Four attorneys comprise the legal team defending the Lawrenceville Living Wage Ordinance:

• Falk Engel
• Jennifer Sung, Brennan Center for Social Justice
• Paul Sonn, Brennan Center for Social Justice
• Bennet Zurofsky

Newark law firm Gibbons P.C. also provided advice on the appeal.

Falk Engel

Attorney
Lawrenceville, NJ

Falk Engel practices as a civil liberties and public interest attorney in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. He has litigated a number of first amendment issues, notably freedom of speech and assembly cases. Much of his work deals with freedom of religion and church governance matters. He is active throughout New Jersey on environmental and animal protection controversies, representing both wildlife protection advocates and property owners, and frequently advises municipal governments on wildlife management policy. Together with the well known Princeton civil rights lawyers Bruce Afran and Carl Mayer he litigated against Princeton (N.J.) Township's controversial deer killing programs.

Falk Engel has served as the chair of StopPaytoPlay.org and is presently a Mercer County co-chair for the Citizens Campaign, advocating for open government and pay-to-play reform. He has worked extensively in Mercer and other New Jersey counties advising citizens groups and township councils, and has worked with numerous municipalities in drafting tighter laws against pay-to-play practices. In 2004 he led a successful referendum in Lawrence Township for pay-to-play reform, which passed with 78% of the vote.

With extensive experience in state politics, he is no stranger to the interrelationship of law and political policy. He has worked in a political capacity for numerous gubernatorial candidates and members of Congress; principally on behalf of Gov. Christie Whitman and Congressman Bob Franks.

Falk is a Lawrence Township native and graduated from Lawrence High School in 1974. He received both his undergraduate and graduate education in political science from Columbia University, where he also worked in teaching and as a researcher in political science. He later earned a J.D. from Rutgers School of Law Newark.

He presently teaches constitutional law review classes part-time at Rutgers-Newark under the auspices of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies. The constitutional review class program, which has been nationally recognized at Rutgers, was created under Falk Engels leadership in 2000.

Falk Engel supports the Living Wage Coalition in Lawrence Township to better protect the rights of working people and to advocate for the interests of propery taxpayers who should not have to subsidize corporate low-wage employers with social costs that are passed to the community.

Jennifer Sung

Associate Counsel and Skadden Fellow
Brennan Center for Social Justice at New York University School of Law

Ms. Sung works primarily with grassroots coalitions to develop new public policies to promote accountable economic development. She also provides support to campaigns to secure living wages, expand access to health care, and protect the right of workers to organize. Prior to joining the Brennan Center, Ms. Sung clerked for Judge Betty Binns Fletcher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. She received her J.D. from Yale Law School (2004), where she was a co-founder of the Hospital Debt Justice Project in the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization and served as co-chair of the Workers Rights Project. She received her B.A. from Oberlin College (1994).

Paul Sonn

Deputy Director
Brennan Center for Social Justice at New York University School of Law

Mr. Sonn co-directs the Economic Justice Project at the Brennan Center. He coordinates the Center’s legal and legislative support for state and local campaigns around living wage jobs, workers’ rights, and accountable development. He has more than ten years of experience designing new state and local policies and defending reform measures against legal challenge. Under his direction, the Brennan Center has helped policymakers and grassroots activists promote state campaigns to raise the minimum wage, defend the legality of citywide minimum wage laws, and develop model programs to improve enforcement of the minimum wage and expand access to health care. Prior to joining the Center in 1999, Mr. Sonn worked as a civil rights litigator at the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund. Mr. Sonn clerked for Judge Thelton E. Henderson of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and Judge R. Lanier Anderson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School (1992), where he was Senior Editor of the Yale Law Journal, and earned an A.B. from Dartmouth College (1988).

Bennet Zurofsky

Partner
Reitman Parsonnet, P.C., Newark, New Jersey

Bennet concentrates in the representation of unions, employees and benefit funds.  He is an Adjunct Professor at Rutgers Law School.

Bennet's activism extends far beyond the court room: he is frequently on the picket line, either defending free speech rights or raising fighting spirits as the Director of the Solidarity Singers of the New Jersey Industrial Union Council. As a litigator, his notable cases include: successfully defending the constitutionality of the New Jersey Community Right to Know Act against a challenge brought by the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, obtaining public deportation proceedings for a post 9/11 detainee who the Department of Justice had declared should be tried in secrecy, and eliminating sexually discriminatory obstacle course testing for municipal police officers. Over the years, he has represented many international and local unions and has helped hundreds of unrepresented employees in their efforts to obtain justice from their employers.
 
As a neutral he serves as Special Master for United States District for the District of New Jersey in litigation relating to inmates' rights at the Essex County (N.J.) Jail, Jail Annex and Youth House.  He is a past Chairman of The New Jersey Supreme Court's District Ethics Committee for Essex County.  He also serves as arbitrator or neutral in non-labor matters and is on the list of mediators for the New Jersey Superior Court.

Mr. Zurofsky is presently a member of the Executive Committee of the Alternative dispute Resolution Section of the New Jersey State Bar Association.  He has served as a member of the National Advisory Board of the AFL-CIO Lawyers Coordinating Committee, the Executive Committee of the New Jersey Plaintiff Employment Lawyers Association, and the Executive Committee of the Labor and Employment Section of the New Jersey State Bar Association.  He is Contributing Editor of The Developing Labor Law, has written several articles for professional publications and has lectured on many labor, employment and attorney ethics topics.

Mr. Zurofsky received his undergraduate degree from Rutgers University and his law degree from Rutgers University Law School-Newark, where he was the recipient of the Alumni Scholar prize.  He served as a Law Clerk to the Honorable Harold A. Ackerman of the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey.