Lawyer, Advocate, Fearless
Abby Rubenfeld is a lawyer in private practice in Nashville, Tennessee, and has been a civil rights activist for the past four decades. In 2013, she initiated the Tennessee marriage equality case, Tanco v. Haslam, a companion case to the Obergefell case that established marriage equality nationally. She was the first legal director of Lambda Legal, a national LGBTQ+ legal organization, in the 1980s, and helped build the organization’s legal program to national prominence; created the roundtable, which continues to serve as an essential forum to coordinate between national LGBTQ+ rights organizations; and started the American Bar Association (ABA) AIDS Coordinating Committee, which allowed the ABA to organize its response to the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. In 1996, she successfully challenged the Tennessee law criminalizing private consensual sexual behavior between same-sex couples. She has received numerous national and local awards. She is married and has two daughters and a step-daughter.