Williams Institute Annual Moot Court Competition 2025-2026

The legal treatment of sexual orientation has shifted dramatically over the past half-century, moving in many jurisdictions from criminalization to anti-discrimination protection and, in some cases, full marriage equality. In the United States, the trajectory ran from Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), which upheld sodomy laws, to Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which struck them down, to Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), which recognized a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, and Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), which read Title VII to bar workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Internationally, the European Court of Human Rights (Dudgeon v. UK, 1981) and the UN Human Rights Committee (Toonen v. Australia, 1994) established that criminalizing same-sex intimacy violates privacy and equality norms. Despite this arc, the global legal landscape remains deeply fractured. More than sixty states still criminalize consensual same-sex conduct, with penalties ranging from fines to death in a handful of jurisdictions. Uganda's 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Act and similar legislation elsewhere have sharpened debates over universalism versus cultural sovereignty, while Russia's expanding 'LGBT propaganda' laws and its 2023 designation of the 'international LGBT movement' as extremist illustrate a counter-trend toward restriction. Conversely, courts in India (Navtej Singh Johar, 2018), Botswana, and Taiwan have decriminalized or extended recognition. Current disputes concentrate on the scope of religious exemptions (e.g., 303 Creative v. Elenis), parental and educational rights, asylum claims based on sexual orientation, conversion-therapy bans, and the cross-border recognition of same-sex unions. Litigators increasingly frame these issues through equal protection, free expression, free exercise, and international human-rights doctrines, making sexual orientation law a primary site of contestation between liberal constitutionalism and competing moral or sovereigntist frameworks.

Gender identity has emerged as one of the most rapidly evolving areas of comparative constitutional and human-rights law. Argentina's 2012 Gender Identity Law set an early benchmark by permitting self-declaration of legal gender without medical gatekeeping, and similar self-ID frameworks have since been adopted in Malta, Ireland, Denmark, and parts of Latin America. The European Court of Human Rights, beginning with Goodwin v. UK (2002), has required states to provide some path to legal recognition, while the Inter-American Court's Advisory Opinion OC-24/17 (2017) read the American Convention to require recognition based on self-perceived identity. In the United States, the legal questions have shifted from access to identity documents toward access to gender-affirming medical care, participation in sex-segregated spaces and sports, and the reach of sex-discrimination statutes after Bostock. Tennessee's SB1, restricting gender-affirming care for minors, reached the Supreme Court in United States v. Skrmetti (2024-25), and more than twenty states have enacted comparable restrictions. The United Kingdom's Cass Review (2024) and the Supreme Court's 2025 decision in For Women Scotland v. Scottish Ministers — holding that 'sex' in the Equality Act 2010 refers to biological sex — reflect a parallel European reassessment, as do policy reversals in Sweden and Finland on pediatric care. The core legal disputes turn on whether gender-identity classifications trigger heightened scrutiny under equal protection or sex-discrimination law, how to reconcile single-sex protections with identity-based recognition, the evidentiary standards for restricting or providing medical interventions to minors, and the extraterritorial recognition of gender markers. These questions implicate medical regulation, parental rights, free speech (including pronoun and compelled-speech cases), prison and athletic policy, and international human-rights commitments — making gender identity law a fast-moving and doctrinally unsettled field.