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William B. Rubenstein (born 1960) 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.
Rubenstein was born in 1960. He is originally from Pennsylvania, although he claims he never had an intent to stay. He attended Taylor Allderdice High School in Pittsburgh before receiving his B.A. magna cum laude from Yale College in New Haven in 1982. [1] In 1986, he received his J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School. After law school, he clerked for the Hon. Stanley Sporkin in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia for one year. [1]
In 1986, Rubenstein was awarded a Harvard Fellowship in Public Interest Law to help start an AIDS Project at the national office of the American Civil Liberties Union. Rubenstein served as Staff Attorney with the ACLU's National LGBT and the newly created AIDS Project from 1987-1990 and Director of those Projects from 1990-1995. [1] [2]
During this time, Rubenstein challenged the Reagan administration's response to the AIDS crisis. [3] In 1987, he led the ACLU's lawsuit against the President's Commission on the HIV Epidemic's hearings, in which he defended the position that the commission's makeup was not representative of the group of people actually affected by AIDS. Rubenstein advocated for a larger and more inclusive commission and closer conformity with the terms of the Federal Advisory Committee Act. [4] [5] Rubenstein also litigated civil rights cases in state and federal courts throughout the country and oversaw the ACLU's national litigation docket on these issues. Rubenstein argued the landmark case, Braschi v. Stahl Associates, 544 N.E.2d 49 (N.Y. 1989), before New York's highest court, yielding the first decision in the United States recognizing an unmarried but cohabitating gay couple as a legal family. [1] [6] During the same years, Rubenstein also taught courses on sexual orientation and AIDS law at Harvard and Yale Law Schools. [1] In conjunction with those courses, he authored the first law school casebook in the area, now entitled, Cases and Materials on Sexual Orientation and The Law (now with Carlos Ball and Jane Schacter, 4th ed. 2011). [1]
Rubenstein has continued his work to further the rights of homosexual and HIV-positive people during his academic career. [2] While at UCLA (1997-2007), Rubenstein founded the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy, a think tank "dedicated to conducting rigorous, independent research on sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy" [1] [7] In 2000, he was chosen as that year's Honoring with Pride honoree by the American Foundation for AIDS Research. [3]
Besides his work with civil rights, Rubenstein is also an expert on Class action and Complex Litigation. He has written about how institutional lead plaintiffs request proposals from law firms seeking to represent them in securities class actions. [8]
While practicing with the ACLU (1987-1995), Rubenstein also taught courses on sexual orientation and AIDS law at Harvard and Yale Law Schools. In conjunction with those courses, he authored the first law school casebook in the area, now entitled, Cases and Materials on Sexual Orientation and The Law (now with Carlos Ball and Jane Schacter, 4th ed. 2011). [1]
From 1995-1997, Rubenstein was a visiting professor from practice at Stanford Law School; he was awarded the 1996-1997 John Bingham Hurlbut Award for Excellence in Teaching at Stanford Law School. From 1997-2007, Rubenstein taught at UCLA School of Law; he was awarded the 2001-2002 Rutter Award for Excellence in Teaching at UCLA. [1]
William Rubenstein joined the Harvard faculty in 2007. [1] In 2012, he was awarded the 2012 Albert M. Sacks-Paul A. Freund Award for Teaching Excellence at Harvard Law School. [1] [9] He is rated by his students as an exceptionally clear and attractive professor. [10]
Rubenstein currently serves as director and advisor for several boards. He was chosen to be one of the advisors to the Project on the Principles of the Law of Aggregate Litigation, the American Law Institute's 2009 effort to re-think class action law. [9] [11]
He is co-chair of the Class Action Subcommittee of the ABA's Mass Torts Committee, which addresses current and emerging issues in management aspects of mass tort litigation, including joinder of multiple parties and the use of Alternative Dispute Resolution. [9] [12] He regularly serves as an expert witness in class action lawsuits. [1]
He is a member of the Board of Directors of the ACLU of Southern California, the Board of Advisors of the HIV/AIDS Legal Services Alliance, and the Board of Advisors of the HIV Legal Check-Up Project, a Los Angeles-based program for people recently diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. [3]
Rubenstein's books about issues of sexuality and health include Cases and Materials on Sexual Orientation and the Law (1997); the co-authored work, The Rights of People Who Are HIV Positive (1996) (which received the 1997 American Bar Association Certificate of Merit); [9] Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Law (1993); and AIDS Agenda: Emerging Issues in Civil Rights (1992), co-edited with Nan D. Hunter. [3]
Since 2008, Rubenstein has been the sole author of Newberg on Class Actions and he is in the process of re-writing the entire eleven-volume treatise for its Fifth Edition. [1]
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is an American nonprofit human rights organization founded in 1920. The organization strives "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States". The ACLU works through litigation and lobbying and has over 1,800,000 members as of July 2018, with an annual budget of over $300 million. Affiliates of the ACLU are active in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. The ACLU provides legal assistance in cases where it considers civil liberties at risk. Legal support from the ACLU can take the form of direct legal representation or preparation of amicus curiae briefs expressing legal arguments when another law firm is already providing representation.
The Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, better known as Lambda Legal, is an American civil rights organization that focuses on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities as well as people living with HIV/AIDS (PWAs) through impact litigation, societal education, and public policy work.
Dale Minami is a prominent Japanese American civil rights and personal injury lawyer based in San Francisco, California. He is best known for his work leading the legal team that overturned the conviction of Fred Korematsu, whose defiance of the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II led to Korematsu v. United States, which is widely considered one of the worst and most racist Supreme Court decisions in American history.
Mari J. Matsuda is an American lawyer, activist, and law professor at the William S. Richardson School of Law at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She was the first tenured female Asian American law professor in the United States, at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law in 1998 and one of the leading voices in critical race theory since its inception. Matsuda returned to Richardson in the fall of 2008. Prior to her return, Matsuda was a professor at the UCLA School of Law and Georgetown University Law Center, specializing in the fields of torts, constitutional law, legal history, feminist theory, critical race theory, and civil rights law.
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Kim McLane Wardlaw is an American lawyer and jurist serving as a U.S. circuit judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit since 1998. She is the first Hispanic American woman to be appointed to a federal appeals court. Wardlaw was considered as a possible candidate to be nominated by Barack Obama to the Supreme Court of the United States.
Toonen v. Australia was a landmark human rights complaint brought before the United Nations Human Rights Committee (UNHRC) by Tasmanian resident Nicholas Toonen in 1994. The case resulted in the repeal of Australia's last sodomy laws when the Committee held that sexual orientation was included in the antidiscrimination provisions as a protected status under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).
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Paul Richard Abramson is a UCLA psychology professor, expert witness, author, and musician.
The American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey (ACLU-NJ) is a nonpartisan, not-for-profit civil rights organization in Newark, New Jersey, and an affiliate of the national American Civil Liberties Union. According to the ACLU-NJ's stated mission, the ACLU-NJ operates through litigation on behalf of individuals, lobbying in state and local legislatures, and community education.
Braschi v. Stahl Associates Co. was a 1989 New York Court of Appeals case that decided that the surviving partner of a same-sex relationship counted as "family" under New York law and was thus able to continue living in a rent controlled apartment belonging to the deceased partner.
José Gómez was an American labor and civil rights activist and educator. He was most widely known for his work as executive assistant to president of the United Farm Workers Cesar Chavez, for founding the Committee on Gay Legal Issues (COGLI) at Harvard Law School, and for his law review article "The Public Expression of Lesbian/Gay Personhood as Protected Speech."
Jane S. Schacter is an American legal scholar who serves as the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Stanford Law School with an expertise in constitutional law, statutory interpretation, and sexual orientation law. As an expert on the topic of marriage equality, Schacter has been interviewed by numerous leading news publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, The Guardian, Bloomberg Businessweek, and the San Francisco Chronicle.
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