Two ABF Fellows were named as the 2024 awardees of the American Bar Association’s Stonewall Award. Paula Boggs, ABF Board Member and Leadership Fellow, and Mark Johnson-Roberts, Fellow, will be honored during a ceremony on February 3rd, at the ABA Midyear Meeting in Louisville, KY.
The Stonewall Award was created by the ABA Board of Governors in 2011. The award seeks to honor lawyers, members of the judiciary, and legal academics who have sought to enact real change to remove barriers sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression in the legal profession and the world, nation, state, and/or locale and to recognize those who have championed diversity for the LGBT community, both within the legal profession and impacting the greater human universe.
Paula Boggs, ABF Board Member and Leadership Fellow, was the executive vice president, general counsel, and secretary at the Starbucks Coffee Co from 2002-12. During her time at Starbucks, she led the company’s focus on diversity and inclusion and kept Starbucks partners, including the supply chain, retail partners, and customers, informed and comfortable with the company’s policies. Outside of law, she performs as the front woman of the Paula Boggs Band.
Mark Johnson-Roberts is a former board co-chair of the National Lesbian & Gay Law Association (now the National LGBT Bar Association). He was also the former chair of the ABA Commission on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity and a past president of the Oregon State Bar. Johnson-Roberts assisted in drafting Oregon’s civil union law and served as lead attorney on several cases, including Martinez v. Kulongoski, the first case that attempted to overturn the state’s “defense of marriage” constitutional amendment.
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