Katherine Franke
Academic background
Education
Academic work
DisciplineGender and sexuality law
Institutions

Katherine M. Franke[1] is an American legal scholar who specializes in gender and sexuality law. She is the James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia Law School.

Biography

Franke received a B.A. from Barnard College in 1981.[2] She graduated from Northeastern University School of Law in 1986, before receiving a LL.M. from Yale Law School in 1993 and S.J.D. from Yale in 1999.[1]

Franke began practicing law in the 1980s as a civil rights litigator, having received a grant from the MacArthur Foundation to work on addressing social discrimination faced by people with AIDS. She then joined the New York City Commission on Human Rights as a supervising attorney in its newly created AIDS division.[3] In 1990, Franke was named executive director of the National Lawyers Guild.

Franke began her academic career in 1995 at the James E. Rogers College of Law of the University of Arizona and then taught at Fordham University School of Law from 1997 until 2000, when she joined the Columbia Law faculty.

Franke received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011 to carry out research on the costs of winning marriage rights for same sex couples and African Americans during the mid-19th century, and her research was published into the book Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality (2015).[4][5]

In 2018, Franke traveled to Israel as part of a 14-member human rights delegation touring Israel and the West Bank. However, she was detained at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv before getting deported from the country.[6] The Israeli authorities accused her of ties to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.[7]

In October 2023, following the Hamas massacre of Israelis in southern Israel, Franke authored a letter, signed by over 150 Columbia faculty, that “aim[ed] to recontextualize the events of October 7 … as an occupied people exercising a right to resist”.[8] Franke was criticized in a letter signed by 300 other Columbia faculty members for trying "to 'recontextualize' [the October 7 massacre] as a 'salvo,' as the 'exercise of a right to resist' occupation, or as 'military action', saying that they were 'horrified' that the letter 'justified', among other atrocities, "raping and murdering ordinary citizens in front of their families" [9][10]

Franke is gay.[11]

References

  1. 1 2 "Katherine M. Franke". www.law.columbia.edu. Archived from the original on 2022-04-14. Retrieved 2022-07-01.
  2. ↑ "My Must-Take Course: Gender Justice". Bold. Beautiful. Barnard. Archived from the original on 2022-07-01. Retrieved 2022-07-01.
  3. ↑ "Katherine Franke | Institute for the Study of Human Rights". www.humanrightscolumbia.org. Archived from the original on 2022-07-01. Retrieved 2022-07-01.
  4. ↑ "Wedlocked". NYU Press. Archived from the original on 2022-07-01. Retrieved 2022-07-01.
  5. ↑ Bix, Brian (2016-05-01). "Book Review of Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality—How African Americans and Gays Mistakenly Thought Marriage Equality Would Set Them Free by Katherine Franke". Journal of Legal Education. 65 (4): 983. ISSN 0022-2208. Archived from the original on 2020-07-27. Retrieved 2022-07-01.
  6. ↑ Cohen, Roger (2018-05-04). "Opinion | Israel Banishes a Columbia Law Professor for Thinking Differently". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on 2021-10-31. Retrieved 2022-07-01.
  7. ↑ "Two Leading U.S. Human Rights Activists Refused Entry to Israel, One for BDS Ties". Haaretz. Archived from the original on 2022-06-09. Retrieved 2022-07-01.
  8. ↑ "ProfKFranke Twitter". Twitter/X.
  9. ↑ "Hundreds of faculty sign open letters in debate around free speech, student safety following Palestinian solidarity statement". Columbia Spectator.
  10. ↑ https://twitter.com/wcbs880
  11. ↑ "A Conversation With Out-Spoken Professor Katherine Franke". www.law.columbia.edu. Archived from the original on 2022-06-10. Retrieved 2022-07-01.
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