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 Gerald P. Norton Jerry Norton is one of the founding partners of Harkins Cunningham LLP. His practice has been diverse, including transportation law, Constitutional law, antitrust and trade regulation, administrative law, employment law, environmental law, insurance coverage, commercial and government contracts, and preemption issues. In addition to handling or counseling about trial court and agency litigation, he often acts as appellate counsel. For example, Mr. Norton has been a member of the firm's team that has been involved in every major railroad merger approval proceeding before the Interstate Commerce Commission or now the Surface Transportation Board over more than a decade. Other representative litigation has included: obtaining dismissal of a claim that the purchaser of $850 million of the client's electricity generation assets did not have to close because of intervening regulatory developments; obtaining dismissal of a $900 million antitrust claim by a short-line railroad against a major railroad; and defeating an attempt to void millions of dollars of insurance coverage for environmental remediation; as appellate counsel, successfully challenging an agency order of a forced sale of a rail line; securing reversal of an adverse judgment exposing a chemical manufacturer to some $100 million in Superfund clean-up indemnification liability; obtaining a landmark decision reversing a ruling that companies can be held liable for the government's costs of oversight of environmental cleanups; reversing a rejection of the client's claim for contribution for environmental remediation; and vacating an injunction prohibiting a party or its attorney from offering in state court trials evidence allegedly barred by a federal court class action settlement. Mr. Norton has been involved in arbitration and other alternative dispute resolution mechanisms, and is on the panel of mediators selected by the federal district court in Washington, D.C. He has also been a member of the D.C. Bar Committee on Legal Ethics and its Committee on Review of the Rules of Professional Conduct, and the D.C. Circuit Committee on Admissions and Grievances and its Advisory Committee on Procedures. He is also a volunteer moot court judge for Supreme Court cases for the National Association of Attorneys General, and for Georgetown Law School's Supreme Court Institute. He is a member of the Litigation, Administrative Law, Antitrust, and Labor and Employment Law Sections of the American Bar Association, has lectured and written extensively on a wide variety of subjects, and is included in Who's Who in American Law and Who's Who in America. Mr. Norton is a 1961 graduate of Princeton University and 1964 graduate of Columbia Law School, both magna cum laude, and was Managing and Research Editor of the Columbia Law Review. After clerking for Judge Leonard P. Moore on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, he entered private practice with Covington & Burling. Mr. Norton then served as Assistant to the Solicitor General of the United States, briefing and arguing a wide variety of government cases in the Supreme Court. He became Deputy General Counsel of the Federal Trade Commission, responsible for all the Commission's court litigation, in which position he received a number of awards, including the government-wide Arthur E. Flemming award as one of the outstanding young government employees. Phone: (202) 973-7605 |