Valeria M. Pelet del Toro

A Cooley pro bono team secured an appeal from the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversing a lower court’s decision granting qualified immunity to officers who held Black teenagers looking for a lost dog at gunpoint. The Fifth Circuit held that the officers were not entitled to qualified immunity for stopping the teens because a reasonable jury could find that the officers had no reasonable basis to suspect any criminal activity.

Cooley, alongside the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the ACLU of Georgia, filed a motion on behalf of the National Women’s Law Center to intervene as a defendant in a pending lawsuit against the NCAA that seeks to block transgender women and girls from playing NCAA sports, to bar transgender women and girls from using women’s facilities, and to erase records of past participation by transgender women and girls in NCAA sports.