Karla Gilbride

Supreme Court and Appellate Advocacy

Karla Gilbride litigates civil-rights, disability-access, workers' rights, arbitration, administrative-law, and constitutional matters. Her appellate work spans a unanimous United States Supreme Court decision and favorable arbitration and disability-access rulings in five federal circuits and Maryland's highest court, repeatedly testing whether procedural rules apply equally to workers, consumers, and people with disabilities.

The Unanimous Morgan Decision

Robyn Morgan worked hourly shifts at an Iowa Taco Bell franchise. She alleged that employees were directed to clock out and keep working, and that recorded hours were shifted between weeks so overtime would never appear on a paycheck. When she sued, the franchisee litigated: it moved to dismiss, answered, asserted fourteen defenses, sought transfer into another federal action, and participated in mediation. Then, nearly eight months after the complaint, it changed course and demanded individual arbitration.

The Eighth Circuit let it, requiring Morgan to prove she had been prejudiced by the delay under an arbitration-specific waiver rule. Gilbride took the question to the Supreme Court, arguing that the Federal Arbitration Act places arbitration agreements on equal footing with other contracts — no better and no worse — and does not authorize courts to invent special procedural protections for them. When she stood at the lectern on March 21, 2022, in her first Supreme Court argument, she became the first blind attorney to argue before the Court.

On May 23, 2022, a unanimous Court agreed with her. Justice Kagan's opinion eliminated the arbitration-specific prejudice requirement and returned the case for application of ordinary waiver principles, resolving a split in which nine circuits had demanded prejudice and two had rejected it. The holding was precise and far-reaching at once: federal courts may not fashion arbitration-preferring procedural rules out of a general policy favoring arbitration. It restored a level playing field for workers and consumers facing the same maneuver.

Consumer Arbitration Appeals

Morgan was the summit of a decade of appellate work testing when arbitration clauses actually bind the people asked to honor them.

Midland Funding purchased Clifford Cain's credit-card account and sued him in Maryland district court while operating without the collection-agency license state law required, obtaining a $4,520.54 default judgment. When Cain later filed a consumer class action over Midland's collection practices, the company reached back to the arbitration clause in the original credit-card agreement. Gilbride served as Public Justice's responsible attorney on the appeal, and in March 2017 Maryland's highest court held that Midland had waived arbitration by pursuing the related collection action — and that state law demanded no separate showing of prejudice.

Candy Ray never signed the lease-to-own agreement for a bed her husband purchased, though he listed her mobile number on the account. After Ray revoked any consent and said she would not pay another person's debt, Progressive Leasing placed hundreds of robocalls from more than a dozen numbers between March and October 2016 — sometimes three, four, or five in a single day. Ray brought federal telephone and Florida collection claims; the company sought arbitration under her husband's contract. Gilbride and an appellate team represented her, and in July 2018 the Eleventh Circuit affirmed the denial of arbitration: the company could not overcome the Florida-law basis for holding that Ray, a nonsignatory, was not bound.

Hoai Dang bought a Samsung Galaxy S3 whose warranty booklet tucked an arbitration provision among the product and safety information. Nothing on the packaging or receipt told a buyer that accepting the phone created a separate contract governing nonwarranty disputes. After Dang filed a consumer class action alleging patent-related misrepresentations, Samsung invoked the booklet and his failure to opt out. With Gilbride as Public Justice's responsible attorney, the Ninth Circuit reversed the arbitration order, holding under California law that the booklet did not put a reasonable buyer on notice and that silence could not supply assent.

Dana Fedor and eight other former UnitedHealthcare employees brought wage claims after starting work in different years under different versions of the company's arbitration policy. The company relied on a 2016 version containing a delegation clause — one that none of the plaintiffs had seen or signed. Gilbride argued the appeal, and in September 2020 the Tenth Circuit vacated the arbitration order, holding that a court must first decide whether an agreement was ever formed before a delegation clause can hand threshold questions to an arbitrator.

The decisions treat arbitration as a matter of ordinary contract law rather than an automatic trump card: courts assess waiver, notice, assent, and contract formation before compelling a person to arbitrate.

Disability Access Decisions

The National Federation of the Blind and individual customers alleged that Container Store payment devices forced blind shoppers to disclose their debit-card PINs to sighted employees because the flat screens and keypads could not be operated independently by touch. The company invoked an arbitration provision in its loyalty-program terms. Gilbride joined the team opposing arbitration, and in 2018 the First Circuit affirmed the denial, agreeing that the company had not shown several customers knew arbitration terms accompanied enrollment and upholding the conclusion that the governing promise was illusory.

Jahinnslerth Orozco, an FBI intelligence analyst, alleged that agency software was inaccessible to screen-reading technology even though accessible alternatives were available. The district court dismissed his Section 508 claim on the theory that he held no enforceable right to the requested access. Gilbride argued the appeal, and in February 2023 the D.C. Circuit reversed, holding that a federal employee may bring the statutory action Congress supplied to enforce Section 508 — restoring to federal workers with disabilities the enforcement mechanism the statute had promised them.

EEOC Verdicts and Consent Decrees

Victor Robinson completed truck-driving training and obtained the federal exemption required for a Deaf commercial driver, yet Werner Enterprises and its placement affiliate declined to hire him. In September 2023, an eight-person Nebraska jury found that the companies failed to hire Robinson because he is Deaf and failed to provide a reasonable accommodation. The final damages award was $300,000, with a separate award of $35,682 in lost wages and prejudgment interest and injunctive relief requiring policy, training, and monitoring changes. The Eighth Circuit affirmed in July 2025. Gilbride supervised the EEOC's national litigation program during the judgment and the appeal.

The agency also alleged that Black employees at a DHL facility in Illinois were assigned more difficult and dangerous routes in predominantly Black neighborhoods while white employees received routes in predominantly white areas. A 2024 consent decree required DHL to pay $8.7 million to eighty-three Black employees and imposed four years of monitoring, revised assignment procedures, training, and reporting. The decree combined compensation with measures governing future route assignments.

The DHS Oversight-Offices Litigation

After joining Public Citizen Litigation Group as deputy director, Gilbride became lead counsel for organizations challenging the reduction of staff and functions at three congressionally created Department of Homeland Security oversight bodies: the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, and the Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman.

The plaintiffs alleged that DHS's March 2025 stop-work and staffing actions unlawfully disabled the offices responsible for civil-rights complaints, detention oversight, disability access, and immigration-service problems. Following a May 2025 hearing, DHS publicly stated that it would not abolish the three offices, and the litigation pressed forward over their staffing and statutory functions. The parties filed summary-judgment and related submissions in 2026. The case remained pending in August 2026, testing the staffing and functions required to carry out Congress's oversight mandates.

Public Service and Education

Gilbride, who is blind, was sworn in as EEOC general counsel in October 2023 after Senate confirmation — the first person with a known disability appointed to the position. She directed, coordinated, and supervised the agency's entire federal litigation program, which during her tenure brought early enforcement actions under the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act and cases involving disability access, race, sex, gender identity, and harassment of young workers.

She graduated from Swarthmore College with highest honors in linguistics and earned her law degree with honors from Georgetown. She clerked for Ninth Circuit Judge Ronald M. Gould, litigated disability class actions at Disability Rights Advocates, handled employment and fair-housing matters at Mehri & Skalet, and spent nearly a decade at Public Justice — a career in which each chapter widened the circle of people for whom the courthouse door actually opens.