Bryan M. Killian

Throughout his career, Bryan has had a central role in high-profile environmental matters. He briefed the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit litigation challenging US Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation of stationary-source greenhouse gas emissions. He challenged the constitutionality of California’s low carbon fuel standard on behalf of out-of-state fuel producers. He represented one of the owners of the oil well involved in the Deepwater Horizon disaster. And he represents defendants in climate-change suits brought by state and local municipalities. Bryan also regularly briefs and argues on behalf of the domestic biofuels industry in state and federal cases related to the federal Renewable Fuel Standard.

Bryan’s non-environmental matters arise in a variety of areas, and recent representative examples include work in arbitration, tax, and American Indian law. Bryan represents companies seeking to compel arbitration under the Federal Arbitration Act and has persuaded federal courts of appeal to overturn district court decisions refusing to compel arbitration. He has convinced the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit to unanimously reverse a district court decision that refused to issue a tax refund to a major US railroad, opening up a circuit split on the question. Bryan co-leads Morgan Lewis’s American Indian law practice and has been involved in a range of cases arising out of fee-to-trust conversions and tribal jurisdiction.

Bryan previously served as a law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia of the United States Supreme Court and to Judge Paul Niemeyer of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Bryan also was a Bristow Fellow in the Office of the Solicitor General, where he worked on federal civil and criminal appeals and on the federal government’s cases in the US Supreme Court. He is a member of the Fourth Circuit Judicial Conference.

As a law student, Bryan’s pro bono work on copyright was featured in the Harvard Law Bulletin; and as a lawyer, he successfully resolved an authorship dispute in federal court between a Connecticut museum and a former volunteer.