Gender & Sexuality Law Blog

Nicole Medham is a third year law student at Columbia Law School and has these thoughts about a recent 20/20 episode that caught her attention when the authors of Freakonomics were interviewed about the what and why of various implications of feminism:
Last Friday’s edition of ABC’s 20/20 featured the authors of the bestseller Freakonomics, Steven [...]

Friday the Iowa Supreme Court held unanimously that the state’s definition of marriage – a union of a man and a woman – violated the Iowa Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.  This is the first court to do so unanimously, and the first mid-western court to do so.  No more can marriage traditionalists dismiss the idea [...]

From Columbia Law School Professor Patricia Williams, via The Nation
For some years now, the biotechnology of fertility enhancement has been exalted as God’s gift to the biblically barren. A relentless narrative of entitlement intertwined with prayerfulness has framed infertility as a tragedy, an oppression, an agony, a disease. Some have proclaimed a “right” to [...]

Yesterday, the Gender and Sexuality Law Program kicked off its spring 2009 colloquium with the presentation and discussion of Professor Anna Marie Smith’s paper entitled “Reproductive Technology, Family Law, and the Post-welfare State: The California Same-Sex Parents’ Rights ‘Victories’ of 2005.“ Professor Smith’s article touches on several facets of parental rights and its intersection with [...]

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 [...]

We miss our wonderful colleague Carol Sanger, the Barbara Aronstein Black Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, who is on leave this year, but she is making good use of her leave.  She has just completed a new article on the use and abuse of ultrasound technology in steering women to chose not to [...]

Did you ever stop to think that, despite all the international variations in policy and laws on reproductive rights, the experience of pregnancy and childbirth is truly universal?  We all have been part of the reproductive process, whether going through it or being the product of it. Nancy Northup very eloquently made this point in [...]

On Monday, the Supreme Court denied cert. in a case in which a sperm donor sought to have a Kansas court declare him the legal father of the children born to a woman who had been inseminated with his sperm by and through a licensed physician. Under Kansas law:
The donor of semen provided to [...]