2. March 6, 2013 - The Rights of Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals and Transsexuals

Faculty Dining Room

The guest speaker will be Judge Wolf's former law clerk, Roberta Kaplan (Cosmopolitan Feature on Roberta Kaplan), Harvard '88, who recently successfully argued in the Supreme Court that the Defense of Marriage Act ("DOMA") is unconstitutional. In addition to discussion of the role of the courts concerning same-sex marriage, the session will draw on Judge Wolf's decisions finding that: the private organizers of Boston's St. Patrick's Day Parade had a First Amendment right to exclude a gay, lesbian, and bisexual group (case summary); religiously motivated parents did not have the right to exempt their children in elementary school from education about homosexuality and same-sex marriage (case summary); and ordering the Massachusetts Department of Corrections to provide sex reassignment surgery to a transsexual prisoner (case summary).