NLGLA Awards Arthur S. Leonard

WASHINGTON () -- The National Lesbian and Gay Law Association (NLGLA) today announced it will honor Arthur S. Leonard, Professor of Law at New York Law School with its annual Dan Bradley Lifetime Achievement Award. The Award will be conveyed to Professor Leonard at NLGLA’s Lavender Law Career Fair and Conference on October 28, 2005 in San Diego, California. 

“We are thrilled to honor Professor Leonard for his lifelong commitment to activism and education around HIV/AIDS, sexual orientation and gender identity and expression,” stated D’Arcy Kemnitz, NLGLA Executive Director. “Professor Leonard’s resume is a list of visionary firsts, including the co-founding of NLGLA. We owe him a deep debt of gratitude for his role in jump starting our legal path to LGBT equality.”

The Dan Bradley Award is NLGLA's highest honor. It recognizes the efforts of a member of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex legal community whose work has led the way in the struggle for equality under the law. 

“It is keenly appropriate that Professor Leonard, who struggled with Attorney Bradley and others to secure support for an American Bar Association House of Delegates resolution endorsing the enactment of gay rights laws by the federal government and the states, would receive this year's award,” said Kemnitz. 

Professor Leonard's Law Notes began in 1980 as a one-page sheet summarizing legal developments, which he mailed out monthly to the small membership of the "New York Law Group," an association of lawyers and law students in the New York metropolitan area that Leonard had started in 1978. He joined the full-time faculty of New York Law School in 1982, has served as a member of the Legal Advisory Committee at Lambda Legal Defense & Education Fund, contributed a chapter on discrimination to Lambda Legal’s first legal handbook on AIDS and the law, and in 1985, published an expanded version of that article in the University of Dayton Law Review, the first published law review article on AIDS discrimination. 

Professor Leonard also participated in the founding meeting of NLGLA in Washington, D.C. in 1987 and was a presenter at the first Lavender Law Conference held in San Francisco, California. He was a founding member of the Section on Gay and Lesbian Legal Issues of the Association of American Law Schools, and one of its earliest chairs. He also helped to lead the effort in the House of Representatives of the American Association of Law Schools to amend the by-laws requiring law schools to have policies prohibiting sexual orientation discrimination. Prof. Leonard interprets legal issues for readers nationally, writing since the mid-1980s, in Gaysweek, The New York Native, Outweek, Lesbian & Gay New York, and Gay City News, now available online.

Dan Bradley, for whom the NLGLA award is named, was the first chair of the American Bar Association Section of Individual Rights and Responsibility's Committee on the Rights of Gay People, now known as the Committee for Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity. Bradley saw the law as a powerful instrument of social justice, and believed that lawyers had an obligation to place their skills as advocates at the service of the least powerful. 

Lavender Law 2005 will be held in San Diego on October 27th - 29th, 2005. More than 500 LGBT lawyers, law professors, law students, judges and other legal professionals will be in attendance. For dates and details, visit the Bgay Calendar.