Deborah K. Marcuse

Listen to this article

Deborah K. Marcuse

Firm Managing Partner and Baltimore Managing Partner
Sanford Heisler Sharp LLP

Deborah Marcuse came to the law after initially pursuing an academic career.

After finishing Yale Law, Marcuse served as the founding head of the City of New Haven’s Reentry Initiative as an Arthur Liman Public Interest Fellow.

That early career experience later translated into more effective advocacy for her clients in an academic workplace lawsuit, Rapuano et al v. Dartmouth. She led the team for Sanford Heisler Sharp LLP, in the case, representing current and former female graduate students and undergraduates at Dartmouth’s Department of Psychology and Brain Sciences. In May 2020, the United States District Court for the District of New Hampshire approved a $14 million settlement and an additional $1.5 million in programmatic relief.

“This high-profile case gave us a national platform to highlight the dangers posed by professors who historically have wielded almost unlimited power over the careers of their graduate students,” she said.

Last year, Marcuse was named firm managing partner of Sanford Heisler Sharp.

Prior to returning to the firm to establish its Baltimore office, she was a partner at Feinstein Doyle Payne & Kravec LLC in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She was also a co-managing partner of Sanford Heisler Sharp’s New York office.

She also worked on a pro-bono basis, in partnership with nonprofits including the ACLU of Maryland and CAIR Coalition, to successfully challenge unconstitutional bond hearing policies and practices of the Baltimore Immigration Court.

“The class-wide preliminary injunction we obtained in May 2020 reshaped bond hearings in Maryland immigration courts by requiring the government to justify an immigrant’s continued detention and immigration judges to consider a detainee’s financial circumstances when setting bond amounts and terms of release,” she said.

Marcuse is also an active member of the National Employment Lawyers’ Association (NELA), which provides legal training for workers’ rights attorneys, promotes a fair judiciary and advocates for laws and policies that benefit workers.

“This high-profile case gave us a national platform to highlight the dangers posed by professors who historically have wielded almost unlimited power over the careers of their graduate students.”