Gender & Sexuality Law Blog

More than 50 legal scholars today strongly urged President Obama to resist calls for an overly broad religious exemption in a proposed executive order prohibiting sexual orientation and/or gender identity discrimination by federal contractors. The effort is being spearheaded by Columbia Law School’s Center for Gender and Sexuality Law, as part of its recently launched […]

The Supreme Court is supposed to be the final word on our legal questions, but apparently it reserves the right to change its mind at a moment’s notice. When the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores on Monday June 30th, holding that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act required the government […]

Check out the contribution Elizabeth Sepper and I made to the U.S. News and World Report “Room for Debate” discussion about:   Should Catholic and Other Religious Institutions Have to Cover Birth Control? Last month, President Obama announced his administration’s plan to require religious employers, like universities and hospitals, to cover contraceptives in employee health […]

As the Mississippi Legislature debates this week whether to impose mandatory sex education in public schools (Mississippi has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the country), new research reinforces the importance of sex education as a public health measure.  A new study released by the Journal of Sex Research entitled One Love: Explicit Monogamy Agreements […]

I attended the oral argument this morning in the Second Circuit in Alliance for Open Society International v. USAID, a case brought by the Brennan Center challenging the 2003 Bush era regulations that required any entity receiving USAID under the Global AIDS Act to sign a pledge that “no funds made available to carry out […]

Yesterday, an HIV positive Australian man won a discrimination suit against a medical clinic that refused to treat him for erectile dysfunction on account of his HIV status.  The man, whose name is being withheld, paid the clinic $1995 for treatment, but soon after his treatment began the medical staff determined that he was no […]

In March, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli made headlines when out of nowhere he sent a letter to the Commenwealth’s public colleges and universities indicating that they had no legal authority to enact policies prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and that those that had done so must rescind their policies.  The AG […]

It seems some things haven’t changed much since the time of Stonewall Students in the Columbia Law School Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic, working with the Urban Justice Center and the New York Civil Liberties Union, are seeking to compel the New York City Police Department to release records of prostitution arrests and a series […]

Yesterday, the Utah Senate Health and Human Services Committee unanimously passed a bill that would amend the Utah Criminal Code to make it much easier to charge sex workers and their patrons with a felony if they knew or should have known that they were HIV positive. The proposed amendment to the law suffers a […]

All eyes were on the Senate hearings this week on repeal of the so-called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, meaning that before long members of the U.S. military will be permitted to do two things without negative consequences for the first time in U.S. history: i) say out loud “I am gay or lesbian,” and […]