Appellate Practice

Print Email This Page

Home > Practices > Litigation > Appellate Practice
PreviousPreviousNextNextBack To Main

Michele Hangley, Shareholder, Litigation

Our lawyers have extensive experience before federal and state appellate courts, frequently taking over the appellate representation of a client that employed other counsel at the trial level. Questions that our attorneys have presented to appellate courts include:

  • whether the federal Help America Vote Act preempted a provision of the Pennsylvania Constitution requiring a voter referendum on the use of electronic voting systems (argued successfully before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on behalf of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania); 

  • whether plaintiffs in ERISA litigation had standing to prosecute a derivative action on behalf of an employees’ savings plan to recover losses sustained by the plan because of alleged breaches of fiduciary duty (argued successfully before the Third Circuit Court of Appeals on behalf of plaintiffs);

  • the showing that a litigant must make in order to receive pre-complaint discovery in Pennsylvania state court (argued successfully before the Pennsylvania Superior Court and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on behalf of the executor of a large estate); 
     
  • the constitutionality of portions of a Pennsylvania statute that forever prohibited all felons and many misdemeanants from holding any jobs in residential care facilities (argued successfully before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on behalf of a social services organization and several aggrieved individuals);

  • whether humane society officers have statewide jurisdiction in matters involving cruelty to animals (argued successfully before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on behalf of the Pennsylvania SPCA);
    • Steve Shadowen, Shareholder, Litigation
  • whether an interim settlement of a certain type of patent litigation is a per se violation of the antitrust laws (argued successfully before the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals on behalf of major retail drugstore chains); and

  • whether the confidential investigations and deliberations of a state bar association’s commission for evaluation of judicial candidates could remain secret (argued successfully before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on behalf of the Pennsylvania Bar Association).