Armen H. Merjian is the Senior Staff Attorney at Housing Works, Inc. The New York Law Journal/Law.com recently named Armen “one of the nation’s leading civil rights lawyers, and likely the preeminent lawyer in the history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.” For over three and a half decades, Armen has conducted impact litigation on issues involving HIV/AIDS, homelessness, public benefits, disability, gender, and housing discrimination. He has litigated numerous landmark cases, including Hanna v. Turner (establishing the right of homeless New Yorkers living with AIDS to same-day placement in emergency housing, the first ruling of its kind in the United States); Hernandez v. Barrios Paoli (eliminating the onerous eligibility verification review for tens of thousands of indigent New Yorkers living with AIDS); Henrietta D. v. Bloomberg (the largest welfare/ADA case in U.S. history, establishing that the failure to provide reasonable accommodations is an independent form of disability discrimination in the Second Circuit); Bumpus v. New York City Transit Authority (finding 40,000 Transit Authority workers not exempt from City Human Rights Law, and ruling that gender identity protections do not violate the First Amendment and are not constitutionally vague); Short v. Manhattan Apartments (the first trial challenging source of income housing discrimination in New York); Wilson v. Phoenix House (finding drug treatment program subject to the human rights law and its transgender protections); and Olivierre v. Parkchester Preservation Co. (first case to prohibit minimum-income requirements for voucher holders with full subsidies, against one of the world’s largest housing complexes).

Armen is a co-author of the national treatise on AIDS, AIDS and the Law, an Editorial Board Member of the ABA’s Human Rights Magazine, and the author of 20 law review articles on human and civil rights, publishing in the nation’s top-ranked law journal in five different areas. An executive editor at Bender’s called his article on asylum “a must read for all immigration law students,” while another of his articles has been cited and used on six continents.

Pronouns: He/Him/His