Gender & Sexuality Law Blog

The Human Rights Institute (HRI) of Columbia Law School will co-host a groundbreaking conference on gender, sexuality and women’s rights issues that will bring together leading scholars and advocates from over 20 countries in North, South, Central America and the Caribbean. The conference,  “Gender Justice in the Americas: A Transnational Dialogue on Sexuality, Violence, Reproduction [...]

Elizabeth Sepper, the Center for Reproductive Rights Fellow at Columbia Law School, is a legal scholar working in the field of health law and human rights. Her current work examines the role of conscience in medical care. U.S. Representative Joe Pitts thinks hospitals shouldn’t have to treat pregnant women in emergencies. Instead, under a provision [...]

As the Mississippi Legislature debates this week whether to impose mandatory sex education in public schools (Mississippi has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the country), new research reinforces the importance of sex education as a public health measure.  A new study released by the Journal of Sex Research entitled One Love: Explicit Monogamy Agreements [...]

If you follow the situation in Haiti, you know that the recovery and rebuilding from the devastating earthquake last January has proceeded slowly, and that cholera has now spread throughout the country – adding new forms of misery to a people already suffering from inordinate emiseration. Gender Action, an NGO promoting gender justice and women’s [...]

The Center for Reproductive Rights filed a contempt motion today against the FDA for ignoring a March 2009 court order to end age restrictions on emergency contraception.  The motion is here.  CRR sued the FDA in 2005 (complaint here) for failing to grant over-the-counter status to EC against the advice of its scientific experts and [...]

The CRR-CLS Fellowship is a two-year, post-graduate fellowship that is designed to prepare recent law school graduates for legal aca­demic careers. Fellows are affiliated with the Center and Columbia Law School and participate in the intellectual life of both programs. The Fellow will also have access to law school facilities, including the library and on-line [...]

Yesterday at the Women Deliver global conference, Melinda Gates announced that the Gates Foundation will invest $1.5 billion over the next five years in programs promoting maternal and child health, family planning, and nutrition in developing countries.  Fantastic.  Yet, one of Women Deliver’s key goals – safe and legal abortions as one of the tools [...]

It seems some things haven’t changed much since the time of Stonewall Students in the Columbia Law School Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic, working with the Urban Justice Center and the New York Civil Liberties Union, are seeking to compel the New York City Police Department to release records of prostitution arrests and a series [...]

All eyes were on the Senate hearings this week on repeal of the so-called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, meaning that before long members of the U.S. military will be permitted to do two things without negative consequences for the first time in U.S. history: i) say out loud “I am gay or lesbian,” and [...]

There is so much to say about what is wrong with the anti-abortion policy that got smuggled into the House’s “health care reform” bill last weekend. Yet The New York Times’ Op-Ed page today contained a singularly disappointing piece titled Trading Women’s Rights for Political Power by Kate Michelman (the former president of Naral Pro-Choice [...]