Gender & Sexuality Law Blog

Erin Meyer, Columbia Law School student in the class of 2011, sends us this post.  Meyer is a student in the Columbia College Accelerated Interdisciplinary Legal Education program. She is currently a summer associate at Hogan Lovells and a student member of the New York City Bar Association’s LGBT Rights Committee, and has previously interned [...]

Columbia Law School’s Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic has just issued a new report entitled, Sent Away: The Trafficking of Young Girls and Women within the Family Unit. The report highlights the gravity of the problem of women and girls being trafficked by their own families into domestic labor, supplementing the European Court of Human [...]

The Columbia Law School Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic has submitted a report to Congress showing U.S. allies have managed smooth transitions to having gay and lesbian soldiers serve openly in the military. Based on extensive research into the experiences of Australia, Canada, Israel, and the United Kingdom, the report, entitled “Open Service and Our [...]

New York’s highest court Tuesday unanimously granted parental rights to a woman whose former partner blocked her from spending time with the child the two women had raised together since birth. The Columbia Law School Sexuality & Gender Law Clinic had filed a friend-of-the-court brief with the Court of Appeals in the case, Debra H. [...]

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 [...]

Suzanne Goldberg, Director of Columbia Law School’s Sexuality & Gender Law Clinic and the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law filed a friend of the court brief this week in Perry v. Schwarzenegger on behalf of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Foundation.  She argued that California’s Proposition 8 is unconstitutional because it violates [...]

Columbia Law School’s Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic has won asylum for a gay man who feared persecution because of his sexual orientation if forced to return to his native Brazil. The grant, issued by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, comes at a time when conditions for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) individuals in [...]

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 [...]

The New York Court of Appeals is currently weighing issues of critical importance to families around the state of New York in the matter of Debra H. v. Janice R. The petitioner in the case, Debra H., seeks to prevent the possibility that she may never again see the child she parented since birth.  Respondent, [...]

The Supreme Court of Puerto Rico is currently considering whether Puerto Rico’s laws permit the adoption of a child by a non-biological parent who is the same-sex partner of the child’s legally recognized parent.  Such adoptions are typically referred to as “second-parent” adoptions because they occur in situations where the child already has a legally [...]