Cardozo Law to offer LGBTQ policy sessions as Yeshiva U. refuses to recognize LGBTQ student club

Muri Assunção, New York Daily News
·2 min read
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Cardozo Law, Yeshiva University’s law school, is reaffirming its commitment to supporting LGBTQ students and staff as its parent institution staunchly refuses to recognize an LGBTQ group.

On Wednesday, the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law is set to offer the first in a weekly series of pop-up sessions that will explore LGBTQ law, policy and history.

The classes will cover civil rights challenges related to the LGBTQ community and examine how the issues have affected past generations, and what they mean for the future. The sessions will be taught by prominent scholars, legal experts, researchers and LGBTQ advocates.

The program kicks off just days after Yeshiva University announced that it would temporarily shut down all of its undergraduate clubs to avoid recognizing its YU Pride Alliance.

On Friday, the institution sent an email to students saying that it would “hold off on all undergraduate club activities while it immediately takes steps to follow the roadmap provided by the U.S. Supreme Court to protect YU’s religious freedom.”

The move came just days after the Supreme Court told school officials to comply with a lower court order and recognize the LGBTQ club, which describes itself as “an unofficial group of undergraduate YU students providing a supportive space for all students, of all sexual orientations and gender identities, to feel respected, visible and represented.”

In the new Cardozo Law series, the first session will cover the evolution of LGBTQ+ family law in the U.S. and it will be presented by Edward Stein, LGBTQ legal expert, and a professor and former vice dean at the school.

Subsequent speakers include Rachel B. Tiven, the former head of the LGBTQ law nonprofit Lambda Legal; Dmytro Vovk, a human rights expert who runs the Center for Rule of Law and Religion Studies at Yaroslav the Wise National Law University in Kharkiv, Ukraine; and professors from Cardozo and Yeshiva’s Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology.

Nearly 60 Cardozo faculty members signed an open letter in late August “to express our profound disappointment that Yeshiva University continues to enforce a discriminatory policy that harms its LGBTQ+ undergraduate students and has gone so far as to seek the intervention of the United States Supreme Court in this matter.”