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James Esseks is Director of the ACLU Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender & HIV Project. Esseks was raised in Long Island, New York, and attended Yale as an undergraduate and then Harvard Law School. After clerking for U.S. Circuit Judge James R. Browning on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and U.S. District Court Judge Robert L. Carter in the Southern District of New York, he worked for the law firm of Vladeck, Waldman, Elias & Englehard. In 2001 he was hired by the ACLU as Litigation Director for the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender & HIV Project. In this interview, Esseks discusses the freedom to marry movement from the vantage point of the legal strategy to win marriage, including the ways in which the various organizations collaborated. Further, he details the pivotal cases on which he worked, including United States v. Windsor (2013) and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015).

Details

Title
James Esseks on Legal Strategy, the ACLU, and LGBT Legal Organizations
Creator
Esseks, James, interviewee
Meeker, Martin, interviewer
Published
Berkeley, CA, Oral History Center, 2017
Full Collection Name
Freedom to Marry Oral Histories
Subject (Topic)
Advocacy and Philanthropy
Type
Text
Format
Oral histories.
Archive
The Bancroft Library Oral History Center
Note
Esseks, James. "James Esseks on Legal Strategy, the ACLU, and LGBT Legal Organizations." Interview by Martin Meeker in 2015. Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2017.
Interview date(s) 2015
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