Brad Sears

1997

Brad Sears

HIV Legal Checkup

Los Angeles, CA, United States

Arts, Culture, Humanities, Health

The Bold Idea:

Create a comprehensive client intake strategy that covers the full range of HIV-related legal issues such as denial of benefits, tenant rights, immigration, family law, and debtor-creditor conflicts, and discrimination. Law students can perform the checkups, ensuring a steady stream of volunteers. The comprehensiveness of the checkups means that checkup staff indentifies incipient legal problems before they became crises. The client education component empowers clients to resolve many such problems themselves.

In spring 1997, HIV Legal Checkup became part of a new Los Angeles-area HIV legal services program, the HIV & AIDS Legal Services Alliance (HALSA).

Biography:

Brad Sears is the Executive Director of the Charles R. Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy, a national think-tank at UCLA School of Law dedicated to promoting legal scholarship, public policy analysis, and education programs on sexual orientation law and public policy. In addition, he teaches courses in disability law and sexual orientation law at UCLA School of Law.

Brad graduated summa cum laude from Yale University and magna cum laude from Harvard Law School. During college and law school, he completed internships with the Center for Constitutional Rights, Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Jamaica Plain Legal Services Center's AIDS Unit, the ACLU's National Gay and Lesbian and AIDS Project, and the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem. He also served as Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review.

After law school, Brad moved to Los Angeles and clerked for the Hon J. Spencer Letts of the Central District of California. In addition to his support from Echoing Green, Brad received funding from the Kaufman Fellowship and Columbia Law School's Public Interest Law Fund to create the HIV Legal Checkup Project, a legal services program dedicated to empowering people living with HIV-disease to address and prevent legal problems.

In 1997, Brad also became the Discrimination & Confidentiality Attorney for the HIV/AIDS Legal Services Alliance of Los Angeles (HALSA). In this capacity, he litigated and settled HIV-discrimination cases, ending the discriminatory practices of a number of medical practices, schools, and residential care facilities. His work also included settlements that resulted in mandated HIV-training for 22,000 Los Angeles County employees, the overturning of the City of Los Angeles' discriminatory denial of licenses to HIV-positive massage therapists, and the end of a major credit reporting company's policy of disclosing consumers' HIV-status on credit reports.

Brad has given hundreds of presentations to community groups, lawyers, medical practitioners, and advocates on HIV/AIDS and LGBT legal issues and has written a number of articles on these issues. He has also served on the board of directors or advisory boards for Being Alive Los Angeles, HALSA, USC's AIDS Education Training Center, and CorrectHelp, an organization dedicated to the needs of incarcerated persons living with HIV/AIDS.