Monica Wagner
Lecturer in Law
Monica Wagner received her law degree from Columbia in 1981 and served
as a clerk to Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the United States Court of
Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. After her clerkship, she
joined the law firm of Terris & Sunderland in Washington, D.C.,
where she did environmental and employment discrimination litigation and
became a partner in 1988. She left that law practice in 1998 and
opened a small-town general practice in Great Barrington, Massachusetts,
where she handled real estate transactions, and family law matters.
She closed that practice in 2007 when she was appointed as an Assistant
Solicitor General in the New York Attorney General’s Appeals and
Opinions Division. In 2011 she became Deputy Chief of the Attorney
General’s Environmental Protection Bureau. Ms. Wagner was a member of
the Clinton Administration transition team and served as President of
the Washington Council of Lawyers.
Among the cases she has worked on are
American Electric Power Co. v. Connecticut, 131 S.Ct. 2527 (2011);
State of New York v. United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 681 F.3d 471 (D.C.Cir. 2012);
Palmer v. Shultz (Baker), 815 F.2d 84 (D.C. Cir. 1987), 905 F.2d 1544 (D.C. Cir. 1990);
Friends of the Earth, Inc. v. Chevron Chemical Co., 129 F.3d 826 (5th Cir. 1997);
New Jersey Public Interest Research Group v. Magnesium Elektron, Inc., 123 F.3d 111 (3d Cir. 1997).
