Celebrity Friday: Tara Borrelli Named CA Top 100 Lawyer

Tara Borelli is an acquaintance of mine who works in the Western Regional Office of Lambda Legal in Los Angeles on impact litigation impacting the LGBT and HIV/AIDS communities. It is with great pleasure I get to declare that she is today's subject of Celebrity Friday thanks to the fact that the Daily Journal (which is basically the daily newspaper for lawyers in the state of California) has named Tara one of the Top 100 lawyers in the state of California!

The Journal recognized Borelli for her work in four of the cases in which she is leading litigation:

• Golinski v. U.S. Office of Personnel Management, in which Lambda Legal won a district court ruling that a key portion of the federal so-called Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is unconstitutional.
• Diaz v. Brewer, in which Lambda Legal represents seven lesbian and gay Arizona state employees in federal court and has blocked the state's discriminatory attempt to eliminate the health care benefits that they rely on to safeguard their families' health.
• Sevcik v. Sandoval, Lambda Legal's federal case challenging Nevada's law prohibiting same-sex couples from marrying.
• Esquivel v. Oregon, in which Lambda Legal represents a state employee denied medically necessary surgery because he is transgender.

These are all very important cases, with Diaz v. Brewer on the docket before the United States Supreme Court as it considers whether to grant certiorari in Governor Jan Brewer's non-sensical appeal of an injunction against the state of Arizona from dropping domestic partner benefits for state employees. Golinksi is another one of the many recent cases which have been used to demonstrate the legal abomination which is the so-called Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), although it is unlikely to make it to the high court at the same time as some other cases which are further along, but the Department of Justice has asked the Supreme Court to consider it along with the myriad other courses in which DOMA has been struck down at either the federal district or appellate court level.