Five Questions with Roberta Kaplan, Esq.

It used to be that lawyers were the butt of jokes. Then came the Trump era. That began to change when we saw lawyers, in airports, with their laptops set up like weapons, fighting against Trump in the early days of the Muslim ban, trying to protect people. But even before there were lawyers for the good during Trump, there was Roberta Kaplan.

Kaplan talks about some of her cases below, but something you should know going into is that the Columbia-educated lawyer, who is also a Harvard undergraduate, took on a pro bono case (work lawyers do for free as a public service) in 2009 on behalf of a woman named Edith Windsor. Windsor’s wife had passed away two years earlier. Because of U.S. laws prohibiting same-sex marriage, the two had married in Canada. Windsor was her wife’s sole heir. But because their marriage wasn’t recognized under U.S. law, she was hit with a whopping estate tax bill of $363,053, in addition to losing her partner. Kaplan pursued the case all the way to the United States Supreme Court.

On June 26, 2013, the Supreme Court ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act was unconstitutional, which meant that the federal government could no longer discriminate against married lesbian and gay couples in determining federal benefits and protections, like they did when the imposed the estate tax on Windsor. Windsor opened the floodgates, and in 2015 in Obergefell v. Hodges, the Court legalized same-sex marriage.

Courtroom sketch from Reuters

More recently, Kaplan has been the lawyer who has pursued E. Jean Carroll’s defamation and related claims against Donald Trump through a tangle of state and federal courts before obtaining a $5 million dollar verdict against him, with trial in a related case set for next January. E. Jean had this to say about her lawyer: “Robbie Kaplan is the wisest, strongest, best-humored, best-dressed, most courageous attorney in the country—AND she works out with a trainer.  I would not be surprised to see Robbie enter her next courtroom, lift the opposing attorney over her head, spin them around three or four times and throw them out the window.” In other words, when Robbie Kaplan is in the courtroom, expect the unexpected. And, expect her to advance the causes of social justice she has been committed to for her entire professional life.

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