William N. Eskridge

Professor William N. Eskridge, Jr. is the John A. Garver Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School. His primary legal academic interest has been statutory interpretation.  Together with Professor Philip Frickey, he developed an innovative casebook on Legislation. In 1990-95, Professor Eskridge represented a gay couple suing for recognition of their same-sex marriage. Since then, he has published a field-establishing casebook, three monographs, and dozens of law review articles articulating a legal and political framework for proper state treatment of sexual and gender minorities. The historical materials in the book on Gaylaw formed the basis for an amicus brief he drafted for the Cato Institute and for much of the Court’s (and the dissenting opinion’s) analysis in Lawrence v. Texas(2003), which invalidated consensual sodomy laws. His most recent book is Gay Marriage: For Better or For Worse? (with Darren Spedale). Professor Eskridge received his B.A., summa cum laude, from Davidson College, his masters in History from Harvard, and his J.D. from Yale.

Professor Eskridge is the author of Marriage Equality: An Idea Whose Time is Coming . . .

Therese Stewart

Therese Stewart is Chief Deputy City Attorney for the City of San Franscisco.  In this capacity, she defended Mayor Gavin Newsom’s order authorizing same-sex unions at City Hall in In Re Marriage Cases.  Prior to joining the city attorneys office, she was a litigation partner at Howard, Rice, Nemerovski, Canady, Falk & Rabkin.

Ms. Stewart has represented parties and amici in LGBT civil rights cases, including the airlines’ challenge to San Francisco’s Equal Benefits Ordinance, a lesbian police officer discrimination suit against the City of Sacramento, an early equal protection challenge to the State’s denial of equal benefits to partners of lesbian and gay employees, and the High Tech Gays case challenging the Defense Department’s denial of security clearances to lesbians and gay men.

Ms. Stewart served as the first openly gay President of the Bar Association of San Francisco (BASF)as well as the first  first Co-Chair of the BASF Committee on Sexual Orientation, which developed guidelines for legal employers on eliminating sexual orientation discrimination.  She also  co-founded BASF’s School-To-College Program, which provides mentoring and guidance to inner city high school students to help them prepare for, select, and apply to college.

Therese Stewart is the co-author, along with Mollie M. Lee of The Role of Public Law Offices in Marriage Equality Litigation.

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.