Gender & Sexuality Law Blog

Letizia Palumbo is a visiting scholar at Columbia Law School, and a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Palermo, Department of Politics, Law and Society.  This fall at Columbia she is researching the limits of current feminist interpretations of sex-trafficking developed around the “victim” versus “agency” dichotomy.  These are her thoughts about two recent cases [...]

Milli Kanani Hansen, currently a second year law student at Columbia Law School is on the editorial board of the Human Rights Law Review, is the Research Chair for Rights Link (is a human rights law student organization at Columbia Law School that provides free legal research services to human rights and public interest law [...]

The Supreme Court issued a decision today authored by Justice David Souter that is likely his last opinion on the Court.   The Court decided Safford Unified School District v. Redding 8-1 that the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures was violated when public school officials searched a 13 year old girl by having [...]

Today, the House of Representatives voted on a bill that had come before them in 2007 and failed, the Matthew Shepard Act (officially, the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009 or LLEHCPA).  Last Friday the Act passed the House Judiciary Committee by a vote of 15–12.  Today, the House considered and passed [...]

Last Friday night, the Syracuse men’s basketball team was routed by Oklahoma, losing 84-71 – in no small measure because of the shooting collapse of Syracuse’s star guard Eric Devendorf, who finished the game with only 8 points.
Why should readers of a Gender and Sexuality Law blog care about the Syracuse men’s basketball team?  Well, [...]

Columbia’s Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic recently filed a brief in the European Court of Human Rights involving the right of victims of sex trafficking to a remedy under various European and International Laws.  My recent article in the European Lawyer magazine, which takes a somewhat different view from Professor Franke’s post, elaborates the trafficking/slavery [...]

From the Reproductive Rights Law Prof Blog:
Obama to Keep Abstinence-Only AIDS Coordinator, by Jodi Jacobson:
Confirming month-old rumors, a high-level source reported last night that President-Elect Obama’s transition team has asked Ambassador Mark Dybul to remain in place as Global AIDS Coordinator, despite strong opposition by treatment access, HIV prevention, and women’s rights advocates across the [...]

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Fitzgerald v. Barnstable School Committee – a case involving a girl in the kindergarten at Hyannis West Elementary School who claimed that every time she wore a skirt to school, an eight-year-old third grade boy on the school bus would force her to lift her skirt, [...]

One of the courses I teach at Columbia Law School has to do with litigating cases of excessive force against the police.  See the syllabus here if you’re interested.  A couple months ago I was talking to a lawyer, James Cook, in Tallahassee, Florida about a taser case he is working on (you can see [...]