Michael Kavey
CONTACT: National Headquarters, 212-809-8585
Michael Kavey is the Arthur Liman Public Interest Fellow at Lambda Legal, the oldest and largest national legal organization committed to achieving full recognition of the civil rights of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgender people and people with HIV.
Kavey received his fellowship from Yale University's Arthur Liman Public Interest Fellowship and Fund, an organization supporting Yale law students and alumni who work on behalf of underserved and underrepresented communities.
At Lambda Legal, Kavey advocates for the civil rights of LGBT youth through litigation, community education and public policy work. This includes efforts to protect the right of public school students to form gay-straight alliances and to hold schools accountable for discriminatory harassment and violence. Kavey also assists in Lambda Legal's support of school districts with LGBT-inclusive policies and curricula.
Kavey began his advocacy for LGBT youth early as a student at Horace Greeley High School in Chappaqua, New York, where he led a gay-straight alliance in its successful efforts to secure school board approval of an antidiscrimination policy that included sexual orientation. The 1994 policy was the first of its kind in a suburban school district in New York State. He continued his civil rights work as an intern at the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network in 1998 and at Lambda Legal in 2002. He has written articles on antidiscrimination law for the Yale Law Journal and the Advocate, and will contribute an essay on LGBT youth to the forthcoming book "The Chicago Companion to the Child."
Kavey received a B.A. in Political Science, cum laude and with Distinction, from Yale College in 2000; an M.A. in Spanish from Middlebury College in 2001; and a J.D. from Yale Law School in 2004. During law school, he served as the co-chair of an LGBT student organization, OutLaws, when it filed a federal lawsuit to challenge military recruiters' violation of Yale's antidiscrimination policy. He also served as an editor of the Yale Law Journal and the Yale Law and Policy Review, and was a member of the Student/Faculty Alliance for Military Equality and the Yale Project for Civil Rights.
Before beginning his fellowship at Lambda Legal, Kavey clerked for the Honorable Sonia Sotomayor of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and for the Honorable Gerard E. Lynch of the District Court for the Southern District of New York.
