Gender & Sexuality Law Blog

Two important events in the criminal treatment of sexual violence against women took place yesterday. First: Michigan’s Attorney General Bill Schuette filed a criminal complaint against Sedrick Leman-Issac Mitchell, aka “Gruesome,” charging him with human trafficking, forced prostitution, criminal sexual conduct (including rape), assault with a firearm and other felonies in connection with a criminal enterprise […]

Just published on GSL Online, the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law’s e-journal, Prosecuting Human Trafficking as a Crime Against Humanity under the Rome Statute, by Jane Kim (JD 2011) Here’s the abstract: Bought and sold, consumed and exploited: human bodies, labor, personhood, and dignity have become the most valuable, reusable, and profitable products in […]

For students of the legal regulation of sex/work, this forthcoming issue of the Journal of Law and Society looks great.

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 […]

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 the New York State Senate, an otherwise dysfunctional political institution, passed the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights by a vote of 33 to 28.  The new law would provide New York’s estimated 200,000 domestic workers with basic labor protections such as a day off every week, overtime pay, paid sick days, the right to […]

GSL Online, the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law’s new webjournal, publishes Columbia law students’ written work that engages key issues in gender and/or sexuality law.  Today we published Jeannie Chung‘s (JD 2010) excellent paper she wrote as part of the Feminist Theory Workshop last fall.  It is entitled: Creation of the Living Dead: North […]

Last week, the Columbia Law School Human Rights and Sexuality & Gender Law Clinics released “Human Rights and Domestic Violence: An Advocacy Manual,” which frames and reinforces an international human rights approach to domestic violence/gender-based violence advocacy and underscores the growing interest among domestic violence lawyers and advocates in international human rights law strategies to […]

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 annual […]