Charles G. Curtis, Jr. joined Heller Ehrman LLP in 2001 as a shareholder. He is a founder and former co-chair of the firm’s Appeals & Strategy Practice. He also is a member of the Complex Commercial Litigation, Intellectual Property Litigation, and Antitrust & Trade Regulation Practice Groups.
Experience
Prior to joining Heller Ehrman, Mr. Curtis was a partner in Foley & Lardner and served as the national chair of its Appellate Practice Group. He has nearly 25 years of experience in counseling and litigating in a diversity of areas, including constitutional, administrative, antitrust, intellectual property, telecommunications, environmental and natural resource, and general commercial law. He focuses his practice on the briefing and argument of complex issues at the agency, trial and appellate levels.
Mr. Curtis also has been involved in a broad spectrum of litigation, agency proceedings, and business negotiations involving Native American legal issues. He has played a key role in cases defining the historic treaty rights and present-day sovereign powers of several tribes in the eastern, midwestern, and western United States and has extensive experience in briefing and arguing Indian law issues before federal and state tribunals. He has litigated cases involving issues of aboriginal and recognized title; tribal usufructuary rights; reservation disestablishment and diminishment; tribal regulation of nonmember activities; federal grants of regulatory authority to tribes; taxation, land use, natural resource, and environmental disputes with tribes; and issues involving the extent of Indian country jurisdiction. He has counseled a wide array of individuals, firms, trade groups, and governmental bodies in their commercial, political and legal relations with tribes and tribal entities.
Mr. Curtis served as a law clerk to Senior Judge David L. Bazelon of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (1982-1983), and to Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. of the Supreme Court of the United States (October Term, 1984).
Mr. Curtis is listed in The Best Lawyers in America and in Chambers USA — America’s Leading Lawyers for Business. He was a 2004 co-recipient of Heller Ehrman’s Richard E. Guggenhime Pro Bono Award, given each year to one or more attorneys who have demonstrated “exceptional commitment” to pro bono work in their legal practices. Mr. Curtis is an adjunct professor at Marquette University Law School.
Education
Harvard University (B.A., History, magna cum laude, 1978); The University of Chicago Law School (J.D., 1982); editor-in-chief, Volume 49, The University of Chicago Law Review.
Admissions & Courts
Wisconsin; Supreme Court of the United States; U.S. Courts of Appeals for the D.C., Third, Seventh, and Ninth Circuits; U.S. District Courts for the Eastern and Western Districts of Wisconsin; U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York.
Memberships
American Bar Association; Seventh Circuit Bar Association; State Bar of Wisconsin (member of Bar Stucture Commission, 2006-present); Dane County Bar Association; Wisconsin Federal Nominating Commission (2001-03).
Representative Engagements
Representative Engagements Involving Native American Legal Issues:
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Represents Philip Morris USA, Inc. in connection with a variety of Native American legal and government affairs issues, including in Philip Morris USA, Inc. v. Veles, Ltd., et al., SDNY No. 06 Civ. 2988, which seeks to enjoin false advertising on Native American-related websites regarding sales of “tax free” cigarettes to nonmembers and “guarantees” of nondisclosure to federal and state authorities. Monitors and advises client on a wide range of Native American legal, regulatory, government affairs, and commercial matters throughout the country.
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Represents PacifiCorp in Klamath Tribes of Oregon v. PacifiCorp, Ninth Circuit No. 05-36010, in which the Klamath are seeking more than $1 billion in compensatory and punitive damages for the alleged interference with anadromous fish runs caused by the construction and operation of government-authorized dams on the Klamath River beginning in 1911. After oral argument, the Ninth Circuit affirmed the District Court’s dismissal of the Klamath’s claims. See 2008 WL 539226 (9th Cir. Feb. 28, 2008). The Klamath have petitioned the Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari.
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Represented a group of village residents as amici curiae in Oneida Tribe of Indians v. Village of Hobart, Wisconsin, 542 F. Supp. 2d 908 (E.D. Wis. 2008), in which the District Court relied in part on the research and arguments in the amici brief in holding that fee lands within the exterior boundaries of a tribe's reservation that are repurchased by the tribe remain subject to local land use and condemnation authority unless and until placed into federal trust pursuant to 25 U.S.C. § 465.
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Represented several town governments in the New York Oneida Indian land claim area, and submitted an influential Supreme Court amici curiae brief in City of Sherrill, New York v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York, 544 U.S. 197 (2005). The court ruled 8-1 that the Oneida do not reacquire sovereignty over lands they purchase on the open market, notwithstanding that those lands lie within their historic reservation boundaries and were improperly acquired from them in prior centuries. The court grounded much of its decision on several arguments developed exclusively in the towns’ amici brief.
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Represented Oneida Ltd., the largest private landowner in the New York Oneida land claim area, in ongoing litigation in which three Oneida tribes assert continuing possessory rights and sovereignty over approximately 270,000 acres of Central New York State. The District Court expressly adopted large parts of Oneida Ltd.’s briefing and oral argument in holding that the tribes may not, as a matter of law, recover possession or damages from modern-day private landowners for historic governmental wrongdoing in dispossessing the tribes of their lands. See Oneida Indian Nation of New York State v. County of Oneida, 199 F.R.D. 61 (N.D.N.Y. 2000).
