Trans-formation

A year ago, President Barack Obama issued a proclamation naming June “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered Pride Month.”  The proclamation effectively incorporated the transgendered community into President Bill Clinton’s 2000 proclamation, which named June “Gay & Lesbian Pride Month.”  In honor of the transgendered community, their legal rights, and the month of June, it seems appropriate to discuss gender identity discrimination and the infamous “trans panic defense.”

The overall struggle that transgender people face is similar to the struggle that gays and lesbians face, but for transgender people, the progressive change for their legal rights seems to be slower.  Currently, in 38 states it is still legal to discriminate based on gender identity.  Comparatively, 30 states have not yet developed laws against sexual orientation discrimination.  Wisconsin was the first state to ban employment discrimination based on sexual orientation, and it did so in 1982.  However, as of yet, it has not created equal legislation regarding gender identity.

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Memories of Sensenbrenner Hall (Part 3)

As the Law School community prepares to leave our current home and move into a new facility, it seems appropriate to pause and recall some of the memorable events that have taken place in Sensenbrenner Hall over the years.  Professor Michael McChrystal shares the third of what we hope will be many recollections of classroom surprises, distinguished visitors, and construction oddities associated with our present surroundings.  These memories will ensure that Sensenbrenner Hall lives on forever in our hearts. 

 For many years, the Wall of Judges, on the first floor hallway in old Sensenbrenner, included photographs of alums who were county or circuit court judges in the state.  The wall was filled with photos, which were probably six by eight inches in size, if I recall correctly.  There was a statistic floating around that one in every twenty graduates was a judge, although I have no sense of the accuracy of that count, nor even of how “judge” would be defined for that purpose.

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Learning from Sports Law

Some problems that seem to demand coordinated international solutions, like global warming and biopiracy, languish for years without effective responses by the international community.  Yet, when the international community set out to address the problem of doping in sports in the late 1990’s, a robust international regulatory system was set up in relatively short order.  Does the anti-doping experience have broader lessons for global law-making?  Matt Mitten and Hayden Opie think it might.

In a new paper on SSRN, Matt and Hayden argue that “the evolving law of sports is having and will continue to have a significant influence on, and implications for, the development of broader international and national laws.”  They examine the anti-doping movement and other sports-law case studies that they believe should be better appreciated by scholars outside the sports-law field for their broader relevance. 

Entitled “‘Sports Law’: Implications for the Development of International, Comparative, and National Law and Global Dispute Resolution,” the paper will appear in the Tulane Law Review.  The abstract appears after the jump. 

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