Panel Explains New Issues in Gender and Sexuality Law

Columbia Law School graduates have long defined and shaped the ever-changing field of gender and sexuality law. That notable strength was highlighted during a Reunion panel discussion titled “On the Cutting Edge: Future Directions of Gender and Sexuality Law.”

 

The panel was moderated by Professor Katherine Franke, director of Columbia Law School’s Center for Gender and Sexuality Law, who led a discussion that covered issues such as domestic violence, gender discrimination, and the problems facing homeless LGBT youth.

 

Panelist Nancy Northup ’88, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, a global organization, noted that women in various parts of the world continue to be subject to forced sterilization and genital mutilation, and, in some cases, have severely limited access to emergency obstetrics care.

 

“There are still about 500,000 women who die in connection with childbirth every year,” Northup said. “That is a massive human rights violation because most of those deaths are preventable.”

 

Both Northup and panelist Lynn Hecht Schafran ’74, director of the National Judicial Education Program, which provides continuing education for judges, routinely address problems that arise from gender bias.

 

Schafran’s latest project is a web course that teaches judges and others about intimate partner sexual abuse, in which women are forced to have sex with abusive partners to prevent violence. She said sexual assault is widespread in violent domestic relationships, and noted that “a woman who is being subjected to forced sex in addition to physical violence is seven times more likely to be killed than a woman subjected to physical violence alone.” For too long, Schafran continued, many courts have viewed such episodes as consensual relations, rather than as acts of violence.

Schafran’s interest in the field was inspired in part by her classes with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’59, who became the first tenured female professor at the Law School in 1972. Since that milestone nearly four decades ago, Columbia Law School has continued to support innovators in the field of gender and sexuality law.

 

As an inaugural member of the Law School’s Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic, Sydney Tarzwell ’07 gained firsthand experience in shaping the developing legal field as a law student. Now, as the interim director of the Urban Justice Center’s Peter Cicchino Youth Project, she provides legal assistance to homeless and at-risk gay and transgender youths in New York.

 

Tarzwell explained that many of her clients were born into poverty and have faced family rejection, violence, or harassment because of their sexual orientation. That discrimination can follow them to schools and jobs, and it can also effect their placement in youth shelters and foster care. Police may even escalate the problem, Tarzwell said.

 

“The police tend to assume that these young people are doing sex work,” Tarzwell noted. “Regardless of what kind of work these people are actually doing, the police see someone that they interpret as being a transgender young woman of color, and they’ll stop them on the street just for that.”

 

In response to an audience question about new issues in family law, Franke commented on Debra H. v. Janice R., a recent decision from the New York Court of Appeals that raised the issue of whether it might be in the best interests of a child to have more than one legal parent.