Gender & Sexuality Law Blog

Law Professors Urge New York’s High Court to Protect Functional Parent-Child Relationships Columbia Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic Submits Statewide Amicus Brief on Behalf of 45 Family Law Scholars from All 15 Law Schools New York, February 9, 2016 – Professors from every one of New York’s 15 law schools are urging the state’s highest […]

All of us at Columbia Law School and the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law congratulate Devi Rao (class of 2010) for gaining a clerkship with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg for the 2013 term! While at Columbia Devi served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Columbia Law Review, worked with the Columbia Law Women’s Association, the […]

Today’s NYT Styles section ran a story reflecting on the fact that the last two Supreme Court nominees were unmarried, childless women in their 50s, Then Comes the Marriage Question.  The writer, Laura Holson, quotes Stanford Law Professor Deborah Rhode as being annoyed at the assumption that you have to be married to be considered […]

A: What we think we know about their sexualities deviates from a narrowly defined and ruthlessly enforced notion of  “healthy adult sexuality.”  He liked/wanted/got too much, she (is assumed to) like/want/get not enough.   The hub bub surrounding General Kagan’s (I love that title) nomination to the Supreme Court has unfortunately over-focused on her sexuality […]

As we all now know, President Obama will today nominate Solicitor General Elena Kagan to fill Justice John Paul Stevens’ seat on the Supreme Court.  Sure, it will be great to have another woman sitting on the Court, but chromosomal diversity isn’t the most important value to be celebrated as Obama makes his mark on […]

All eyes were on the Senate hearings this week on repeal of the so-called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, meaning that before long members of the U.S. military will be permitted to do two things without negative consequences for the first time in U.S. history: i) say out loud “I am gay or lesbian,” and […]

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 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 […]