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.

Matt Coles

Matt Coles is the Deputy National Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union. From 1995 until 2010, he was the Director of the ACLU’s LGBT Project. Matt was counsel in Romer v. Evans, which resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down Colorado’s ban on laws protecting LGB people from discrimination, and counsel for amicii in Lawrence v. Texas, which resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down laws against same-sex intimacy. He’s argued cases challenging the ban on LGBT people in the military and bans on adoption by gay people and he has tried discrimination cases. Matt was the primary drafter of California’s law banning sexual orientation discrimination and he wrote the nation’s first domestic partnership law. He is the author of Try This at Home, a do-it-yourself guide to passing LGBT discrimination laws.

Matt Coles is the author of Reinhardt is Right; Perry is a Case About California.

Roberta Kaplan

A partner in the Litigation Department of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, Roberta (“Robbie”) A. Kaplan has been chosen by the National Law Journal as one of the top “40 Under 40” lawyers in the United States, as a New York “Super Lawyer,” and as one of the 500 leading litigators in the United States.  In addition to representing major corporate clients such as Fitch Ratings in complex, high profile matters.

Ms. Kaplan currently represents Edith Windsor in a case challenging the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (“DOMA”), a federal statute that defines marriage as a legal union between one man and one woman. Having prevailed at the District Court and the Second Circuit, Ms. Kaplan will argue that case before the United States Supreme Court on March 27, 2013. Ms. Kaplan is a graduate of Harvard College and Columbia Law School, and served as a law clerk to the Hon. Judith S. Kaye of the New York Court of Appeals and the Hon. Mark L. Wolf of the District of Massachusetts.

Roberta Kaplan is the co-author, along with Jaren Janghorbani, of Proof vs. Prejudice.