Gender & Sexuality Law Blog

Last night at the Human Rights Campaign dinner President Barack Obama delivered his first big speech on lgbt issues since becoming President.   There was much anticipation for the speech, as some in the gay community feel that the President has not moved fast enough on the issues affecting our community.
What is “an LGBT Issue”?
But what [...]

Yesterday’s New York Times ran a front page article about Liz Cheney and how she’s become the new doyenne of the Republican right. There’s much to say about what it means to have Vice President Dick (they call him that for a reason, right?) Cheney’s daughter pick up the cudgel of his father, but [...]

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 [...]

A majority of Americans could support same-sex marriage within five years regardless of whether state courts legalize such unions, a new study by Columbia Law Professor Nathaniel Persily and New York University Professor Patrick J. Egan have found.
The study estimates that 42 percent of the public now supports legalizing same-sex marriage, the highest level ever.
“If [...]

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 [...]

The California Supreme Court took the next step today in the ongoing battle over marriage rights for same sex couples, ruling 6-1 that the people of California had properly amended their constitution last November with Proposition 8, thereby limiting marriage to one man and one woman.   The Court’s opinion, widely predicted to come out as [...]

The California Supreme Court just issued its opinion in Strauss v. Horton, the case challenging the constitutionality of Proposition 8.  The Court found Proposition 8 a valid amendment to the California constitution.  It also held that Prop 8 did not retroactively invalidate the roughly 18,000 marriages of same sex couples performed between June and November [...]

The California Supreme Court plans to release it’s decision in the Prop 8 case tomorrow morning at 10:00 am PDT.  The opinion will be available here.  You can find further information about the case here.

Both during and after the City Bar Association panel I participated in a few weeks ago on the future of same sex marriage, I’ve gotten some push back for suggesting that we consider and evaluate the merits and risks of various constitutional arguments that have been made in the cases challenging the exclusion of same [...]

Suzanne Goldberg was interviewed this week about State-by-State Trends in Marriage Law Reform – hear the interview here: