Messing & Spector LLP is a law firm that handles a small number of cases to pursue meaningful victories for its clients.

 

We specialize in writing and arguing appellate briefs, memoranda of law in trial courts, and motions to vacate arbitral awards. We also help our clients to develop strategies to navigate seemingly insoluble legal problems.

 

The founding partners are friends who attended Yale Law School together, and then worked alongside one another at one of the nation’s premier litigation firms, and in the U.S. Senate.

 

Representative briefs and motions that our partners have written, or were actively involved in writing, include:

 

• A Supreme Court merits brief that achieved an 8-0 victory in a case interpreting the Hobbs Act.​

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• A Supreme Court amicus brief that was cited and closely followed by a unanimous Court in a leading Fourth Amendment case concerning whether police may search, without a warrant, the contents of an arrested person’s mobile phone.

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• An amicus brief and declaration filed in multiple federal courts of appeals and district courts on behalf of a bipartisan group of former national security officials, in a successful challenge to the Trump Administration’s executive order suspending travel into the United States from seven (and later six) Muslim-majority countries.

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• A merits brief in a successful post-licensing challenge in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to a Nuclear Regulatory Commission decision that would have enabled nuclear plants to store a large percentage of the nation’s nuclear waste on a Native American reservation.

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• A merits brief in a pending California state court appeal for a mother who lost custody of her daughter even though the family court lacked jurisdiction to remove the girl from the mother’s care.

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• A successful summary judgment motion in federal district court in Greensboro, North Carolina in multi-billion-dollar antitrust litigation involving retail shelf space and promotional space.

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• A successful motion to dismiss a $2.2-billion fraud claim against a telecommunications company in Nevada state court.

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• A number of successful briefs in opposition to petitions for a writ of certiorari to the U.S. Supreme Court, including cases that involved religious rights, tort liability, federal preemption, and fortified property.