that the agency had not directed GEO to require common-area cleaning or to cap voluntary-program pay at one dollar a day. It rejected GEO’s request for summary judgment under Yearsley v. W. A. Ross Construction Co. GEO appealed before trial, and the Tenth Circuit dismissed for lack of appellate jurisdiction.

Yearsley and the Timing of Appeal

GEO characterized Yearsley as derivative sovereign immunity and argued that a federal contractor should be able to appeal immediately rather than bear the very trial burden the doctrine was asserted to prevent.

Bennett’s respondents recast the doctrine at its foundation: Yearsley is a potential defense to liability, not a freestanding right to avoid litigation altogether. An erroneous liability ruling could be corrected after final judgment because the defense would remain available. The United States joined the respondents as an amicus and shared argument time.

At oral argument, the justices pressed on why a private contractor performing a government function should have to wait when public officials can sometimes appeal immediately. Bennett returned, each time, to the interest Yearsley actually protects — nonliability for acts lawfully directed by the government — an interest that can still be fully vindicated after final judgment.

Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the Court that Yearsley supplies a potential merits defense rather than immunity from suit, so the denial did not authorize an immediate appeal under the collateral-order doctrine. Seven justices joined the opinion in full; Justice Clarence Thomas joined its first and third parts and wrote separately; Justice Samuel Alito concurred in the judgment. Every justice voted to affirm, resolving a circuit split over immediate appeals from denials of the contractor defense.

Brock’s Intrastate Route

Angelo Brock’s company held distribution rights for Flowers products around Denver. He picked up baked goods at a Colorado warehouse and delivered them to local stores without ever crossing a state line — although most of the goods had been made out of state to fill distributors’ orders.

In 2022, Brock filed a putative class and collective action alleging that Flowers had misclassified distributors and underpaid them under federal and Colorado labor law. Flowers invoked an arbitration agreement. The district court denied the motion to compel arbitration, and the Tenth Circuit affirmed on the ground that Brock’s class of drivers was engaged in interstate commerce.

At the Supreme Court, Bennett became counsel of record, worked with five Gupta Wessler colleagues and the Nicholas & Tomasevic team, and presented oral argument.

Flowers advanced what the Court called a “cross-or-tag” rule: a worker who neither crossed a state line nor handled a vehicle that did was outside the Federal Arbitration Act’s Section 1 transportation-worker exemption. It also relied on Brock’s separate company and the transfer of title before local resale.

Brock’s brief treated the route as one segment of a continuous interstate shipment. Bennett’s team argued that the statute asks whether workers are engaged in interstate commerce, not whether each worker personally crosses a border. The proposed class consisted of drivers performing the final intrastate leg of goods moving from other states to their intended retailers — the last mile of a journey the whole country depends on.

Butterscotch Krimpets and The Daniel Ball

Justice Neil Gorsuch tested Flowers’s rule with a hypothetical truckload of Butterscotch Krimpets. One driver carried the goods to a state border, a second moved them ten feet across it, and a third completed delivery inside the destination state. Under Flowers’s rule, only the middle driver would qualify.

The Court reasoned that all three drivers took a direct, active, and necessary part in the interstate shipment. It also reached back to The Daniel Ball, an 1871 case involving a steamer operating entirely within Michigan while carrying goods moving to or from other states: separate carriers did not change the interstate character of the transportation then, and they do not now.

A unanimous Court affirmed the Tenth Circuit, with Justice Gorsuch writing. A worker on an intrastate leg of an interstate journey can qualify for Section 1 without crossing a state line or touching a vehicle that does. The ruling rejected the categorical border-or-vehicle rule and anchored the analysis where Bennett had argued it belongs: in the worker’s role in the movement of goods.

A Line of Unanimous Precedents

Brock was not an isolated result. Bennett became counsel of record at the certiorari stage in Bissonnette v. LePage Bakeries and argued the case before the Supreme Court; in 2024, the Court adopted her position that transportation workers need not be employed in the transportation industry to fall within Section 1. She was also prevailing counsel in New Prime, Inc. v. Oliveira and Southwest Airlines Co. v. Saxon — both, like Bissonnette, unanimous.

Brock then addressed the next disputed boundary: whether a worker completing an intrastate portion of an interstate shipment could qualify. Case by case, the decisions have replaced industry labels and border-crossing formalism with inquiries focused on the transportation work itself and the interstate journey it serves — a doctrinal line Bennett has argued, and won, at every step.

Appellate Practice

Bennett is a principal at Gupta Wessler and heads its San Francisco office. Her practice includes workers’ rights, consumer protection, civil rights, constitutional law, and government transparency. In 2023 Senate Judiciary subcommittee testimony, she described representing workers, consumers, and civil-rights plaintiffs in state and federal appeals.

She previously worked at Public Justice and completed clerkships in the Ninth Circuit and federal district courts. She graduated from Yale Law School and Yale University.