Jennifer Levi, ’92, Honored with 2025 Professional Achievement Award by Alumni Association
UChicago announces 2025 Alumni Award honorees
A group of accomplished University of Chicago graduates will receive 2025 Alumni Awards, recognizing their outstanding professional achievement, service to society and contributions to the UChicago community.
The awards were announced by the UChicago Alumni and the Alumni Board. This year’s honorees span a wide range of fields, including theology, LGBTQ+ advocacy, sports journalism and private equity. The recipients of the Professional Achievement Award, Early Career Achievement Award and Recent Alumni Service Award will be honored during Alumni Weekend from May 1-4.
In addition, Assoc. Prof. Emeritus Stephen Pruett-Jones and Prof. Emeritus Donald G. York, PhD’71, will both be recognized with the Norman Maclean Faculty Award for extraordinary contributions to teaching and student experience.
Learn more about the 2025 Alumni Award honorees:
Professional Achievement Award
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Jennifer Levi, JD’92, has been a force in LGBTQ+ civil rights law for more than 25 years at GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders, or GLAD Law, where she serves as senior director of transgender and queer rights. In that role, she has pioneered litigation that has reshaped legal protections for transgender people in the U.S.
A professor at Western New England University Law School who also teaches at Duke University School of Law, Levi co-edited the first book on transgender family law.
Her strategic litigation has established precedents protecting transgender rights under federal sex discrimination laws and ensuring transgender students’ access to facilities and inclusion in all educational programming. Her prison advocacy includes successfully arguing for the transfer of a transgender woman from a men’s to a women’s facility.
In 2017, she led the fight against President Donald Trump’s ban on transgender military service, and she currently spearheads two cases challenging restrictions on transgender health care. One is aimed at Alabama’s law criminalizing medical care for transgender adolescents, and another Florida’s law restricting medical care for both transgender youth and adults.
While a law student at UChicago, she was also a member of the U.S. Women’s National Rugby team, which won the first-ever Women’s Rugby World Cup.
Read more at The University of Chicago