Gender & Sexuality Law Blog

Press Advisory: Columbia Law Professor files Amicus Brief in Federal Prosecution of Catholic Anti-Nuclear Activists in Georgia Media Contact: Elizabeth Boylan | eboyla@law.columbia.edu | 212.854.0167 _____________________________________________________________________ On November 6th, Katherine Franke, Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia University in the City of New York, submitted an amicus brief on behalf of scholars of religious liberty […]

A Ugandan court today issued a permanent injunction banning the media from listing the names and addresses of Ugandans thought to be gay and awarded the plaintiffs damages and attorneys fees (1.5 million Uganda shillings, or about 650 dollars).   The ruling came in a case brought by three people from a gay rights group, Sexual […]

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’s campaign finance case out of the Supreme Court (Citizens United v. Federal Election Com’n) might have inflicted a devastating blow to the functioning of democracy in the U.S. by giving corporations unlimited power to spend money in elections, but what does it have to do with Proposition 8 and marriage equality, you might ask?  […]

The passage of Proposition 8 in California a year ago unleashed a troubling new strategy in the movement to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples: public shaming.  In an effort to slow down the ever-increasing use of propositions and referenda that forestall or overturn court or legislatively created marriage rights for same-sex couples, some advocates […]

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 […]

The Supreme Court has been busy this week thinking about dirty language and pictures. In two cases, they affirmed efforts to censor speech about matters sexual or profane. One case involved an FCC fine levied on CBS for Janet Jackson’s now well-known “wardrobe malfunction” during the Super Bowl halftime show in which a part of […]