Gender & Sexuality Law Blog

Today, December 17th, is International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers.  December 17th received this designation in 2003 in memoriam of the more than 49 known sex workers and other marginalized women who were murdered by serial murderer, Gary Ridgway. The call to end violence is an important one, and one that we should […]

Media Contact: Public Affairs, 212-854-2650 or publicaffairs@law.columbia.edu New York, May 15, 2012—Columbia Law School’s Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic today sent letters to all New York State Senators and Assembly Members urging support for a bill that would prohibit the use of condoms as evidence in prostitution cases.  The letters say the bill addresses a […]

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

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 […]

Nan Hunter has the story here.  The opinion is here.  The case involved a challenge to Canadian law criminalizing 1) keeping a common bawdy house, 2) communicating for the purposes of prostitution, and 3) living on the proceeds of prostitution.  Some highlights of Judge Susan Himel’s opinion: She starts off with: This case demonstrates the […]

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 […]

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 […]

Yesterday, the Utah Senate Health and Human Services Committee unanimously passed a bill that would amend the Utah Criminal Code to make it much easier to charge sex workers and their patrons with a felony if they knew or should have known that they were HIV positive. The proposed amendment to the law suffers a […]

New York’s police and prosecutors should not be permitted to introduce condoms as evidence of prostitution and prostitution-related offenses, according to the students who work in Columbia’s Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic.  The Clinic held a tabling day yesterday at Columbia Law School in support of a New York State bill that would enact this […]

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, […]