Evan Wolfson

Evan Wolfson is Founder and President of Freedom to Marry, the campaign to win marriage nationwide. In 1983, Evan wrote his Harvard Law School thesis on gay people and the freedom to marry.  During the 1990’s he served as co-counsel in the historic Hawaii marriage case that launched the ongoing global movement for the freedom to marry, and has participated in numerous gay rights and HIV/AIDS cases. He earned a B.A. in history from Yale College in 1978; served as a Peace Corps volunteer in a village in Togo, West Africa; and wrote the book, Why Marriage Matters: America, Equality, and Gay People’s Right to Marry, published by Simon & Schuster in July 2004. Citing his national leadership on marriage and his appearance before the U.S. Supreme Court in Boy Scouts of America v. James Dale, the National Law Journal in 2000 named Evan one of “the 100 most influential lawyers in America.”  Newsweek/The Daily Beast dubbed Evan “the godfather of gay marriage” and Time Magazine named him one of “the 100 most influential people in the world.” In 2012, Evan received the Barnard Medal of Distinction alongside President Barack Obama.

Evan Wolfson is the author of Where Perry Fits in the National Strategy to Win the Freedom to Marry.

Dean Spade

Dean Spade is an associate professor at the Seattle University School of Law and is currently a fellow in the Engaging Tradition Project at Columbia Law School. In 2002 he founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a non-profit collective that provides free legal help to low-income people and people of color who are trans, intersex and/or gender non-conforming and works to build trans resistance rooted in racial and economic justice. He is the author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law (South End Press 2011).

Dean Spade is the author of Under the Cover of Gay Rights.

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.