Caleb Kruckenberg is an attorney in Pacific Legal Foundation’s Separation of Powers practice. He litigates cases concerning the nondelegation doctrine, agency adjudication, and due process, among other issues. Caleb was the lead attorney in Garrison v. United States Dept. of Education, PLF’s lawsuit against the Biden administration’s unlawful student loan cancellation program. He joined PLF in 2021.
As a former criminal defense lawyer, Caleb has a keen appreciation for what “liberty” really means. He has seen firsthand how our justice system is designed for maximum punishment while criminal laws are written so broadly that, as Harvey Silverglate said in his infamous book Three Felonies A Day, they become a “tyrannical trap for the unwary innocent.”
Innovation, creativity, and determination were the foundation for America’s greatest successes. But those same traits are the ones most despised by self-sustaining bureaucracies that thrive on conformity, fear, and hesitancy. It’s not surprising that Caleb regularly represents entrepreneurs who have been targeted by administrative agencies just because of their success.
Caleb believes that the best way to defeat abusive governmental involvement in our lives is to overwhelm it with the same entrepreneurial spirit embodied by his clients. He is not afraid to take risks, and, above all, he is relentless when the government is on the other side of his clients’ interests.
Before coming to PLF, Caleb worked as a prosecutor, a public defender, a lobbyist for a national advocacy organization, and, most recently, an impact litigator fighting the administrative state. He defeated the SEC in a jury trial, challenged an ATF regulation before the Tenth Circuit, sitting en banc, and sued seven U.S. attorneys general. He even convinced Chief Judge Timothy Tymkovich to describe Chevron deference as the “Lord Voldemort of administrative law.”
He graduated cum laude from Temple University Beasley School of Law in Philadelphia, where he was the lead articles editor for the Temple Law Review. He also attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he studied figurative painting.
Caleb is a member of the bar only in the states of New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and DC.
