Tobias Barrington Wolff (born 1970) is a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School where he teaches classes on sexuality and the law, same sex marriage and human rights. He is known for his legal advocacy on same sex marriage and other LGBT-related issues, and served as the chief advisor and spokesperson on LGBT issues for Barack Obama throughout his 2007-08 presidential campaign. He is openly gay. [1]
Wolff was educated at Yale University (BA 1992) and Yale Law School (JD 1997), where he transferred after his first year. [2] At Yale, he wrote for the Yale Law Journal . [3] After clerking for Ninth Circuit Federal Appeals Court judges William A. Norris and Betty Fletcher, Wolff spent two years as an associate at Paul, Weiss before beginning his academic legal career. He has taught at UC Davis, Stanford, and Northwestern Law Schools. He is currently professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania. [4]
Wolff is the youngest son of the philosopher Robert Paul Wolff and the brother of chess grandmaster Patrick Wolff.[ citation needed ]
The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was a United States federal law passed by the 104th United States Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton on September 21, 1996. It banned federal recognition of same-sex marriage by limiting the definition of marriage to the union of one man and one woman, and it further allowed states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages granted under the laws of other states.
The availability of legally recognized same-sex marriage in the United States expanded from one state (Massachusetts) in 2004 to all fifty states in 2015 through various court rulings, state legislation, and direct popular votes. States each have separate marriage laws, which must adhere to rulings by the Supreme Court of the United States that recognize marriage as a fundamental right guaranteed by both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, as first established in the 1967 landmark civil rights case of Loving v. Virginia.
The Harvard Law Review is a law review published by an independent student group at Harvard Law School. According to the Journal Citation Reports, the Harvard Law Review's 2015 impact factor of 4.979 placed the journal first out of 143 journals in the category "Law". It is published monthly from November through June, with the November issue dedicated to covering the previous year's term of the Supreme Court of the United States. The journal also publishes the online-only Harvard Law Review Forum, a rolling journal of scholarly responses to the main journal's content. The law review is one of three honors societies at the law school, along with the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau and the Board of Student Advisors. Students who are selected for more than one of these three organizations may only join one.
The origin of the LGBT student movement can be linked to other activist movements from the mid-20th century in the United States. The Civil Rights Movement and Second-wave feminist movement were working towards equal rights for other minority groups in the United States. Though the student movement began a few years before the Stonewall riots, the riots helped to spur the student movement to take more action in the US. Despite this, the overall view of these gay liberation student organizations received minimal attention from contemporary LGBT historians. This oversight stems from the idea that the organizations were founded with haste as a result of the riots. Others historians argue that this group gives too much credit to groups that disagree with some of the basic principles of activist LGBT organizations.
Evan Wolfson is an attorney and gay rights advocate. He is the founder of Freedom to Marry, a group favoring same-sex marriage in the United States, serving as president until its 2015 victory and subsequent wind-down. Wolfson authored the book Why Marriage Matters: America, Equality, and Gay People's Right to Marry, which Time Out New York magazine called, "Perhaps the most important gay-marriage primer ever written". He was listed as one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world. He has taught as an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School, Rutgers Law School, and Whittier Law School and argued before the Supreme Court in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale. He now teaches law and social change at Georgetown Law School and at Yale University; serves as a senior counsel at Dentons, the world's largest law firm; and primarily provides advice and assistance to other organizations and causes, in the United States and globally, that are seeking to adapt the lessons on "how to win" from the same-sex marriage movement.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights in the United States rank among the highest in the world, with public opinion and jurisprudence changing significantly since the late 1980s; by the early 2020s, an overwhelming majority of Americans approved of the legality of same-sex marriages. In 1961, beginning with Illinois, states began to decriminalize same-sex sexual activity, and in 2003, through Lawrence v. Texas, all remaining laws against same-sex sexual activity were invalidated. In 2004, beginning with Massachusetts, states began to offer same-sex marriage, and in 2015, through Obergefell v. Hodges, all states were required to offer it. In many states and municipalities, LGBT Americans are explicitly protected from discrimination in employment, housing, and access to public accommodations. Many LGBT rights in the United States have been established by the United States Supreme Court, invalidated state laws banning protected class recognition based upon homosexuality, struck down sodomy laws nationwide, struck down Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act, made same-sex marriage legal nationwide, and prohibited employment discrimination against gay and transgender employees. Public opinion is overwhelmingly supportive of same-sex marriage. A 2022 Grinnell College National Poll found that 74% of Americans agree that same-sex marriage should be a guaranteed right while 13% disagree. According to General Social Survey, support among 18-34 year olds is near-universal.
Kenji Yoshino is a legal scholar and the Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law at New York University School of Law. Formerly, he was the Guido Calabresi Professor of Law at Yale Law School. His work involves constitutional law, anti-discrimination law, civil and human rights, as well as law and literature, and Japanese law and society.
Dale Carpenter is an American legal commentator and Professor of Law at the SMU Dedman School of Law. He formerly served as the Earl R. Larson Professor of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Law at the University of Minnesota Law School for sixteen years. As a professor, Carpenter specializes in constitutional law, the First Amendment, Due Process and Equal Protection clauses, sexual orientation and the law, and commercial law.
Chai Rachel Feldblum is an American author and activist for disability and LGBT rights. A former law professor at Georgetown University Law Center, she served as Commissioner at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. She was nominated to the position on the EEOC by president Barack Obama in 2009. In April 2010, she received a recess appointment to the EEOC, and in December 2010 she was confirmed to serve on the EEOC by the United States Senate. The Senate confirmed her in December 2013 for a second term on the Commission which expired in July 2018.
The Almanac of American Politics (2008) rated Barack Obama's overall social policies in 2006 as more conservative than 21% of the Senate, and more liberal than 77% of the Senate.
This is a list of notable events in the history of LGBT rights that took place in the year 2010.
This is a list of events in 2011 that affected LGBT rights.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania enjoy most of the same rights as non-LGBT residents. Same-sex sexual activity is legal in Pennsylvania. Same-sex couples and families headed by same-sex couples are eligible for all of the protections available to opposite-sex married couples. Pennsylvania was the final Mid-Atlantic state without same-sex marriage, indeed lacking any form of same-sex recognition law until its statutory ban was overturned on May 20, 2014.
Christopher R. Barron is an American political activist best known as the cofounder of GOProud, a political organization representing gay conservatives. He is the president of CapSouth Consulting, a political consulting firm, and previously the organizer of LGBT for Trump and the national political director for Log Cabin Republicans, where he directed the organization's federal lobbying efforts and media relations.
LGBT history in the United States spans the contributions and struggles of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people, as well as the LGBT social movements they have built.
Michael J. McShane is an American lawyer and jurist serving as a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Oregon. He previously served as a state court judge on the Oregon Multnomah County Circuit Court from 2001 to 2013.
This article addresses the history of gay men in the United States. Unless otherwise noted, the members of same-sex male couples discussed here are not known to be gay, but they are mentioned as part of discussing the practice of male homosexuality—that is, same-sex male sexual and romantic behavior.
William B. Rubenstein is an American legal scholar and the Bruce Bromley Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Professionally, he specializes in complex litigation and civil rights advocacy. He has advocated widely for the rights of gay, lesbian, and HIV-positive individuals. He teaches civil procedure and complex litigation classes.
This is a list of notable events in LGBT rights that took place in the 2010s.
Nancy D. Polikoff is an American law professor, LGBT rights activist, and author. She is a professor emerita at Washington College of Law. Polikoff's work focuses on LGBT rights, family law, and gender identity issues. She authored Beyond Marriage: Valuing All Families under the Law (2008).