Gender and the Law

In a Last Lecture, Alex Chen reflects on moments of reckoning he’s faced in pursuit of advancing social change.

Diane Rosenfeld presents a model from the animal world that she says would empower and protect women.

Rebecca Richman Cohen, a Harvard Law School lecturer, debuts a new documentary on the unintended consequences following the recall of the judge in the Brock Turner assault case.

70 years on, Sondra Miller ’53 reflects on her experience as a member of the first class at Harvard Law School to include women.

From transgender equality to the rights of displaced persons, four Harvard Law students describe their winter-term projects abroad.

As a 2023 Cravath International Fellow, Janna Adelstein traveled to the United Kingdom to conduct research on how equality law doctrines affect transgender people.

Legal scholar, thought leader, and equal rights champion Catharine A. MacKinnon, 2022 recipient of the American Philosophical Society’s Henry M. Phillips Prize in Jurisprudence, discusses her teaching and the changes she has spent her career fighting for.

Victor Madrigal-Borloz, the UN Independent Expert on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity shared his views at a virtual event last month hosted by the HLS Human Rights Program that focused on his year-long investigation into incorporation of gender and gender identity into international human rights law.

Alexander Chen ’15, founding director of the LGBTQ+ Advocacy Clinic at Harvard Law School, on the significance of the Biden administration's executive orders providing protections for LGBTQ people, the danger of backlash, and the work that still needs to be done.

Constitutional lawyer Menaka Guruswamy LL.M. ’01 successfully argued against a colonial-era law that criminalized gay sex in India. The ruling by India's Supreme Court last year went beyond decriminalizing gay sex to acknowledge the individual rights of LGBTQ people and apologize for past mistreatment.

The Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program joined the American Immigration Lawyers Association, Human Rights First and Kids in Need of Defense in filing a brief of amicus curiae in the case Matter of A-B-, a case that originated in immigration court but that is now before review of the U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions.