Room 320F, Third Floor
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Join us for an informal brown bag lunch with Bob Libman, BA ’85, JD ‘88

Hear about Bob’s experience as a litigator in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and in private practice at Miner, Barnhill & Galland in Chicago (where Barack Obama practiced).

About Bob Libman
Bob Libman was born and raised in the Chicago area. He obtained his undergraduate degree in Economics from Stanford University in 1985, and his law degree from Stanford Law School in 1988.

After serving as law clerk to the Honorable Joyce Hens Green of the United States
District Court for the District of Columbia for two years, Mr. Libman began his career in civil rights litigation as a plaintiff, bringing a Fourth Amendment challenge to the United States Department of Justice’s policy of suspicionless drug-testing of applicants for trial attorney positions in the Department’s Civil Rights Division in Libman v. Thornburg.
From 1991 until 2004, Mr. Libman held a variety of positions in the Employment Litigation Section of the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice,
where he litigated a wide variety of cases under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 under both disparate treatment and disparate impact theories. Mr. Libman successfully tried a sex discrimination failure to promote case in United States v. Hancock Count Board of Education, litigated and obtained a consent decree in the Civil Rights Division’s first lawsuit alleging a pattern or practice of sexual harassment by a public employer in United States v. McHenry County, (Illinois), litigated and obtained a consent decree resolving claims of systemic racial and sexual harassment in United States v. New Jersey Department of Corrections, and successfully argued the appeal in United States v. Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, a case of first impression interpreting the “consistent with business necessity” standard under the disparate impact provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1991. Mr. Libman trained trial attorneys in the Civil Rights Division and the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on trial advocacy and spoke frequently on behalf of the Department of Justice at national conferences of employer, employee, and stakeholder organizations regarding Title VII.

In 2002, he was selected by the Civil Rights Division to be its sole representative to the Department of Justice’s newly formed Employment Discrimination Task Force. Mr.
Libman received numerous awards and commendations from the Department of Justice for his work as a trial attorney, senior trial attorney, and Special Litigation Counsel in the Employment Litigation Section.

In 2004, Mr. Libman returned to Chicago to join the law firm of Miner, Barnhill & Galland, where he has been a partner since 2005 representing individual and class
plaintiffs in a variety of civil rights and other public interest cases. Among other cases, in Vergara, et al. v. City of Waukegan, Mr. Libman represented a group of Latino and African-American residents alleging that the City of Waukegan and its Mayor and Chief of Police interfered with their First Amendment rights to protest what they believed to be the Police Department’s racial profiling and discriminatory enforcement of various City ordinances. Mr. Libman served as a Special Assistant Attorney General for seven states in litigation against dozens of pharmaceutical manufacturers alleging pricing fraud in violation of state consumer protection, Medicaid fraud, and false claims statutes, and served as lead or co-lead counsel in four jury trials in these cases. Mr. Libman represented the Sierra Club in Sierra Club v. PPL Montana, et al., in a case under the Clean Air Act alleging that a coal-fired power plant in Montana made major modifications that increased emission of pollutants without obtaining the required permits.

Mr. Libman currently represents the local chapter of the NAACP in NAACP v. Jacksonville Fire & Rescue Department, a Title VII disparate impact case challenging written promotional examinations in the Jacksonville, Florida Fire Department. In Pruitt v. Quality Labor Services, et al., Mr. Libman represents a putative class of African-Americans alleging that the defendant staffing agency and its client companies failed to assign them for work because of their race. Mr. Libman represents two Chicago
community groups in Brighton Park Neighborhood Council v. Berrios, et al., a case filed in December 2017 alleging that the Assessor of Cook County, Illinois conducts
assessments of residential properties that systematically and illegally shifts property tax burdens from Whites to Hispanics and African-Americans, and from the rich to the poor in violation of various federal and state laws.

Since 1995, Bob has been married to Karen Altenberg Libman, a clinical social worker originally from Silver Spring, Maryland. They have three children.