Ruthann Robson

Ruthann Robson is Professor of Law & University Distinguished Professor. She is the author of the forthcoming book Dressing Constitutionally: Hierarchy, Sexuality, and Democracy (2013), and a collection of legal creative writing entitled Instead, as well as the books Sappho Goes to Law School (1998); Gay Men, Lesbians, and the Law (1996); and Lesbian (Out)Law: Survival Under the Rule of Law (1992), and the editor of the three volume set, International Library of Essays in Sexuality & Law(2011). She is a frequent commentator on constitutional and sexuality issues and the co-editor of the Constitutional Law Professors Blog.

Ruthann Robson is the author of Thirteen False Blackbirds.

Karin Wang

Karin Wang is the Vice-President of Programs and Communications, where she oversees APALC’s direct services, litigation, policy, leadership development and communications work.

Wang is active in local, state and national organizations that seek to improve the legal system for immigrants and low-income communities. Currently, she serves on the board of OneJustice and is a member of the State Bar’s Council on Access & Fairness. She also is a past president of the Asian Pacific American Bar Association of Los Angeles County; past board member of the Southern California Chinese Lawyers Association; former chair of the State Bar’s Standing Committee on the Delivery of Legal Services; and past co-chair of the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association (NAPABA) Pro Bono & Community Service Committee.

In addition, Wang has been involved since 2005 in the struggle for marriage equality in California. She is a founding and current Steering Committee member of API Equality-LA, leading the coalition’s media efforts against Proposition 8 in 2008 and also helping to file several amicus briefs in the California Supreme Court in support of marriage equality, including one brief on behalf of 63 Asian American organizations.

Before her current position, Wang directed APALC’s immigrant rights project and helped file a landmark civil rights complaint against Los Angeles County on behalf of limited English speaking welfare recipients, leading to major reforms to the department’s services to immigrants and payment of $1.7 million in back benefits. Wang also ran the first Los Angeles field office of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Office for Civil Rights, enforcing federal civil rights laws across the Southwest. After law school, she was a litigation associate at Morrison & Foerster LLP in San Francisco.

For her activism and leadership, Wang has received the Lambda Legal “Liberty Award”; the “Pioneer in Community Service” award from the Taiwanese American Citizen League/Taiwanese American Professionals; the “Local Hero” award from KCET in Los Angeles; and the “Woman of the Year” award from California Assemblymember Mike Eng. She also was named by NAPABA as one of its “Best Lawyers Under 40.”

Wang graduated from the UC Berkeley Boalt Hall School of Law, where she was the Editor-in-Chief of the Asian American Law Journal, and the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.

Karin Warn is the author of When Litigation Collides with Grassroots Organizing: The Impact of the Perry Lawsuit Through the Eyes of Asian Americans Organizing for Marriage Equality.

Anthony Michael Kreis

Anthony Michael Kreis is a doctoral student at the University of Georgia and a visiting scholar-in-residence at Emory Law School where he specializes in sexual orientation, public policy, and the law. In 2011, he earned his law degree from Washington & Lee.

While taking up visiting student status at the University of Virginia during his law school tenure, he studied under the direction of civil rights leader Julian Bond and simultaneously began to actively engage in sexual orientation policy issues.  Since 2010, he’s worked under a national cohort of law faculty on religious liberty issues in proposed same-sex marriage legislation and is currently authoring a series of law review articles and a full length book on the topic.

Kreis has lectured at a number of universities on marriage equality including Emory, Virginia, North Carolina, Wake Forest, and Washington & Lee.  His academic work has been featured in a variety of publications including the online companion of the Yale Law Journal, the Journal of Law & Inequality, and SCOTUSblog.

He currently serves as a political co-chair for the Human Rights Campaign in Atlanta, Georgia and lobbies the Georgia State Legislature on civil rights issues.  Anthony also blogs for the Huffington Post on LGBT rights issues.

Anthony Michael Kreis is the co-author, along with Robin Fretwell Wilson, of The Overlooked Benefit of Minimalism: Perry v. Brown and the Future of Marriage Equality.

Laurence H. Tribe

Laurence H. Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard, has taught at its Law School since 1968 and was voted the best professor by the graduating class of 2000.  A much sought-after appellate advocate as well as a distinguished academic, Tribe has prevailed in three-fifths of the many appellate cases he has argued (including 35 in the U.S. Supreme Court).

The title “University Professor,” which Tribe has held since 2004, is Harvard’s highest academic honor, awarded to just a handful of professors at any given time and to fewer than 70 professors in all of Harvard University’s history.

Tribe was appointed in 2010 by President Obama and Attorney General Holder to serve as the first Senior Counselor for Access to Justice; currently serves as a Member of the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships; and has written 115 books and articles, including his treatise, American Constitutional Law, cited more than any other legal text since 1950.  Former Solicitor General Erwin Griswold wrote: “[N]o book, and no lawyer not on the [Supreme] Court, has ever had a greater influence on the development of American constitutional law,” and the Northwestern Law Review opined that no-one else “in American history has… simultaneously achieved Tribe’s preeminence… as a practitioner and… scholar of constitutional law.”

Born in China to Russian Jewish parents, Tribe entered Harvard at 16; graduated summa cum laude in Mathematics (1962) and magna cum laude in Law (1966); clerked for the California and U.S. Supreme Courts(1966-68); received tenure at 30; was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences at 38 and to the American Philosophical Society in 2010; helped write the constitutions of South Africa, the Czech Republic, and the Marshall Islands; and has received ten honorary degrees, most recently a degree honoris causa from the Government of Mexico in March 2011 that was never before awarded to an American.

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