Benjamin P. Marcus is a Senior Constitutional Law Fellow with GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders. He rejoins GLAD Law after clerking for the Honorable Judith W. Rogers of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. As a Senior Fellow, Ben helps GLAD Law strengthen legal strategies to defend the constitutional rights of the LGBTQ+ community from ongoing attacks, including attempts to undermine or overturn marriage equality and other legal rights and protections.
Ben is also a Fellow for Religious Freedom at the Freedom Forum. From 2017-2020 he served as the Religious Literacy Specialist with the Religious Freedom Center of the Freedom Forum, where he developed religious literacy and religious freedom programs for public schools, universities, businesses, and government organizations.
His research and publications examine the intersection of education, religious literacy, and religious liberty in the United States. He has authored multiple book chapters and peer-reviewed journal articles, and he wrote regularly for First Five, a nationally distributed column about the First Amendment. He has also delivered over 100 presentations on these topics in the U.S. and Europe, including at the Aspen Institute, Chautauqua Institution, Harvard University, Twitter, and the U.S. Departments of State and Education, and been interviewed by major media outlets including NPR’s All Things Considered, the Chicago Tribune, the Houston Chronicle, The Hill, and Bloomberg News.
He has played a leading role in developing policies and guidelines for teaching about religion for education organizations and government bodies in the United States and abroad. He has advised prominent religious studies organizations including Harvard’s Pluralism Project and the Foundation for Religious Literacy. He recently completed a term on the American Academy of Religion’s Applied Religious Studies Committee.
Ben earned a J.D. at Yale Law School, where he served as a Coker Fellow in constitutional law and a notes editor on the Yale Law Journal. He also attended Harvard Divinity School as a Presidential Scholar, where he earned an M.T.S. with a concentration in religion, ethics, and politics. As an undergraduate, he studied religion at the University of Cambridge and Brown University, where he graduated magna cum laude.
Ben is admitted to practice law in the State of New York and the District of Columbia, as well as in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.
