Washington Lawyer - January/February 2022 - 36

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT
Ezra Rosenberg:
Championing Voters' Rights
By Richard Blaustein
J
ust shy of a half-century
career in law, Ezra Rosenberg
spent 20 years at Dechert LLP
focused mainly on mass tort
class action defense. Today his
public interest passion, which
emerged when he was young,
finds its fullest expression through
his work with the Lawyers' Committee
for Civil Rights Under Law,
where he is co-director of its
Voting Rights Project.
His most well-known case for the Lawyers'
Committee so far is the Veasey litigation, which
challenged Texas's voter ID law. In addition to
his current work on the consolidated Texas
case, Rosenberg has litigated census and
school segregation matters.
Jon Greenbaum, chief counsel for the Lawyers'
Committee who oversees the Voting Rights
Project, among other program units, says that
" working with the private bar to combat discrimination
and racial injustice through legal
strategies is at the heart of what the Lawyers'
Committee has done and continues to do, and
Ezra in a lot of ways encapsulates that. "
Born and raised in the central New Jersey city
of Perth Amboy by immigrant parents who ran
a local hardware store, Rosenberg always knew
he would go to law school. " I always thought
I would spend my career doing public interest
law, " he says.
After getting a degree in sociology at the
University of Pennsylvania, Rosenberg attended
New York University Law School and earned his
JD in 1974. He clerked a year for Judge John
Crane of the Appellate Division of the New
Jersey Superior Court in
Newark, and then worked for
three years with the New
Jersey Department of the
Public Advocate.
Afterward Rosenberg spent
three years with the U.S.
Department of Justice as a
senior trial attorney before
joining Katzenbach, Gildea and
Rudner, a small New Jersey firm
that eventually became part of
Fox Rothschild LLP. In 1995 he
joined Dechert's Princeton,
New Jersey, office. In addition
to being partner, Rosenberg
served several terms as Policy
Committee member, as a
deputy chair of the firm, and as
co-chair of its product liability
and mass torts group.
Rosenberg says Dechert gave
him the chance to hone his
collaborative skills, which
found apt application in the
Texas voter ID case. " In the
mass tort defense area, some
of the clients like to create
what we call virtual law firms
where they will pick lawyers from different
firms - people experienced in government
investigations, people experienced in the
products liability side, in the class action side,
etc. " - with the client expecting the different
firms to work together and coordinate, says
Rosenberg.
Toward the end of his time at Dechert,
Rosenberg expressed his desire to do pro bono
work, and in 2012 the firm directed him to a
voting rights matter that converged under the
consolidated Veasey case. His pro bono clients
were both the Lawyers' Committee and the
Brennan Center for Justice.
Wendy Weiser, the Brennan Center's vice
president and director of its Democracy
36 WASHINGTON LAWYER * JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022
Program, worked with Rosenberg on the
matter. According to Weiser, Rosenberg
" quickly became the go-to leader on the case,
which doesn't usually happen when you have
a case of that import and that many stakeholders. "
Rosenberg " had an unusual way of
winning trust and an unusual degree of
empathy and respect for everybody he was
working with, " Weiser says.
The trajectory of the Veasey case is complicated.
In 2011 Texas enacted SB 14, which
limited the acceptable types of photo IDs for
voters to cast their ballot. The state sought preclearance
from the Department of Justice
(DOJ) as stipulated under the Voting Rights Act
Section 5 provision. Shortly before then-U.S.
Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law
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