Cathryn (Kate) Oakley (she/her) is the Deputy Legal Director of Policy at Lambda Legal. Oakley joins Lambda Legal’s Washington, D.C. office and brings more than a decade of experience at the forefront of LGBTQ+ civil rights advocacy, non-discrimination law, and legislative strategy.

Oakley joins Lambda Legal from the Human Rights Campaign, where she served since 2012 in a range of roles including Senior Director of Legal Policy, Senior Counsel, and State Legislative Director. She supervised HRC’s legal policy and impact litigation teams and directed its cross-departmental state legislative program, providing expert counsel to legislators and advocates at the federal, state, and local levels. Her policy accomplishments include work on the Respect for Marriage Act (2022), the Virginia Values Act (2020), and the successful fight against North Carolina’s House Bill 2. She also served as a founding author of HRC’s Municipal Equality Index and co-author of the State Equality Index, two of the organization’s most widely accessed resources.

A nationally recognized subject matter expert, Oakley has worked extensively on non-discrimination protections in employment, housing, and public accommodations; access to healthcare for transgender people; non-discrimination in education, including athletics; family law and child welfare; and constitutional protections for LGBTQ+ people. She has provided on-the-spot legal analysis of landmark Supreme Court decisions, including Skrmetti v. United States, Obergefell v. Hodges, and Windsor v. U.S., and has appeared as a spokesperson and commentator on PBS NewsHour, CNN, Al-Jazeera, NPR, and NBC, as well as in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and other major outlets.

Oakley is a member of the Virginia Bar. Prior to joining the Human Rights Campaign, Oakley practiced domestic relations law at the Law Offices of Jay B. Myerson in Fairfax County, Virginia. She has served as an adjunct professor at George Washington University since 2014, co-teaching “Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, and the Law” in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. She is also a published legal scholar, with recent articles appearing in the Loyola University Chicago Law Journal and the Richmond Public Interest Law Review, among other publications. In 2023, she was named to the National LGBTQ Bar Association’s 40 Best Lawyers Under 40.

Oakley holds a J.D. from George Mason University School of Law and a B.A. from Smith College.