Melissa Murray

Melissa Murray joined the Berkeley Law faculty in 2006. She teaches Family Law, Criminal Law, and Advanced Topics in Family Law. Murray is a graduate of the University of Virginia, where she was a Jefferson Scholar and an Echols Scholar, and Yale Law School, where she was notes development editor of the Yale Law Journal. While in law school, she earned special recognition as an NAACP-LDF/Shearman & Sterling Scholar and was a semifinalist of Morris Tyler Moot Court.

Following law school, Murray clerked for Sonia Sotomayor, then of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, and Stefan Underhill of the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut. Murray is a member of the New York bar.

Her research focuses on the roles that criminal law and family law play in articulating the legal parameters of intimate life, and encompasses such topics as marriage and its alternatives, the criminal regulation of sex and sexuality, the marriage equality debate, and the legal recognition of caregiving. Her publications have appeared (or are forthcoming) in the California Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Iowa Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Virginia Law Review, and Yale Law Journal, among others.

Her article, “Marriage as Punishment,” won the Association of American Law Schools’ 2010-2011 Scholarly Papers Competition for faculty members with fewer than five years of law teaching. “Marriage as Punishment” was also selected by the Association of American Law Schools’ Section on Women in Legal Education as a winner of the 2010-2011 New Voices in Gender Studies scholarly paper competition. In 2010, Murray was awarded the Association of American Law School’s Derrick A. Bell Award, which is given to a junior faculty member who has made an extraordinary contribution to legal education, the legal system, or social justice. In 2011, Murray was elected to the membership of the American Law Institute.

Professor Murray is the author of Paradigms Lost: How Domestic Partnership Went From Innovation to Injury.

David B. Cruz

David B. Cruz is is Professor of Law at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. A constitutional law expert focusing on civil rights and equality issues, including equal marriage rights for same-sex couples, his primary areas of scholarship and practice are constitutional law and sex, gender, and sexual orientation law.

Before joining the USC Law faculty, Prof. Cruz was a Bristow Fellow in the Office of the Solicitor General in Washington, D.C. He also clerked for the late Honorable Edward R. Becker, Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. He is admitted to the bars of the State of New York and the United States Supreme Court; a past chair of the Association of American Law Schools Section on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Issues; co-president of ILGLaw, the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Intersex Law Association; and a member of the board of directors of the national ACLU, for which he is an elected General Counsel (but was not involved in discussion or work on United States v. Windsor).

Professor Cruz holds a B.A. in Mathematics, summa cum laude, and a B.A. in Drama, summa cum laude, from the University of California, Irvine; an M.S. in Mathematics from Stanford University; and a J.D. From New York University School of Law, where he was managing editor of the Law Review and first in his class at time of graduation.

David Cruz is the author of Repealing Rights: Proposition 8, Perry, and Crawford Contextualized.

Michael Kavey

Michael Kavey, a Lecturer-in-Law at Columbia Law School, is a graduate of Yale College (B.A.), Middlebury College (M.A.), and Yale Law School (J.D.). He clerked for the Honorable Sonia Sotomayor when she sat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and for the Honorable Gerard E. Lynch when he sat on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. He practiced as an attorney for three years with Lambda Legal in New York and served as an Associate-in-Law for two years at Columbia Law School. He blogs about LGBT youth issues at http://www.youthallies.com.

Michael Kavey is the author of Slighting the Sex-Discrimination Claim in Hollingsworth v. Perry.

Andrea J. Ritchie

Andrea Ritchie is a police misconduct attorney who has engaged in extensive research, litigation, and advocacy on profiling and policing of women, girls and LGBT people of color coordinates Streetwise & Safe (SAS), a leadership development initiative sharing “know your rights” information, strategies for safety and visions for change among LGBT youth of color who experience of gender, race, sexuality and poverty-based criminalization.

Ritchie is lead counsel in Tikkun v. City of New York, impact litigation challenging the use of searches to assign gender to individuals in police custody, and co-counsel to the Center for Constitutional Rights in Doe v. Jindal, a successful challenge to Louisiana’s requirement that individuals convicted of “crime against nature by solicitation” register as sex offenders and Doe v. Caldwell, a class action seeking to remove all individuals who continue to be required to comply with this unconstitutional requirement.

She is also co-author of Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States (Beacon Press 2011) and is currently at work on a book on policing of women of color. Her original piece, Law Enforcement Violence Against Women of Color appeared in The Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology (2006, South End Press), for which she also served on the editorial collective.  She also co-authored In the Shadows of the War on Terror: Persistent Police Brutality and Abuse in the United States, a “shadow report” submitted on behalf of over 100 national and local organizations to the United Nations and published in the Police Misconduct and Civil Rights Law Reporter and the DePaul Journal for Social Justice.

Andrea Ritchie is the author of The Pertinence of Perry to Challenging the Continuing Criminalization of LGBT People.