Jeannie Suk Gersen

An op-ed by Jeannie Suk Gersen. President Obama’s mantra for the past year has been that Congress is broken, so the executive will act. And now, as the stage is set for the new executive, it is dawning on Democrats that living by that sword may mean dying by it. A President can unilaterally revoke prior Presidents’ unilateral actions, and we may soon see just that, in response to Obama’s moves on immigration, climate change, and gun control. Among the myriad areas subject to upheaval is the President’s administration of Title IX, the 1972 law that prohibits schools that receive federal funding from discriminating “on the basis of sex.” The civil-rights statute has been the primary federal guarantee of equality in educational opportunity for male and female students.

...What is an adequate solution for the dark and persistent threat of sexual violence on campus? And what should colleges and universities expect from a very different administration, headed by a president who has himself been accused of sexual assault?...But the Obama approach has its critics. Harvard Law professors Jeannie Suk and Jacob Gersen say it resulted in a “sex bureaucracy,” placing more and more ordinary behavior under federal oversight. And feminist legal theorist Janet Halley, their colleague who has contested the OCR's process in the Harvard Law Review, describes the “Dear Colleague” letter as a case of “administrative overreach.” Halley, who has participated in sexual-violence cases at Harvard, has had concerns about their fairness from the beginning. She took pains to say that she cares deeply about sexual assault, but she worries about an overcorrection, prompted by OCR, that moves universities from ignoring the rights of accusers to trampling on those of the accused.

A Northeastern University student has sued the school and several administrators, alleging they failed to prevent her rape on campus by another student, and that the school failed to protect her rights. ... Harvard Law School Professor Jeannie Suk Gersen said Title IX can cut both ways, as it’s been used around the country in the last year both by alleged victims and by those accused of sexual assault.

An article by Jeannie Suk Gersen: In a strange triumph for feminists, the election that may give us our first female President has brought extraordinary attention to women’s sexual victimization. The election turned in Hillary Clinton’s favor, perhaps decisively, when footage emerged of Donald Trump bragging about assaulting women.

An op-ed by Jeannie Suk Gersen. Last year, in holding that states must allow gay and straight couples alike to enter civil marriage, the Supreme Court extolled the “transcendent importance of marriage,” its beauty, nobility, and dignity. That was the fulsome culmination of the decades that led to marriage equality. But, just as two people must enter marriage with the law’s blessing, they need the law in order to exit it. As legal marriage is now universally available, so, too, is legal divorce. Marking the start of a period in which divorce may well get more attention is the new HBO series “Divorce,” which began airing this month. Sarah Jessica Parker, the show’s star and executive producer, has explained that her desire to tell the story of an ordinary suburban couple’s divorce was motivated by fascination with the inside of a marriage. The show, written by Sharon Horgan, of “Catastrophe,” understands that how people divorce can reveal more about a marriage than anything one could see before its unravelling.

A Q&A with Jeannie Suk Gersen...I have taught a course at Harvard on Performing Arts and Law, with my friend Damian Woetzel, Director of the Vail Dance Festival and former Principal Dancer of the New York City Ballet. We were both students at the School of American Ballet, though of course he continued dancing and I did not. For years I watched his incredible performances at Lincoln Center – I thought he was a god. When I was teaching law students with Damian, I had to pinch myself. The course actually had a lot of law, and also involved Damian teaching the students the steps of certain dances. I remember Judge Michael Boudin ofthe First Circuit, who’s a ballet fan, came to class one day, and I loved seeing him join in to dance the beginning of Balanchine’s Serenade. That has been one of my favorite teaching experiences.

