Farías asks Director Brown how litigation experience shapes LGBTQ+ initiatives
Farías asks Brown to connect her litigation background to the office's current work. Brown describes prior roles at the NYS Attorney General's Civil Rights Bureau, ACLU, and Lambda Legal, doing impact litigation for transgender people, and says that experience informs using legal tools amid federal hostility.
Let's see.
So I'd like to talk about, I mean specifically Director Brown, if you can speak a little bit about your litigation experience and how that's informing the initiatives the office is undertaking in the current
federal environment that we have here.
I feel like you spoke a little bit to that in your testimony.
Would just like to hear how you're framing or the framework of the initiatives coming out of the office.
Yeah, thank you for the question.
And so for those who don't know, prior to this position, I was an assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Bureau here in the office of the New York State Attorney General, Letitia James.
Before that, I was a staff attorney at both the American Civil Liberties Union and Lambda Legal.
And I was doing impact litigation on behalf of transgender people across the country.
And I graduated from law school in 2017, so that was right when Trump was elected, so I really cut my teeth in doing a lot of that very early litigation as well as it continued on.
And so I would say,
And my work specifically was focused on health care in a very real way because of my own sort of personal story in that.
And so because of the types of cases I led and their significance, that has given me deep expertise in both civil rights and constitutional law.
I think it also has given me, clearly, but even from a personal perspective, but a very deep understanding of the issues facing LGBTQIA people and especially where those issues intersect with government.
My office's work is done in the shadow of unprecedented federal hostility and serious changes to the legal landscape.
And so in the shadow of that, my litigation experience, primarily suing governmental entities and actors and challenging unconstitutional or unlawful executive orders, laws,
policies, regulations, and what have you, it's given me a deep understanding because we also have those tools.
And so it has given me a deep understanding of how to use those tools and others that government has in order to effectuate true change in people's lives for the better.