Associate Attorney

Paul Bernard

Paul Bernard has been an appellate litigator since 1996, representing clients in a wide variety of substantive law areas. In 2005, Paul wrote the successful petition for certiorari and winning merits brief in Carabell v. United States Army Corps of Eng’rs, 547 U.S. 715 (2006). Paul represented a landowner who wanted to develop condominiums on a wooded parcel in Macomb County. The Army Corps asserted jurisdiction over the parcel as a wetland, relying upon its own interpretation of one of its regulations promulgated under the Clean Water Act. The federal district court and the Sixth Circuit endorsed the Army Corps’ interpretation of its regulatory authority, but the Supreme Court vacated the lower court rulings and remanded the case. More recently, in Jackson v. Genesee Cty. Rd. Comm’n, 999 F.3d 333 (6th Cir. 2021), Paul successfully obtained a reversal of a summary judgment ruling against a plaintiff who alleged that she had been the victim of retaliation in violation of federal civil rights law. And, in In re Name Change of Allan Sq Pearson, Case No.  352377 (Mich. App. March 25, 2021), he briefed and argued a pro bono appeal from denial of a name change petition, winning reversal by showing that the trial court abused its discretion when considering petitioner’s criminal history.

Paul has received an A.B. from Brown University, a Ph.D in American Culture from the University of Michigan, and a J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School, where he graduated magna cum laude and was Executive Article Editor of the Michigan Law Review. Before beginning practice, he was a law clerk for the Hon. Richard D. Cudahy of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and he was a member of the founding faculty at the University of Washington, Bothell, where he taught United States intellectual history.