Gender & Sexuality Law Blog

Letizia Palumbo is a visiting scholar at Columbia Law School, and a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Palermo, Department of Politics, Law and Society.  This fall at Columbia she is researching the limits of current feminist interpretations of sex-trafficking developed around the “victim” versus “agency” dichotomy.  These are her thoughts about two recent cases [...]

Maine voters will see on their ballots next Tuesday a proposition to repeal legislation that would have allowed same-sex couples to marry.  The language on the ballot is:
Do you want to reject the new law that lets same-sex couples marry and allows individuals and religious groups to refuse to perform these marriages?
The Research 2000/Daily Kos [...]

A day doesn’t go by that we don’t hear about a man in the public eye being found to have had sex with female subordinates at work.  Today’s offender is 46 year-old Steve Phillips, ESPN baseball analyst (love that term, instead of “on-air baseball commentator who was accused of sexually harassing a female employee when [...]

Katherine Darmer is a is a Professor of Law at Chapman University and is also a Distinguished Senior Fellow in the Gender & Sexuality Law Program this fall.   She offers the following observations about on-going litigation challenging a California High School’s failure to protect LGBT students from homophobic threats and violence:
Earlier this year, the New [...]

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is back in New York for the annual fall gathering of heads of state at the U.N. General Assembly meeting.  As expected, his remarks to the body on Wednesday provoked outrage, walkouts, and general condemnation by various states and the media.  If all you did was read the press reports about [...]

Today is Constitution Day, the anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution this day in 1787.   I’ll be one of the speakers at our Constitution Day event, and have put together these brief remarks to raise the question: to whom do the rights contained in the Constitution belong?
Fifty years ago police officers entered the [...]

Anyone interested in gender stereotyping should rejoice the decision released last Friday in Prowel v. Wise Business Forms.  Brian Prowel describes himself as “effeminate” and that due to his effeminacy he was harassed and retaliated against at his job in violation of the sex discrimination protections contained in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act [...]

The Gender and Sexuality Law Blog covered a case our Sexuality & Gender Law Clinic was handling back in May having to do with a man who applied for and was denied parole by the Massachusetts  Parole Board because he was gay.  See post here.
This week, the Parole Board granted Bruce Wilburn’s parole application.   See [...]

Gulnar Mistry graduated from Columbia Law School with an LLM this May and is now a Junior Counsel at the Bombay High Court.  She offers the following observations about the Delhi High Court’s ruling invalidating India’s Sodomy Law:
On July 20, the Supreme Court of India will hear a fast-tracked petition against the recent Delhi High [...]

The Supreme Court issued a decision today authored by Justice David Souter that is likely his last opinion on the Court.   The Court decided Safford Unified School District v. Redding 8-1 that the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures was violated when public school officials searched a 13 year old girl by having [...]