Laura W. Brill

Brill has been prominently mentioned as a candidate for the state Supreme Court to replace the recently retired Kathryn M. Werdegar as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender groups lobby Gov. Jerry Brown to choose the state’s first openly gay justice.

As a member of the Lambda Legal National Leadership Council since 2015, Brill has been active in the gay rights movement for years. Last year she recalled in a California Lawyer article how she, her wife and their kids marched with Lambda Legal and Equality California in gay rights parades in West Hollywood.

“I’m very flattered” to be identified as a potential high court candidate, she said. Of others in the LGBT community also named, she added, “It’s a wonderful group to be listed with.”

She is lead counsel for Los Angeles County in a lawsuit seeking to invalidate a new state law the county asserts discriminates against independent voters by meddling in the redrawing of county supervisors’ districts. It creates a redistricting committee of county residents whose political party affiliations must be proportionate to the registration totals statewide. County of Los Angeles v. State of California, BS168212 (L.A. Super. Ct., filed Feb. 27, 2017).

“We’ve been trying to understand what is motivating this law,” she said. “It certainly wasn’t Los Angeles’ idea. We’re hoping for a ruling by next spring so as not to affect the 2020 redistricting.”

For client NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund and other civil rights groups, Brill drafted and filed an amicus brief in connection with the Supreme Court’s partisan gerrymandering case, Gill v. Whitford, set for oral argument Oct. 3. “The case is about what happens when redistricting becomes partisan,” she said.

Brill was also involved in collecting more than 7,000 signatures from attorneys and law professors on letters expressing grave concerns about tweets from President Donald Trump that called U.S. District Judge James L. Robart a “so-called judge” after he ruled against Trump’s travel ban and a lament from U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions about a similar ruling by a federal jurist in Hawaii.

“I spent hours emailing every one I knew,” Brill said. “Judicial independence is extremely important to me, and I was very disturbed by these personal attacks on judges.”

— John Roemer