Biography
Courses
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Robert Bradley Sears
Executive Director, The Charles R. Williams Institute on
Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy
B.A. Yale, 1992
J.D. Harvard, 1995
UCLA Law faculty since 2000
sears@law.ucla.edu
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R. Bradley (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.
Sears 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, Sears moved to Los Angeles and clerked for the Hon J. Spencer Letts of the Central District of California. In 1996, he received funding from echoing green, 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. The HIV Legal Checkup Project provided preventive legal services to over 800 clients per year and over 100 UCLA School of Law students received training through volunteering with the Project.
In 1997, Sears 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.
Sears 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.
