Gender & Sexuality Law Blog

The guy who has been the voice and puppeteer for Elmo, Kevin Clash, resigned today from Sesame Workshop on account of recent accusations that he had sex with under age boys.  Maybe he did it, maybe he didn’t – we don’t know yet.  But Sesame Workshop wanted him out as we head into the holiday […]

As many now know, CIA Director and retired four-star Army General David Petraeus has resigned his post at the CIA on account of newly emerging information that he had what the media calls an “extra-marital” affair with Paula Broadwell, who is also married.  Broadwell is the author of the flattering Petraeus biography All In: The […]

Check out Katherine Franke’s VLOG, discussing what a gender-rights lawyer in Palestine would work on if asked: If you can see this, then you might need a Flash Player upgrade or you need to install Flash Player if it’s missing. Get Flash Player from Adobe.

The Israeli Supreme Court last Thursday cut the prison term for a man convicted of “rape-by-deception” from 18 to 9 months.  It seems that lying about your ethnicity converts consensual sex to rape.  Really?  Well only if a Palestinian male citizen of Israel tells a woman he hooked up with that he was Jewish when […]

Egyptian officials announced on Saturday that the state’s emergency laws might be lifted in six months. We’ll see. Since 1967, Egypt has spent all but five months under a declared “state of emergency” by which the regime has rationalized the outlawing of demonstrations, the use of indefinite detentions without trial, the extensive use of “security […]

From Tanya Domi: A couple days ago we brought you a video from “The Today Show” announcing a lawsuit against the pentagon and military leaders, and we brought you an excellent report, “Pentagon Faces Class Action Suit Exposing Military Sexual Abuse Crisis,” by The New Civil Rights Movement writer Tanya Domi, a fifteen-year Army veteran, […]

Advocacy Organization Joins In Support Of Class Action Lawsuit Against Pentagon Leaders Gates, Rumsfeld To Combat Military Rape, Sexual Assault From Tanya Domi: Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN), a national advocacy organization devoted to eliminating sexual violence in the U.S. military, led by executive director and former Marine Corps Captain Anu Bhagwati, are joining in support of […]

Well-known Indian TV personality and Yogi Swami Ramdev is back in the Indian press, once again arguing that homosexuality is a curable disease and that sufferers could seek a cure. “It can be treated like any other congenital defect. Such tendencies can be treated by yoga, pranayam and other meditation techniques,” he has argued in […]

Last Thursday an Iowa appellate court affirmed a jury verdict convicting an HIV+ man in Iowa for the criminal transmission of HIV to his girlfriend.  At issue was a technical question of whether the jury had been properly charged on the question of “reasonable doubt.”  Underlying questions about the wisdom or constitutionality of statutes criminalizing […]

Jane Kim, a 3rd year law student at Columbia, has published to LSN’s Women, Gender and the Law eJournal an electronic version of a Note just published in the Virginia Journal of International Law, vol 51, p. 443.  Congratulations Jane! The paper is available here, and the abstract is here: At any given time, upwards […]