Ryan M. Kendall is an advocate and civil rights lawyer whose work has had an outsized impact for good on the people and world around him.
Ryan is a Staff Attorney in the Systemic Impact Unit at Community Legal Aid SoCal. Previously, he was a Staff Attorney with the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles and a Litigation Fellow with the ACLU National Prison Project. Before he became a lawyer, Ryan helped establish marriage equality in California by testifying in the federal challenge to Proposition 8, and he pioneered the movement to ban the vile, abusive practice of so-called conversion therapy.
The Systemic Impact Unit (SIU) seeks to effect meaningful social and legal change that benefits vulnerable, historically marginalized, and low-income communities in Southeast Los Angeles and Orange counties.
At SIU, Ryan works on litigation to hold the City of Huntington Beach accountable for its failure to follow state law, including its failure to plan for enough housing for its low-income residents. Ryan helped obtain mandatory intervention in the California Attorney General’s lawsuit to enforce state housing laws against Huntington Beach.
In addition to his primary cases, Ryan continues to work on a variety of impact cases and other matters benefiting qualifying low-income residents of Orange and Southeast Los Angeles counties.
Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles (LAFLA)
Staff Attorney, Housing and Communities Workgroup
2021–2023
Staff Attorney, Eviction Defense Center
2019–2021
As an attorney in LAFLA’s Housing and Communities Workgroup (HoCo), Ryan led litigation to hold landlords accountable for harassing their tenants and seeking to evict them unlawfully during the COVID-19 pandemic. Ryan helped obtain six-figure settlements and attorney fee awards in tenant protection and routine eviction cases. Ryan also worked to preserve pandemic-era tenant protections in Los Angeles from legal challenges by billionaire developers. Ryan designed community trainings and oversaw multiple community-based clinics providing free legal aid to qualifying low-income Los Angeles residents.
In the Eviction Defense Center, Ryan helped dozens of people and families avoid eviction and stay in their homes. Ryan fought tirelessly to protect vulnerable, low-income tenants from illegal evictions, utility shutoffs, and lockouts.
Ryan began his legal career as a Litigation Fellow with the ACLU’s National Prison Project in Washington, D.C. At the ACLU, Ryan helped represent tens of thousands of prisoners in the Arizona Department of Corrections (ADC). Ryan’s work at the National Prison Project identified a systematic error in ADC’s compliance data, which a federal court relied on to keep in effect part of an agreement holding ADC accountable for decades of inhumane conditions and faulty medical care throughout Arizona prisons.