After a long and distinguished career in the federal government with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Ms. Wheeler joined Katz Banks Kumin LLP as Of Counsel in August 2015.
As an appellate lawyer with the EEOC, Ms. Wheeler was in the forefront of developing cutting edge legal arguments and theories to prove discrimination and harassment under Title VII, The Age Discrimination in Employment Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Equal Pay Act. Ms. Wheeler was an Assistant General Counsel in EEOC’s Office of General Counsel, Appellate Services Division, for 25 years, and for 12 years served intermittently as the Acting Associate General Counsel, with responsibility for managing the entire office and staff.
As an Assistant General Counsel, she supervised six attorneys who prepared briefs and argued appeals in EEOC cases in all the federal courts of appeals, as well as the Supreme Court, and who filed briefs as amicus curiae in cases raising important legal issues under EEOC’s statutes. For example, in past years she worked on the landmark decision holding that fetal protection policies that bar fertile women from particular jobs violate Title VII and the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, UAW v. Johnson Controls; the trilogy of disability cases that spurred the amendments to the ADA, Sutton v. United Airlines, Murphy v. UPS, and Albertson’s v. Kirkingburg, as well as the disability case that led Congress to reexamine the meaning of “substantially limited,” Toyota v. Williams; the cases that led to the creation of an affirmative defense for supervisory sexual harassment, Faragher v. City of Boca Raton and Ellerth v. Burlington Industries; the sexual harassment case recognizing that same-sex harassment is actionable, Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, and the sexual harassment case recognizing that harassment victims do not need to prove they were emotionally devastated to the point of being unable to work to establish actionable harassment, Harris v. Forklift Systems.
