Gender & Sexuality Law Blog

Today is Constitution Day, the anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution this day in 1787.   I’ll be one of the speakers at our Constitution Day event, and have put together these brief remarks to raise the question: to whom do the rights contained in the Constitution belong?
Fifty years ago police officers entered the [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

There has been much made of Sonia Sotomayor’s life, her Puerto Rican background, her modest, if not poor, childhood, her mother, what her Latina-ness means to her, her involvement in civil rights organizations, etc.  It’s both a big part of why Obama picked her to serve on the Supreme Court and will form the basis [...]

From Columbia Law School Professor Patricia Williams, via The Daily Beast:

President Obama’s nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor just plain fills me with delight. She’s brilliant, she’s fair, she’s an inspiration on many, many levels. That she is the first Puerto Rican or Latina nominee, appointed by the first Afro-Hawaiian-Kansan-Kenyan-American president, just makes this moment [...]

Sonia Sotomayor, nominated by President Obama to the U.S. Supreme Court, has taught a course on Federal Appellate Court advocacy at Columbia for several years.  While President Obama’s adjunct teaching job at the University of Chicago is often cited as one of his credentials, little mention has been made of Judge Sotomayor’s teaching experience.  Hmmm.
Students [...]

The Supreme Court has been busy this week thinking about dirty language and pictures. In two cases, they affirmed efforts to censor speech about matters sexual or profane. One case involved an FCC fine levied on CBS for Janet Jackson’s now well-known “wardrobe malfunction” during the Super Bowl halftime show in [...]

We learned late last week that David Souter plans to step down from the Supreme Court at the end of this term. Nominated by President George H. W. Bush in July of 1990 on the expectation that he would be a dependable conservative vote on the Court, Justice Souter has instead marked his time [...]