Watson Institute at Brown University
Public Policy

The Constitutional Right to Marriage Equality: David Boies and Ted Olson on how they fought and overturned California’s same-sex marriage ban.

Thursday, March 5, 2015

6 p.m.

Starr Auditorium, MacMillan 117, 167 Thayer Street

Attorneys David Boies and Ted Olson will speak about the movement to recognize the right to marry someone of the same sex and the arguments for Due Process and Equal Protection under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution to vindicate that right. They will discuss their successful litigation to overturn California’s Proposition 8, which had restricted marriage to a man and a woman. Boies and Olson will also speak about the challenge to Virginia’s same-sex marriage prohibition and pending Supreme Court cases related to marriage equality.

This lecture is free and open to the public.
Funded by the Steven Yee and Erich Theophile Family Lecture Fund.

Public Policy

Theodore B. Olson and David Boies are the authors of Redeeming the Dream: the Case for Marriage Equality.

Theodore B. Olson has argued 61 cases before the Supreme Court. He is a partner in Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher's Washington, DC office. Olson was solicitor general of the United States from 2001 to 2004. From 1981 to 1984, he was assistant attorney general in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel in the US Department of Justice. He received his law degree from the University of California at Berkeley.

David Boies is chairman of Boies, Schiller and Flexner LLP. From 1991 to 1993, Boies was counsel to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, recovering $1.2 billion from companies who sold junk bonds to failed savings and loan associations. He served as chief counsel and staff director of the US Senate Antitrust Subcommittee in 1978 and chief counsel and staff director of the US Senate Judiciary Committee in 1979. He received his law degree from New York University.

Watch video of "A Conversation with David Boies and Ted Olson"