Janice Grubin, partner and Restructuring, Bankruptcy & Creditors’ Rights Practice Area co-chair, was featured in the Law360 article “ABA Honors 3 Who Made Law a Safer Place to Be LGBTQ” about the work she and the two other recipients of the American Bar Association (ABA) Stonewall Award have done to change the environment for LGBTQ lawyers. The article highlights Janice’s work to diversify the New York bench in her role as the first vice president and co-chair of the Judiciary Committee of the LGBT Bar Association and Foundation of Greater New York.
Janice and the two other recipients of the award reflected on what the legal profession was like for LGBTQ lawyers when they started their careers in the 1980s and 1990s. About her experience as an LGBTQ lawyer before coming out, Janice said, “People didn’t want to hear about your private life unless it conformed to pretty ‘normative’ characteristics. And also, diversity and LGBTQ sensitivity wasn’t a goal. In government or in the private law arena.”
Despite the progress that’s been made to advance the interests of LGBTQ people, Janice said there’s still more to be done, especially in the judiciary. “I think that still, in many sectors of society today, LGBTQ persons are very underrepresented. That, to me, is a real travesty,” she said. “In the judiciary, maybe two percent of federal judges are LGBTQ . . . and some districts don’t have any.”
Janice noted how well established and American institutions are and how they have been built on foundations of bias against marginalized people. “It’s going to take more than a couple of years to change those institutions,” she said.
Law360 subscribers can read the full article here.