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Cases & Advocacy

In re Marriage of S.

NCLR assisted S., a transgender father in Chicago. S. has lived his entire adult life as a male and has undergone medical treatment for sex-reassignment. He also had his birth certificate changed to reflect his male gender. S. married in 1985. He and his wife had a child together in 1992 through alternative insemination. When S. filed for divorce in 1998, his wife counter-petitioned to have their marriage declared void and to terminate S.’s parental rights.

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Cases & Advocacy

Kantaras v. Kantaras

In June 2005, love, patience, and persistence, combined with a visionary judge and a little help from Dr. Phil, led to an historic settlement agreement between NCLR client Michael Kantaras and his former wife. Michael, a transsexual father, has been fighting for almost seven years to retain his parental rights to his two children, aged 16 and 13.

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Cases & Advocacy

Cozen O’Connor, P.C. v. Tobits

Jennifer Tobits and Sarah Ellyn Farley married in Toronto in 2006. Two weeks after their wedding, Ellyn was diagnosed with cancer. The Chicago couple fought the disease together for their entire marriage, until Ellyn passed away in September 2010. Because Ellyn’s parents had never accepted her marriage to Jennifer, they feared that Ellyn’s parents would make legal claims to their property and generally attack Jennifer’s status as Ellyn’s spouse.

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Cases & Advocacy

Smith v. Knoller

In 2001, Diane Alexis Whipple was killed by two dogs in the hallway of her apartment building in San Francisco where she lived with her life partner, Sharon Smith. NCLR and co-counsel  represented Ms. Smith in a wrongful death case. The defendants argued that Ms. Smith could not pursue a wrongful death claim since the couple was unmarried. In a historic ruling, San Francisco Superior Court Judge A. James Robertson II held that Ms. Smith was a “surviving spouse” and that any other reading of the law “has no place in our system of government” and would “unduly punish Ms. Smith for her sexual orientation.”

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