Bilal Abdul Kareem grew up in New York and built a career as a freelance journalist. By his account, that work took him into reporting territory in Syria where five U.S. airstrikes nearly killed him. He came to believe the explanation was not coincidence but a designation: that his own government had placed him on a list of people marked for death.

On June 13, 2018, a federal judge agreed he deserved the chance to find out. In a 30-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Rosemary M. Collyer refused to throw out Kareem's lawsuit, holding that an American citizen cannot be targeted for lethal action without any opportunity to be heard. Collyer rejected the idea that the executive branch holds unilateral authority to mark a citizen for death beyond the reach of any court. Due process, she wrote, "is not merely an old and dusty procedural obligation" but "a living, breathing concept that protects U.S. persons from overreaching government action even, perhaps, on an occasion of war." The Washington Post reported the ruling here.

The decision was a rare one. Courts have generally been reluctant to second-guess national security determinations, and a co-plaintiff in the case, former Al Jazeera bureau chief Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan, saw his claims dismissed as too speculative because he was not a U.S. citizen. What set Kareem apart was precisely his citizenship. The court treated his constitutional right to due process, together with his First Amendment rights as a journalist, as a "birthright" that an unreviewed government list could not erase.

Representing the plaintiffs was Tara J. Plochocki, today a partner at Sequor Law, where she leads the firm's Washington, D.C. office. Her work on the kill list lawsuit is one strand of a practice that runs through constitutional rights, international law, and national security.

The same command of federal litigation — and of the appellate rules that govern what a court may and may not review — is what she now applies to cross-border asset recovery and complex financial fraud at Sequor Law. The subject matter is different now; the method is the same. Find the legal question that controls the outcome, then press it through a federal system that concedes nothing without a fight.

Targeted killing cases are extraordinary, and few practitioners will ever litigate one. Yet the principle the ruling protected is ordinary and foundational. Before the government acts against a citizen irreversibly, the citizen has a right to be heard. Plochocki's record on that question informs the matters she handles today.