Sara Maeder

Sara Maeder is a second-year law student at NYU, where she is a Root-Tilden-Kern Scholar.  Prior to law school, she worked as a paralegal, first at Lambda Legal and then at Children’s Rights.  Sara worked as a legal intern at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project last summer, and will spend this coming summer at The Defender Association in Seattle, WA.  She currently serves as a political action chair of OUTLaw at NYU, and as a staff editor for the Review of Law and Social Change.

Sara Maeder is the author of Divorcing Marriage from its Incidents: Framing Perry as a Celebration of Family Self-Determination.

Brian Chelcun

Brian Chelcun is a third year law student at NYU Law, pursuing interests in LGBT rights and protecting civil liberties in a post-9/11 national security world.  He is more optimistic about the former than the latter.  Brian spent a summer at Lambda Legal and a semester at Sylvia Rivera Law Project through the NYU Law LGBT clinic, and interned as an Arthur Garfield Hays Civil Liberties Fellow at the ACLU’s National Security Project and Legal Aid Society’s LGBT Law and Policy Initiative.  After graduation, Brian will clerk for federal judges in New York City and pursue a career in direct legal services.  Prior to law school, Brian served as a Peace Corps Volunteer doing HIV prevention and education in Tanzania, and worked as a foreign policy legislative aide to former U.S. Senator Russ Feingold.

Brian Chelcun is the author of Perry‘s Path to Equality: Rejecting “Gay Marriage” and Rethinking the “Right to Marry”.

Joshua Matz

Joshua Matz graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 2012.  He is currently a law clerk to Judge J. Paul Oetken of the Southern District of New York.  From 2013 to 2014, he will clerk for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. In law school, Joshua served as President of the American Constitution Society and as Articles, Book Reviews, and Commentaries Chair of the Harvard Law Review.  He also worked as a research assistant to Professors William Stuntz, David Barron, and Laurence Tribe, interned for SCOTUSblog, and assisted several professors with appellate litigation projects.  Joshua received the Irving Oberman Memorial Prize in Constitutional Law for the Class of 2012.

Before attending HLS, Joshua received a B.A. magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.St. with distinction from Oxford University.

Joshua Matz is the co-author, with Laurence H. Tribe, of An Ephemeral Moment: Minimalism, Equality, and Federalism in the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage Rights.

Ryan Kendall

As a young, gay teen, Mr. Kendall was sent by his parents to a so-called conversion therapist in a desperate attempt to somehow “fix” him. The practice of conversion therapy, combined with familial rejection, virtually destroyed his sense of place in the world. At the age of 16, Mr. Kendall surrendered himself to the Colorado Department of Human Services and sought to have his parents’ custody of him revoked. What followed were dark years filled with depression, drug abuse, thoughts of suicide, and periods of homelessness. In 2010, Ryan told his story in the district trial of Hollingsworth v. Perry, to show to the world that sexual orientation is an immutable trait and to illustrate the fact LGBT people have been subjected to an ugly history of discrimination and abuse, often from members of their own families. Today Mr. Kendall studies political science at Columbia University and continues his work to ensure that no child is subjected to the discredited and dangerous practice of conversion therapy.

Ryan Kendall is the author of Prop. 8: Advancing Civil Rights Through Cultural and Constitutional Change.