Gender & Sexuality Law Blog

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 [...]

The last several weeks have been busy ones in the battle for marriage equality.  The governors of Maine and New Hampshire signed laws that allowed same sex couples to marry.  California’s Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Proposition 8, and we expected the New York State legislature to have a darn good chance of passing [...]

From Columbia Law School Professor Patricia Williams, via The Daily Beast:

President Obama’s nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor just plain fills me with delight. She’s brilliant, she’s fair, she’s an inspiration on many, many levels. That she is the first Puerto Rican or Latina nominee, appointed by the first Afro-Hawaiian-Kansan-Kenyan-American president, just makes this moment [...]

By: DUNCAN OSBORN
Gay City News link here
05/26/2009

Columbia Law students Mollie Kornreich, Abram Seaman, and Keren Zwick have taken up Bruce Wilborn’s case out of their belief he was denied parole in the killing of a gay man because he too is gay.

At first blush, Bruce Wilborn is not the ideal client for a [...]