Gender & Sexuality Law Blog

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 [...]

After much gossip, hand-ringing, internecine scuffles and turf kick-up, the White House has announced that Luis de Baca will be appointed to head up the State Department’s Trafficking In Persons (TIP) Office.  The TIP Office coordinates policy out of the State Department on the Traffic in Persons and, perhaps most importantly, must issue an [...]

News sources report today that the Obama Administration has determined to reverse the previous administration’s refusal to be a signatory to UN statement calling for an end to rights abuses based on sexual orientation and gender identity.  As we blogged earlier here and here, the declaration was signed by all 27 European Union members [...]

On Friday, the Gender and Sexuality Law Program held its inaugural symposium, this year honoring  the work of Professor Martha Nussbaum.  Nine scholars submitted papers providing insights on  Professor Nussbaum’s scholarship, points of departure for her theories, and novel applications of her  theories to many different contexts.  Dean Schizer introduced Professor Nussbaum before her keynote  speech at the end [...]

I blogged recently about the concerns I had when I read the statements Hilary Clinton made in her Senate confirmation testimony related to the issue of sex trafficking.  I heard little sign in her testimony of a desire to change policy from the crusade undertaken by the Bush Administration that overdetermined the problem of human [...]

Columbia’s Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic recently filed a brief in the European Court of Human Rights involving the right of victims of sex trafficking to a remedy under various European and International Laws.  My recent article in the European Lawyer magazine, which takes a somewhat different view from Professor Franke’s post, elaborates the trafficking/slavery [...]

In her confirmation hearing last week Hilary Clinton was asked by Barbara Boxer to talk about how she plans to use the office of the Secretary of State to better the “status of women in the world.” She was particularly interested in the problems of violence against women and sex trafficking, making explicit reference [...]

The Huffington Post has got a story about the Gonzales case before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights about which we have already blogged.  The case is being handled by students in the Human Rights and Sexuality & Gender Law Clinics, under the supervision of the Human Rights Clinic’s Deputy Director Carrie Bettinger-Lopez:
The unfortunate saga [...]

Nazneen Mehta is a second-year law student at Columbia Law School and is writing a Note on the international market in surrogacy services – particularly between relatively affluent “intended parents” in the US and poor female surrogates in India. Her Note will examine the ways in which this market might better be regulated by [...]