About Ryan

Ryan M. Kendall is an experienced civil rights litigator specializing in strategic impact litigation, relationship-driven coalition-building, and persuasive advocacy that effects systemic change. Ryan has a proven record of securing meaningful courtroom and policy victories benefiting low-income and marginalized communities.

Selected Matters

• Challenging Library Censorship in Huntington Beach
  Lead organizational counsel; helped assemble a coalition with the ACLU Foundation of Southern California and the First Amendment Coalition, recruited the lead plaintiff, and co-authored the writ petition, complaint, and merits brief contesting the City’s unlawful public library censorship regime.
  
  
• State Housing Element Enforcement
  Secured mandatory intervention for affordable-housing advocates in the California Attorney General’s action against Huntington Beach, ensuring that low-income residents have a formal voice in litigation over the City’s non-compliance with state housing law.
  
  
• COVID-19 Eviction Moratorium Defense – Obtained dismissal of developers’ federal constitutional challenge to Los Angeles’s emergency eviction protections, preserving housing stability for thousands of tenants during the pandemic.
  
  
• Tenant Harassment Litigation
  Developed and led trial-and-appellate strategy that produced multiple six-figure fee awards and damages settlements for renters targeted by serial eviction and intimidation campaigns.
  
  
• Prison-Conditions Oversight
  Drafted briefing that exposed data irregularities and maintained federal court oversight of conditions of confinement and medical care for more than 30,000 people incarcerated in Arizona state prisons.

Landmark LGBTQ+ Leadership and Advocacy

• Served as a key fact witness in Perry v. Schwarzenegger (the Proposition 8 trial), offering testimony on the harms of conversion therapy and the lived experiences of LGBTQ+ youth. The district court credited this testimony in striking down California’s same-sex-marriage ban, a decision that laid crucial groundwork for nationwide marriage equality. My testimony was credited as the most emotionally impactful of the case and was later dramatized in Dustin Lance Black’s play "8." My story has informed subsequent legislative efforts to prohibit conversion therapy for minors across the United States. I helped pioneer the nation’s first conversion therapy bans for minors through national advocacy and legislative testimony.

Legislative and Community Engagement

• Assisted state lawmakers in passing the nation’s first laws banning conversion therapy for minors, a legislative model now adopted by dozens of jurisdictions.
  
  
• Provided strategic training and technical assistance to community organizations and legal-aid advocates on complex litigation, appellate practice, and impact-case development.
  
  
• Coauthored the Orange County Bar Association’s May 2023 cover article on housing and homelessness, framing regional policy discussions around low-income housing advocates and service provider perspectives.

Education and Admissions

• UCLA School of Law, J.D. with a Specialization in Public Interest Law and Policy
  
  
• Columbia University, B.A., summa cum laude in Political Science
  
  
• State Bar of California; Central District of California