Nancy Polikoff

Nancy D. Polikoff is Professor of Law at American University Washington College of Law, where she teaches in the areas of family law, civil procedure, and sexuality and the law. Previously, she supervised family law programs at the Women’s Legal Defense Fund (now National Partnership for Women and Families), and before that she practiced law as part of a feminist law collective. For 30 years, she has been writing about and litigating cases involving lesbian and gay families. Her articles have appeared in numerous law reviews, and her history of the development of the law affecting lesbian and gay parenting appears as a chapter in J. D’Emilio, W. Turner, and U. Vaid, eds., Creating Change: Sexuality, Public Policy, and Civil Rights (2000). She helped develop the legal theories in support of second-parent adoption and visitation rights for legally unrecognized parents, and she was successful counsel in In re M.M.D., the 1995 case that established joint adoption for lesbian and gay couples in the District of Columbia, and Boswell v. Boswell, the 1998 Maryland case overturning restrictions on a gay noncustodial father’s visitation rights.

Professor Polikoff is the author of the recently published book, Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage: Valuing All Families Under the Law (Beacon Press 2008).  She is also the author of What Marriage Equality Arguments Portend for Domestic Partner Employee Benefits.

Gabriel Arkles

Gabriel Arkles graduated from New York University School of Law in 2004. After NYU, he joined the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP) first as an Equal Justice Works Fellow and then as a Staff Attorney and Director of Prisoner Justice Initiatives. There he provided legal services to low-income people and people of color who are transgender, intersex, or gender nonconforming. He also engaged in impact litigation, public education, and policy work to advance justice for these communities. His work at SRLP spanned issues of public benefits, name changes, identity documents, immigration, discrimination, and shelter access, with a particular focus on prisoners’ rights. He joined NYU as an Acting Assistant Professor of Lawyering in 2010 and currently serves on the Board of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project and the Lorena Borjas Community Fund.

Gabriel Arkles is the author of Marriage and Mass Incarceration.

Kate O’Regan

Catherine (Kate) O’Regan was born in Liverpool, England but grew up in Cape Town, South Africa. She obtained a BA and an LLB at the University of Cape Town, an LLM at the University of Sydney in Australia and a PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science. During the 1980s, she worked as an attorney in Johannesburg specialising in labour law and land rights law. At the end of that decade, she joined the faculty of the University of Cape Town where she taught civil procedure, evidence and labour law. In 1994, she was appointed a judge of the newly established Constitutional Court of South Africa. Her fifteen year term of office came to an end in 2009. Since then she has served as an ad hoc judge of the Namibian Supreme Court, chairperson of the United Nations Internal Justice Council (since 2008), President of the International Monetary Fund Administrative Tribunal and as a visiting professor at the University of Oxford and an honorary professor at the University of Cape Town.

Kate O’Regan is the author of Undoing Humiliation, Fostering Equal Citizenship: Human Dignity in South Africa’s Sexual Orientation Equality Jurisprudence.