Practices:

• Litigation
  • Appellate
  • Federal Issues Litigation
  • Product Liability and Toxic Tort
    • Pesticides
• Environment, Energy & Product Regulation

Experience

Larry Ebner is an accomplished appellate litigator. He specializes in representing companies that produce products or provide services that are regulated by the Federal Government.  Larry founded and heads the firm’s Appellate Practice Group.  Clients and colleagues throughout the United States praise Larry for his analytical, brief writing, and oral advocacy skills.

Larry is widely recognized as a leading expert on federal preemption of state and local law.  This includes Larry’s nationally prominent advocacy of federal preemption defenses in product liability and tort suits before federal and state appellate and trial courts.  He also frequently writes and lectures on this subject.

In July 2009 Larry spoke on the subject of federal preemption at the National Foundation for Judicial Excellence’s annual symposium, which was attended by more than 120 state supreme court justices and appellate court judges.

In addition to federal preemption, Larry represents industry’s interests on a wide variety of constitutionally based or federally related issues.  This has  included appearances before federal courts of appeals and state appellate courts, in  amicus curiae briefs submitted to the Supreme Court, and in federal and state trial courts. 

Some of Larry’s cases have involved issues such as (i) whether "battlefield contractors" can be subjected to common-law personal injury or wrongful death suits arising out of the logistical support services that they provide to the U.S. military in Iraq; (ii) whether federal law preempts local governments from shifting infrastructure rehabilitation costs to a federally funded interstate rail passenger company; (iii) whether the state secrets privilege bars tort litigation alleging that telecommunications companies collected national security-related information for federal government agencies; (iv) whether environmental activists have standing to file suits challenging government regulation of genetically engineered plants; and (v) whether the patent exhaustion doctrine applies to downstream computer industry commercial transactions.

Larry also serves the legal needs of the pesticide industry.  He represents and advises individual pesticide producers, pesticide industry trade associations, and joint data development groups in a broad range of product liability, compliance and enforcement, registration and labeling, and data compensation matters.

Larry acted as Office Administrative Partner for the firm’s Washington, D.C. office between 1994-97.  Prior to joining the firm in 1974, Larry served for two years as an Honors Program attorney in the Civil Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.  

Education

• J.D., Harvard Law School, 1972
• B.A., Dartmouth College, cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, 1969

Admitted

• District of Columbia
• U.S. Supreme Court
• U.S. Courts of Appeals for All Federal Circuits