Anne Noel Occhialino

Anne Noel Occhialino is an experienced civil rights attorney and appellate advocate with a passion for legal writing and mentoring students. Ms. Occhialino served for twenty-five years at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). She began her career in the EEOC’s Honors Program as a line attorney in the Office of General Counsel’s Appellate Litigation Services. She most recently served as an Assistant General Counsel supervising a team of attorneys. She has briefed and argued over fifty employment discrimination cases in eleven different federal courts of appeals. She is an expert on federal anti-discrimination employment law, including Title VII, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. While at the EEOC, Ms. Occhialino worked with the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division on Title VII and ADA cases against state and local government employers and with the Office of Solicitor General on employment discrimination cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Ms. Occhialino has received numerous awards, including the “Champion of Opportunity Award Winner” for groundbreaking work on EEOC v. R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes, Inc., 884 F.3d 560 (6th Cir. 2018), aff’d sub nom. Bostock v. Clayton County, 590 U.S. 644 (2020), in which the Sixth Circuit agreed that transgender discrimination violates Title VII’s prohibition on sex discrimination.

Ms. Occhialino is the coordinator of George Washington Law School’s Scholarly Writing Program and a Professorial Lecturer of Law for GW’s Fundamental Lawyering class. She is also an adjunct professor for the University of New Mexico School of Law’s “DC Semester Program.” Ms. Occhialino is a graduate of Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where she earned a BA in English and in American Studies. She graduated cum laude from the University of New Mexico School of Law. Following law school, she clerked for Judge James A. Parker in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico. She previously taught as an adjunct professor at GW in the Legal Research and Writing Program.