Gender & Sexuality Law Blog

Today the House Education and Labor Committee, Chaired by Rep. George Miller, began hearings on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act of 2009 – a bill that would amend federal employment discrimination law to include sexual orientation and gender identity protections.  Various forms of this bill have been introduced into Congress in prior years, but it has [...]

Anyone interested in gender stereotyping should rejoice the decision released last Friday in Prowel v. Wise Business Forms.  Brian Prowel describes himself as “effeminate” and that due to his effeminacy he was harassed and retaliated against at his job in violation of the sex discrimination protections contained in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act [...]

The Gender and Sexuality Law Blog covered a case our Sexuality & Gender Law Clinic was handling back in May having to do with a man who applied for and was denied parole by the Massachusetts  Parole Board because he was gay.  See post here.
This week, the Parole Board granted Bruce Wilburn’s parole application.   See [...]

The last several weeks have been busy ones in the battle for marriage equality.  The governors of Maine and New Hampshire signed laws that allowed same sex couples to marry.  California’s Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Proposition 8, and we expected the New York State legislature to have a darn good chance of passing [...]

The California Supreme Court took the next step today in the ongoing battle over marriage rights for same sex couples, ruling 6-1 that the people of California had properly amended their constitution last November with Proposition 8, thereby limiting marriage to one man and one woman.   The Court’s opinion, widely predicted to come out as [...]

The California Supreme Court just issued its opinion in Strauss v. Horton, the case challenging the constitutionality of Proposition 8.  The Court found Proposition 8 a valid amendment to the California constitution.  It also held that Prop 8 did not retroactively invalidate the roughly 18,000 marriages of same sex couples performed between June and November [...]

The California Supreme Court plans to release it’s decision in the Prop 8 case tomorrow morning at 10:00 am PDT.  The opinion will be available here.  You can find further information about the case here.

Both during and after the City Bar Association panel I participated in a few weeks ago on the future of same sex marriage, I’ve gotten some push back for suggesting that we consider and evaluate the merits and risks of various constitutional arguments that have been made in the cases challenging the exclusion of same [...]

Suzanne Goldberg was interviewed this week about State-by-State Trends in Marriage Law Reform – hear the interview here:

Last Thursday, I participated in a panel at the New York City Bar Association on the future of marriage equality rights.  The New York Times covered the panel – here is the story:
On a Matter of Marriage in New York

By Sewell Chan

New York legal experts who support same-sex marriage gathered in a conference room [...]