The transgender debate has never been confined to public restrooms. And a recent federal lawsuit filed against the Department of Health and Human Services by five states and two faith-based organizations shows how far-reaching the government's interpretation of the word "sex" could be. The lawsuit filed Aug. 23 alleges that a newly adopted regulation intended to prevent discrimination based on sex in federally funded health care programs "would force doctors to ignore science and their medical judgment and perform gender transition procedures on children."...The dispute over the latest HHS mandate is latest example of how the government's interpretation of Title IX could go beyond the scope of federally funded education programs, legal experts say. "Any government action that depends on interpretation of the word 'sex' in any federal statute, regulation, or policy could be affected by the Department of Education's interpretation of 'sex' in Title IX," Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gersen told Deseret News. "Even if one agency’s interpretation is not binding on other agencies for the purposes of other statutes, it may still be influential on other agencies."

When the University of Chicago recently came out against the use of so-called “trigger warnings,” saying they represented a danger to campus free speech, it represented something of a rarity. Few universities have taken a stance on trigger warnings, which initially were used to alert audiences that an upcoming discussion on, say, rape or other violence could trigger a trauma response for some. Most schools leave the matter up to individual professors...“How could a teacher not be affected by this, if they would like to create a classroom experience that is not causing distress?” said Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gersen in an e-mail. “So teachers, myself included, make some compromises.” In a 2014 New Yorker piece, in fact, Gersen wrote that student complaints regarding the teaching of rape law had grown so significant that roughly a dozen new criminal law teachers she’d spoken with had decided against teaching rape law altogether.

An op-ed by Jeannie Suk Gersen. A poster for Nate Parker’s new film, “The Birth of a Nation,” to be released in October, shows a photo of Parker’s head hoisted in a noose fashioned out of a twisted-up American flag. Parker stars in, wrote, produced, and directed the film, which tells the story of Nat Turner’s life and the slave rebellion he led in 1831. The title is appropriated from the famous 1915 silent film of the same name, which is set during the Civil War and Reconstruction, and in which black men (often played by white actors in blackface) are portrayed as wanting to sexually coerce white women. Parker counters this fantasy by showing an act of sexual violence against a black woman by white men. In his film, the revolt is partly inspired by a gang rape of Turner’s wife. It is hard to avoid the sense that, in creating his film, Parker was reflecting on the rape accusation for which he was tried fifteen years ago.An op-ed by Jeannie Suk Gersen. A poster for Nate Parker’s new film, “The Birth of a Nation,” to be released in October, shows a photo of Parker’s head hoisted in a noose fashioned out of a twisted-up American flag. Parker stars in, wrote, produced, and directed the film, which tells the story of Nat Turner’s life and the slave rebellion he led in 1831. The title is appropriated from the famous 1915 silent film of the same name, which is set during the Civil War and Reconstruction, and in which black men (often played by white actors in blackface) are portrayed as wanting to sexually coerce white women. Parker counters this fantasy by showing an act of sexual violence against a black woman by white men. In his film, the revolt is partly inspired by a gang rape of Turner’s wife. It is hard to avoid the sense that, in creating his film, Parker was reflecting on the rape accusation for which he was tried fifteen years ago.

Many of the most successful immigrants and kids of immigrants in the country know each other and hang out. They belong to a community created by Paul and Daisy Soros, who have funded the graduate educations of 550 first gens — including Pardis Sabeti, a geneticist called a "genius" by Time [and Jeannie Suk Gersen].

An essay by Jeannie Suk Gersen: Years ago, I briefly considered a job on a different career path. A person whose position made him a gatekeeper for that job had contacted me to ask if I was interested in being considered. He suggested we meet to discuss it, and named a restaurant. When I arrived, we had a respectful conversation about my qualifications.

An op-ed by Jeannie Suk Gersen....As the first rounds of students have been disciplined for sexual misconduct under the new procedures, scores of them have gone to court to protest their schools’ decisions. The suits, against schools such as Yale, Cornell, and the University of California, San Diego, have alleged that, under intense pressure to be tough on sexual assault, the schools violated basic fairness to accused students. Most remarkably, many of the suits have claimed that the new procedures, which were developed to protect the Title IX rights of sexual-assault victims, in practice violate the Title IX rights of the accused...But, last week, a unanimous Second Circuit appeals panel reversed that decision and held that the accused student could go forward with his claim that the university subjected him to sex discrimination in violation of Title IX. The case will go back to the lower court for trial proceedings, unless Columbia settles with the student, who is seeking damages and wants his disciplinary record scrubbed. Across the country, state and federal courts have recently decided for other accused students who claimed that their schools’ procedures were unfair.

