Press Release

(San Juan, PR, April 4, 2018) – Yesterday, the U.S. District Court for the District of Puerto Rico struck down a policy that prevented transgender people born in Puerto Rico from correcting the gender marker on their birth certificates and ordered Commonwealth officials to allow such corrections.  Lambda Legal, joined by pro bono co-counsel from Ropes & Gray, challenged Puerto Rico’s categorical ban on corrections to the gender marker in birth certificates last April in a first-of-its-kind federal lawsuit. 

(San Francisco, CA, April 3, 2018) – Lambda Legal today filed a class-action lawsuit in California Superior Court against A.J. Boggs & Company on behalf of 93 low-income Californians living with HIV whose confidential medical records – including their HIV status – were compromised by a data breach of A.J. Boggs’s California AIDS Drug Assistance Program (ADAP) online enrollment system.

(Washington, DC and New York City, March 28, 2018) – Lambda Legal announced today that it had hired Diana Flynn, the Chief of the Appellate Section of the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, as its new Litigation Director. Flynn joins her former DOJ colleague Sharon McGowan, who left DOJ in February 2017 to become Lambda Legal’s Director of Strategy, overseeing both the organization’s litigation and policy work.

COLUMBUS—Today the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Lambda Legal filed a lawsuit challenging Ohio’s refusal to correct the gender marker on birth certificates for transgender individuals, for any reason, at any time. Ohio is one of just three states, with Tennessee and Kansas that has yet to change the extremely regressive and outdated policy.

(Seattle, WA, March 27, 2018) – Lambda Legal and OutServe-SLDN today argued before a federal district court that the Trump Administration’s plan to ban transgender people from serving openly in the U.S. Armed Services is so clearly unconstitutional that it should be permanently blocked. It was the first such argument among the four lawsuits challenging the ban and came just five days after the White House released its so-called ‘plan’ for implementing the discriminatory and harmful ban.

(SEATTLE, March 25, 2018) – Lambda Legal and OutServe-SLDN, together with the State of Washington, will appear Tuesday before the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington to urge the court to block for good implementation of the Trump Administration’s effort to ban transgender people from serving openly in the U.S. Armed Services. Tuesday’s argument is the first to follow Friday’s release of the so-called implementation plan for the bigoted and unconstitutional transgender military ban.

(Washington, DC, March 21, 2018) – Today, Lambda Legal led 40 national, state, and local LGBT organizations in urging the U.S. Senate to reject the nomination of Gordon Giampietro to the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin and asked the White House to immediately withdraw the nomination.

(San Francisco, March 16, 2018) – The Hispanic National Bar Association (HNBA) named Lambda Legal Staff Attorneys Omar Gonzalez-Pagan and Richard Saenz two recipients of the 2018 HNBA Top Lawyers Under 40 Award.