Looking Forward, Looking Back: LeGaL's 2017 Annual Dinner
These are interesting times for the LGBT rights movement.
LeGaL’s 2017 Annual Dinner and Community Vision Awards (by @lgbtbaryny via Twitter).
These are interesting times for the LGBT rights movement. On the one hand, there is much to celebrate — such as nationwide marriage equality, and this week’s Seventh Circuit ruling that sexual-orientation discrimination violates Title VII. On the other hand, much work remains to be done — on issues like transgender rights, or on a more comprehensive approach to protecting LGBT individuals from employment discrimination (e.g., passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act).
The mood at 2017 Annual Dinner and Community Vision Awards of the LGBT Bar Association of Greater New York (aka LeGaL), held last night here in New York at Capitale, reflected this duality. A moment like this creates challenges for a movement, but presents new opportunities as well.
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After welcoming remarks by LeGaL president Gennaro Savastano and executive director Matthew Skinner, legal director Brett Figlewski and treasurer Scott Kohanowski presented the first Community Vision Award to Blank Rome. The firm — which has a perfect score on the Corporate Equality Index of the Human Rights Campaign, a testament to its status as a welcoming workplace for LGBT folks — scored a major pro bono victory. Partners Margaret (Meg) Canby and Caroline Krauss-Browne, working together with Lambda Legal and LeGaL, prevailed before the New York Court of Appeals in the Brooke S.B. case, which overturned a longstanding precedent that made non-biological parents “legal strangers” to children they have cared for since birth. Because LGBT individuals often form families in nontraditional ways, the new precedent of Brooke S.B. ensures that their parental rights will be protected, regardless of who is the biological parent and whether the parents remain together or not.
The next Community Vision Award went to Susan Sommer, Associate Legal Director and Director of Constitutional Litigation for Lambda Legal (and, interestingly enough, another lawyer on the Brooke S.B. team). Introducing Sommer, Kevin Cathcart — her former colleague at Lambda Legal, and one of last year’s CVA winners — praised her brilliance, tenacity, work ethic, and fashion sense.
Taking the stage (in a gorgeous and colorful print dress), Sommer thanked LeGaL, her colleagues and co-counsel over the years, and her family (“for putting up with all my mishegoss over the years”). She acknowledged achievements like Obergefell and Brooke S.B., but reminded the audience that the struggle for LGBT equality is far from over. Earlier this week, for example, she was in Texas for arguments before the Fifth Circuit in a challenge to H.B. 1523, the Mississippi law that protects people and businesses with religious or moral objections to same-sex marriage — a law that many in the LGBT community view as a “license to discriminate.”
“I’m not done,” Sommer said. “Neither are we.”
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James Esseks of the ACLU introduced the final Community Vision Award winner: his former colleague Matthew Coles, who served as Deputy National Legal Director at the ACLU before moving west to join the UC Hastings faculty. Esseks noted that Coles has been working on behalf of LGBT rights for more than four decades, dating back to 1975, and has been a key strategist for the movement over the years.
Accepting the award, Coles thanked LeGaL, his family (including both his husband and his ex), and his clients: “the real heroes, the plaintiffs who put their names and lives on the line in these cases.” In his eloquent and passionate speech, he emphasized the importance of the law but reminded the audience that the law is not everything: “Changing the way people think is as important as changing the law.”
Coles also reminded attendees that recent victories for the LGBT community should not cause us to lose sight of where we came from. We had to work long and hard for these wins, building on a foundation laid by the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement, and other social justice efforts.
“Don’t forget what it was like to be a complete outcast,” Coles urged. “Until all of us are equal, none of us are equal.”
Thanks to LeGaL for its great work, and thanks to my former firm, Wachtell Lipton, for hosting me at its table. I look forward to seeing everyone again this time next year.
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LeGaL’s 2017 Annual Dinner and Community Vision Awards
[LGBT Bar Association of Greater New York]
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David Lat is the founder and managing editor of Above the Law and the author of Supreme Ambitions: A Novel. He previously worked as a federal prosecutor in Newark, New Jersey; a litigation associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; and a law clerk to Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. You can connect with David on Twitter (@DavidLat), LinkedIn, and Facebook, and you can reach him by email at dlat@abovethelaw.com.
