Gender & Sexuality Law Blog

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is back in New York for the annual fall gathering of heads of state at the U.N. General Assembly meeting.  As expected, his remarks to the body on Wednesday provoked outrage, walkouts, and general condemnation by various states and the media.  If all you did was read the press reports about [...]

The White House just announced that it has nominated Georgetown Law Center’s Professor Chai Feldblum as a Commissioner to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.  This is huge not only because Feldblum would be the first out lesbian or gay person on the EEOC (which, as Nan Hunter points out will gain particular significance when/if ENDA [...]

As many will recall, the gold medal performance in the 800 meter track competition by Caster Semenya, a South African athlete, last month at the Berlin World Championships, sparked a “sex panic” when some observers questioned Semenya’s “real” sex.  Well, things have turned a troubling corner in this matter this week.  An Australian newspaper reported [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

by Shilpi Agarwal:
On April 10, the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law held its third triennial symposium entitled: “Gender on the Frontiers: Confronting Intersectionalities.” The goal for the symposium was to explore some of the many and varied points of intersection between gender and sexuality on one hand, and other characteristics that could have a [...]

Khiara Bridges, the Center for Reproductive Rights – Columbia Law School Fellow, presented her paper for our last colloquium of the semester entitled “Capturing the Judiciary: Carhart and the Undue Burden Standard.”  Bridges explains the problematic assumptions and questionable logic behind the “undue burden” standard as promulgated by the U.S. Supreme Court in Carhart.  While [...]

The arguments before the California Supreme Court raised many hard questions, but one that particularly intrigued me was one to which the Justices frequently returned: What did Proposition 8 really do, after all?  Did it overturn the Marriage Cases – the California Supreme Court case that found it unconstitutional for the State of California to [...]

This week, Amy Adler presented her paper entitled “Medusa: A Glimpse of the Woman in First Amendment Law,” at the Gender and Sexuality Law Program Spring Colloquium.  The following is a summary and reaction to the presentation.  (The painting below is entitled Nude Dancing by Anthony Armstrong)
Imagine you’re a shrink.  After deciding the Barnes v. Glen’s [...]