It violates medical ethics, but is it clearly against the law for a doctor to touch a patient sexually under the guise that it’s critical to her care? In some states it is illegal, but not in Massachusetts, according to the Middlesex district attorney’s office. This gap in state law is the reason the office recently decided not to prosecute Dr. Roger Ian Hardy, the popular fertility specialist accused of molesting patients, according to a lawyer for one of his alleged victims...Jeannie Suk Gersen, a Harvard Law School professor, questioned why prosecutors did not charge Hardy with indecent assault and battery, since the patient did not give explicit consent for Hardy to touch her clitoris.

An op-ed by Jeannie Suk...We are now seeing a very public judicial-recall movement in response to a sexual-assault case in California. More than a million people have signed petitions demanding the removal of Aaron Persky, the California state judge who sentenced Brock Turner, a Stanford swimmer convicted of three felony sexual-assault counts, to six months in jail, three years of probation, and lifetime registration on the sex-offender list. ...The strong public reaction and organizing after the Stanford case has expanded public engagement with the largely campus-based efforts to change how sexual assault is treated in our society. It also reflects a tension between the crime of sexual assault and the generally progressive social-justice movements criticizing harsh criminal penalties.

For decades now, we’ve worried about an epidemic of sexual assault and un-safety at American colleges and universities...Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk begins the show with a provocative statement. In an article co-written with her colleague and husband Jacob Gersen, Suk faults universities for overcompensating, after years of neglect, on matters of sexual safety by built a paranoid atmosphere and a self-defensive “sex bureaucracy.”

“Know that listening is your secret weapon,” award-winning actor and humanitarian Sarah Jessica Parker told imminent Harvard Law School (HLS) graduates and their families on Class Day...Parker shared the dais with professor of law Jeannie C. Suk, recipient of the Albert M. Sacks-Paul A. Freund Award for Teaching Excellence, and Gabriela Follett, HLS program assistant in the Human Rights Program, who has been a strong supporter of the student movement on campus, Reclaim Harvard Law. She received the Suzanne L. Richardson Staff Appreciation Award. Both Suk and Follett talked openly about campus activism.

An op-ed by Jeannie Suk. This month, regional battles over the right of transgender people to access public bathrooms were elevated to national legal theatre. First, the Justice Department told North Carolina that its recent law, requiring education boards and public agencies to limit the use of sex-segregated bathrooms to people of the corresponding biological sex, violated federal civil-rights laws. Governor Pat McCrory responded with a lawsuit, asking a court to declare that the state’s law doesn’t violate those federal laws. Meanwhile, in a suit filed on the same day, the Justice Department asked a court to say that it does. To top it off, on May 13th the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (O.C.R.) and the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division issued a Dear Colleague letter announcing to the nation’s schools that, under Title IX—the 1972 law banning sex discrimination by schools that receive federal funding—transgender students must be allowed to use rest rooms that are “consistent with their gender identity.” The threat was clear: schools that failed to comply could lose federal funding. Protests of federal overreach immediately ensued, including from parents citing safety and privacy as reasons for children and teen-agers to share bathrooms and locker rooms only with students of the same biological sex.

Sight, sound, smell, touch and taste can all trigger traumatic flashbacks. So can words. And right now, battle lines are being drawn around attempts to limit exposure to words that could rekindle past trauma. ... In The New Yorker, Jeannie Suk, a Harvard law professor, wrote that student organisations had asked teachers to warn their classes the rape-law unit might "trigger" traumatic memories.