From the Closet to the Boardroom: Regulating LGBT Diversity on Corporate Boards, Albany Law Review (Forthcoming, 2018)

Corporations have aggressively embraced diversity in recent years, often committing considerable resources to diversity-related initiatives. While some companies have successfully diversified the workplace, companies have been uniformly unsuccessful diversifying at the board level. Corporate boards remain disproportionately white, male, heterosexual and cisgender, despite mounting evidence that demographic diversity on corporate boards improves overall financial performance.

This article addresses regulatory responses to the lack of diversity on corporate boards, focusing on the SEC’s diversity disclosure rule. This article argues that the SEC should strengthen its diversity disclosure rule to mandate disclosure of board demography in terms of sexual orientation, sex, gender identity and race. This is the first article to propose mechanisms for increasing LGBT diversity in the corporate board context, addressing the unique implications of “outing” LGBT board members. This article suggests that a confluence of corporate disclosures, institutional investor activism and consumer pressure favoring diversity can catalyze meaningful demographic shifts at all levels of a company, including the board.

 

The New Employment Discrimination: Intra-LGBT Intersectional Invisibility and the Marginalization of Minority Subclasses in Antidiscrimination Law, Duke Journal of Gender Law and Policy (2017)

What do black women, Latino homosexuals and bisexual transgender individuals have in common? These minority subclasses, along with many others, are protected by current employment discrimination laws only to a very limited extent. This is because existing employment discrimination frameworks fail to address the unique experiences of intersectional plaintiffs, defined as plaintiffs who belong to more than one minority group. This article is the first to discuss the concept of intra-LGBT intersectionality, which is the notion that within the LGBT construct, a plaintiff can be both a sexual orientation minority (homosexual or bisexual) and a gender identity minority (transgender).

Given the lack of LGBT employment discrimination protections at the federal level, inconsistent state-level employment discrimination statutes, and narrow construction of  existing antidiscrimination statutes by courts, scholars and practitioners, this article argues that remediating intersectional invisibility should be a top priority in reforming employment discrimination law. Additionally, this article argues that without explicitly recognizing intersectionality, future antidiscrimination statutes will be underinclusive,  leaving many vulnerable populations without adequate legal remedies.

From Outsider to Insider and Outsider Again: Interest Convergence and the Normalization of LGBT Identity , Florida State University Law Review (2015) (Co-authored with Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Chancellor’s Professor of Law, UC Berkeley School of Law)

This Article challenges the progress narrative that has been advanced by gay rights advocates by suggesting that, thus far, the victories of the gay rights movement have been made possible because of the dominant media image of its would-be recipients. Specifically, this Article contends that this dominant image—one of a white, upper middle class, educated, and Northern-city-based gay community—has thus far worked to persuade those in the decision-making elite that the gay community’s interests converge with their own because it implicitly reinforces racial, class, and regional hierarchies within the gay community and in society more generally. In other words, this Article maintains that marriage equality is imminent today in part because of what Professor Derrick Bell identified as interest convergence, which is the notion that the rights of marginalized people are acknowledged and recognized through legal protection only when their interests converge with those in the white decision-making elite.

Extraterritorial Application of the US Constitution: Endorsing the ‘Impracticable and Anomalous’ Standard as Refined by the Boumediene Court, Global Perspectives (2010)

• Selected for presentation at the Southern California Conference on Undergraduate Research at Pepperdine University

 

Dual Federalism and the State of Gay Rights, Occidental Undergraduate Research Center (2009)