Hayley Gorenberg is the Deputy Legal Director for Lambda Legal, the oldest and largest national legal organization committed to achieving full recognition of the rights of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgender people and people affected by HIV.
Gorenberg’s work experience spans the range of Lambda Legal’s mission. She is part of the legal team in Lambda Legal’sgroundbreaking case championing the right of an intersex person to receive a U.S. passport with an accurate designation of neither “female” nor “male.” She testified to the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing and submitted testimony to the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights regarding the impact of the criminal justice system on LGBT people and people living with or affected by HIV. She has worked on successful litigation to defend state laws barring licensed therapists from attempting to change young people’s sexual orientation or gender identity. She was lead counsel in Lambda Legal’s case winning marriage equality for New Jersey and part of the litigation team winning marriage protections for LGBT people in Puerto Rico. Early in her career at Lambda Legal, she brought the high-impact legal action against Cirque du Soleilthat yielded the largest award ever for an HIV-discrimination complaint settled with the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Gorenberg advocates, writes and speaks widely on cutting-edge issues, including the rights of young people in schools and the need to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline, the rights of transgender people, hate crimes and the laws that apply to them, relationship rights for same-sex couples, workplace fairness and HIV-related issues. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, USA Today, wire services such as the Associated Press,Salon.com and the Huffington Post. She has appeared as a commentator and featured guest on Talk of the Nation,On Point, The Takeaway, MSNBC and Fox News.
Gorenberg was a founding co-chair of the American Bar Association’s Civil Rights Litigation Committee, and has been appointed to the Advisory Council for the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton University.
She has chaired the Special Committee on AIDS for the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, and served on the ABCNY’s Bioethics Committee. She also served as a Wasserstein Public Interest Fellow at Harvard School of Law.
Before joining Lambda Legal, Gorenberg was the Coordinating Attorney for HIV Advocacy at the Legal Support Unit of Legal Services for New York City, where she ran a citywide legal task force addressing the emerging needs of low-income New Yorkers with HIV. Earlier, as the first staff attorney in the HIV Advocacy Project of Queens Legal Services, she engaged in a comprehensive civil litigation practice representing people with HIV. Before joining Legal Services, Gorenberg completed a federal clerkship in the Southern District of New York.
Gorenberg graduated with honors from Princeton University. She earned her law degree from New York University School of Law, where she received the National Association of Women Lawyers Award.
Prior to studying law, she had a successful career as a journalist