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Retained by Chicago Title Insurance Company to work with its usual outside counsel in defending against a tribal claim to continuing possessory rights and sovereignty over approximately 1.8 million acres of east-central Illinois. See Miami Tribe of Oklahoma v. Walden, SD Ill. Civ. Action No. 00-4142-JPG (voluntarily dismissed by Miami Tribe in 2001 after briefing).
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Retained by the Wisconsin Paper Council to defend against the Menominees’ aboriginal and treaty‑based claims to continuing natural resource rights in more than 9 million acres of eastern and central Wisconsin and the off-shore waters of Lake Michigan and Green Bay. The council’s briefs were instrumental in persuading the federal courts to reject the tribal land and water claims as a matter of law at the motion-to-dismiss stage. See Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin v. Thompson, 922 F. Supp. 184 (W.D. Wis. 1996), case dismissed, 934 F. Supp. 999 (W.D. Wis. 1996), affirmed, 161 F.3d 449 (7th Cir. 1998), cert. denied, 526 U.S. 1066 (1999).
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Represented a variety of trade groups and private firms from 1995 to 2001 in challenging the EPA’s decision to grant “Treatment as a State” status under the federal Clean Water Act to various Wisconsin tribes, and in challenging tribal water quality standards promulgated pursuant to this authority. See, e.g., Wisconsin v. EPA, W.D. Wis. Case No. 96-C‑397-C and E.D. Wis. Case No. 96-C-90, 96-C-329, and 96-C-450.
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Retained by Exxon Corporation to serve as lead defense counsel in a tribal claim to 144 square miles of northwestern Wisconsin (including mineral deposits). The federal courts held, based on a voluminous summary judgment historical record, that the tribe’s possessory and mineral rights had been extinguished in their entirety. See Sokaogon Chippewa Community v. Exxon Corp., 805 F. Supp. 680 (E.D. Wis. 1992), affirmed, 2 F.3d 219 (7th Cir. 1993), cert. denied, 510 U.S. 1196 (1994).
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Represented a variety of clients in litigation, agency rulemakings, and other administrative proceedings involving numerous other Native American issues, including the allocation of federal, state, and tribal regulatory authority in administering various federal environmental laws; trust land acquisitions; disputes involving rights-of-way through tribal lands; environmental justice claims; NEPA compliance; protection of burial sites and other traditional cultural properties; Native American water law issues; and tribal regulatory authority over nonmembers and nonmember lands.
- Provided counsel to a variety of private clients in their business negotiations with tribes, and served as Special Counsel to the City of Madison, Wisconsin in the negotiation of an Intergovernmental Services Agreement with the Ho-Chunk Nation in 1998.
Representative Engagements In Other Areas of the Law
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Have represented many individual, corporate, government, and associational clients in a variety of appellate matters before the Supreme Court of the United States, many of the federal courts of appeals, and many state appellate courts. Frequently consulted on appellate jurisdictional, procedural, substantive, and strategic issues.
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Represented Microsoft Corporation in the defense of numerous federal and state antitrust lawsuits in California, Arizona, Wisconsin, Iowa, and other jurisdictions, with particular emphasis on the res judicata and collateral estoppel issues arising out of U.S. v. Microsoft.
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Represented clients including VISA U.S.A., 3M, Kohler Co., and ev3, Inc. in the briefing of a wide range of federal antitrust issues.
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Represented Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and led the briefing team in WARF v. Geron Corp. (W.D. Wis.), the first lawsuit dealing with human embryonic stem cell patent rights. The case settled on favorable terms after extensive Rule 12 briefing.
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Represented Senator John McCain, Senator Russell Feingold, and several of their colleagues on a pro bono basis in helping to defend the constitutionality of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (“BCRA”). See McConnell v. FEC, 251 F. Supp. 2d 176 (D.D.C.), aff’d in part & rev’d in part, 540 U.S. 93 (2003). Presented briefing and oral argument to the three-judge district court on the "coordination" issues on behalf of the Congressional sponsors; member of the Supreme Court briefing team.
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Represents Representative Christopher Shays as the leader of the pro bono team that has successfully challenged nearly two dozen of the Federal Election Commission’s regulations implementing BCRA’s provisions regarding soft money, electioneering communications, coordinated expenditures, Federal election activity (FEA), and other campaign finance matters. The district court originally struck down 15 of the 19 FEC regulations challenged by Reps. Shays and Martin Meehan, and the D.C. Circuit affirmed on all issues appealed by the commission. Shays v. FEC, 337 F. Supp. 2d 28 (D.D.C.), motion for stay denied, 340 F. Supp. 2d 39 (D.D.C. 2004), affirmed, 414 F.3d 76 (D.C. Cir. 2005). After the FEC conducted further rulemaking proceedings on remand, Reps. Shays and Meehan again challenged a series of revised regulations involving key coordination, FEA, and soft-money issues. This time, the district court struck down five of the six challenged regulations. Shays v. FEC, 508 F. Supp. 2d 10 (D.D.C. 2007). The D.C. Circuit affirmed as to all but one of the issues appealed by the Commission, and — in response to Rep. Shays’s cross-appeal — reversed as to the one challenged regulation that the district court had upheld. Shays v. FEC, 528 F.3d 914 (D.C. Cir. 2008). The matter has again been remanded for further rulemaking.
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Have represented numerous additional clients in many different industries in patent, trademark, antitrust, telecommunications, public law, and private commercial litigation.
