Thomas F. Gede

Tom Gede is Counsel at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP, having retired January 2023.  He now consults for various public and private clients on a variety of legal and policy matters. At the Morgan Lewis, he assisted clients in sensitive high-profile matters involving state governments and represented clients in complex governmental matters in litigation, administrative and regulatory proceedings. A former senior deputy in the California Attorney General’s office, he was amicus coordinator and Supreme Court counsel, and argued cases in the U.S. Supreme Court, the California Supreme Court, and numerous state and federal appellate courts.

Mr. Gede also served as executive director of the Conference of Western Attorneys General (CWAG), coordinating activities on key legal and policy issues, such as federal Indian law, energy, environmental, public lands, financial services, and telecommunications, for the attorneys general of 18 western states and territories. He has taught federal Indian law as an adjunct law professor at the University of the Pacific - McGeorge School of Law. He was also an assistant editor for and the author of the Indian gaming chapter in CWAG’s American Indian Law Deskbook (2d & 3d eds.). He has been engaged in Indian gaming and Indian law matters for more than three decades, having focused on the gaming compacts with Indian tribes, as well as complex civil and criminal jurisdiction, land, natural resources, water and law enforcement issues in Indian country.

Mr. Gede has testified before Congress on American Indian and Native Alaskan issues, and was selected as an Adviser on the Restatement of the Law Third, The Law of American Indians. In 2012 he was appointed by Speaker John Boehner to serve on the United States Indian Law and Order Commission, where he examined criminal justice issues in Indian country and Alaska, resulting in the issuance of an important report to the President and Congress.