The primary question before the Supreme Court in the Cleveland case, which involved a video poker lounge in Slidell, Louisiana, was whether a state license constitutes “property” under the federal mail fraud statute. In 1997, the Supreme Court had denied a petition for certiorari seeking a resolution of the conflict among the circuits on that question, but three years later  Paul convinced the Court to grant review.  The Court later resolved the question in favor of Paul’s client.

More recently, Paul’s client prevailed in United States v. Ford, 639 F.3d 718 (6th Cir. 2011), where the Sixth Circuit overturned a conviction on all six counts (two wire fraud/honest services counts and four false statement counts).  Paul also prevailed in his representation of a corporate defendant in the Fourth Circuit, which reversed a $200,000 sanction for alleged misconduct during discovery, and he has been involved in six successful challenges to punitive damages awards each of which exceeded $10 million.  He has argued cases in the District of Columbia, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Ninth, and Eleventh Circuits.

A prolific legal writer, Paul’s 1998 University of Chicago Law Review article about punitive damages was reprinted in The Right to a Fair Trial (2009), a collection of essays edited by Thom Brooks of Newcastle University.  His most recent article, published in The University of Denver Criminal Law Review, examines a 2014 decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit that rejected the multi-factor test utilized by several courts to determine where an alleged crime can be prosecuted.   

Paul has also written amicus curiae briefs for the American Bar Association in Mohawk Industries, Inc. v. Carpenter, 558 U.S. 100 (2009), and for the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers in Castro v. United States, 540 U.S. 375 (2003), and Wyoming v. Houghton, 526 U.S. 295 (1999).

Paul was born in Neptune, New Jersey and grew up an hour away in Bridgewater, in central New Jersey.  He graduated from Princeton University summa cum laude and received his J.D. degree magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review.  Paul was a law clerk to Judge Henry J. Friendly of the Second Circuit before joining Williams & Connolly in 1981.  He rejoined the firm after clerking for Associate Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall during the 1982 Term.  Paul was elected as a member of the American Law Institute in 2015.