About Henry J. Perlstein

Henry J. Perlstein, Attorney at Law, represents private and public entity clients across the Portland metro area in civil litigation and appeals, municipal, real property, land use, and administrative matters. Henry has represented clients in contested case proceedings and in Oregon courts, including before the Oregon Court of Appeals.

Henry opened his solo practice in Portland in August 2026, after serving as a law clerk for the firm of Chandler Lang Haswell and Cole, P.A., and then as an associate attorney at Schroeder Law Offices, P.C. He has also served as an appellate research clerk for Attorney Joan M. Fund in Massachusetts, performing research, analysis, and felony criminal appellate brief drafting.

Henry has managed civil and administrative litigation in Oregon circuit courts and before state agencies. He has also advised business and residential real estate clients throughout Oregon, conducting real property title and due diligence reviews and negotiating and drafting contracts.

Public entity representation is a core focus of Henry’s practice. He has represented a municipal client, an Oregon city, by advising on contracts, code enforcement, procurement, employment, land use, regulatory, and policy matters.

Henry’s litigation and transactional work in Oregon has included real property and water rights, including petitions for judicial review and contested case matters challenging decisions by the Oregon Water Resources Department (OWRD).

Henry earned his J.D. from the University of Florida (UF) Levin College of Law in 2012. After law school, he did significant work with venture-backed companies in the mission-driven technology space. He first moved to Oregon in 2020, was admitted to the Oregon State Bar in 2022, and was admitted to the Massachusetts Bar in 2026. Henry returned to the University of Florida in 2023 for post-baccalaureate study in computer science at the Wertheim College of Engineering, where his team took third prize in the UF/NVIDIA AI Days Hackathon.

Henry’s work in legal technology has been featured in the ABA Journal and covered by FlaLaw Magazine, Legal Practice Intelligence, the State Bar of Texas Blog, and the New York Law Journal.

As a law student, Henry spent two semesters as a student associate in the UF Conservation Clinic, supporting the representation of municipal governments and environmental organizations in land use, zoning, and environmental regulatory matters, and served as a judicial intern to Circuit Judge Jeffrey R. Levenson in Florida’s Seventeenth Judicial Circuit. He also researched for the late Professor Steven M. Wise as a volunteer legal researcher and writer with the Nonhuman Rights Project. Before law school he interned in the Washington, D.C. office of U.S. Representative F. Allen Boyd.

Henry is also a published legal author. His scholarship examines the evolving boundaries of legal personhood: the line separating those who are subjects of legal rights and duties from those who are not. He approaches the question from two perspectives. Procedurally, he studies the mechanisms by which courts recognize or deny rights, and how that recognition varies by jurisdiction. Substantively, he applies established frameworks to ask which individuals and entities should be recognized, what rights and duties attach to each, how natural and legal persons differ, and what moral, social, and philosophical commitments shape those distinctions. His published work to date centers on the writ of personal replevin, a common-law ancestor and companion remedy to the writ of habeas corpus.

His article “From the Ashes of the Common Law”: Personal Replevin in the 21st Century, appeared in volume 19 of the Intercultural Human Rights Law Review.

Henry serves on the Oregon Appellate Pro Bono Panel and volunteers with Legal Aid Services of Oregon.

Outside the practice, Henry enjoys nothing more than spending time with family. He has also hiked throughout the Western U.S., including in California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and the Idaho Rockies. Even outside of work, he often finds himself in “court,” playing tennis or basketball.