Jacksonville attorney Nancy Hogshead-Makar, an Olympic champion and civil rights lawyer, will deliver the keynote address at the 26th annual Kate Stoneman Day, March 19 at Albany Law School in Albany, New York
Kate Stoneman Day is the school’s annual celebration of women in law. As the keynote speaker, Hogshead-Makar will be presented the Miriam M. Netter ’72 Stoneman Award, in honor of Kate Stoneman, the first woman admitted to practice law in New York and the first woman to graduate from Albany Law School in 1898.
Hogshead-Makar is founder and CEO of Champion Women, a nonprofit that provides legal advocacy for girls and women in sports. She led an effort to protect athletes from sexual abuse in club and Olympic sports. It led to the Protecting Young Victims from Sexual Abuse and SafeSport Authorization Act that became law in February 2018.
Hogshead-Makar has served on the NCAA Task Force on Gender Equity and on the boards of Equality League, the Association of Title IX Administrators, the Aspen Institute Sport and Society Program, the One Love Foundation and the World Olympians Association.
Hogshead-Makar capped eight years as a world-class swimmer at the 1984 Olympics, where she won three gold medals and one silver medal.
After the Olympics, she graduated with honors from Duke University, where she is a member of the university’s athletics hall of fame. Hogshead-Makar received her law degree from Georgetown University Law Center in 1997.
She practiced law at Holland & Knight in the litigation and public law departments and was co-chair of American Bar Association Committee on the Rights of Women. Hogshead-Makar also was a professor at Florida Coastal School of Law, where she taught first-year torts and sports law courses.
Past Stoneman Award honorees include U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, New York State Solicitor General Barbara Underwood, former New York Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and other leaders in the private sector, public service and academia.