About Katherine Franke
Katherine Franke was the James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia University, and Founder/Director of the
Center for Gender & Sexuality Law. She serves on the Executive Committees of Columbia’s Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality, and the Center for Palestine Studies. She is among the nation's leading scholars writing on law, sexuality, race, and religion drawing from feminist, queer, and critical race theory.
Professor Franke also founded and served as faculty director of the
Law, Rights, and Religion Project, a think tank based at Columbia Law School that develops policy and thought leadership on the complex ways in which religious liberty rights interact with other fundamental rights. In 2021, Professor Franke launched the
ERA Project, a law and policy think tank to develop academically rigorous research, policy papers, expert guidance, and strategic leadership on the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution, and on the role of the ERA in advancing the larger cause of gender-based justice.
Professor Franke also led a team that researched Columbia Law School’s relationship to slavery and its legacies.
Her first book,
Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality (NYU Press, 2015), considers the costs of winning marriage rights for same sex couples today and for African Americans at the end of the Civil War. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011 to undertake research for
Wedlocked. Her second book,
Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Slavery’s Abolition (Haymarket Press, 2019), makes the case for racial reparations in the United States by returning to a time at the end of slavery when many formerly enslaved people were provided land explicitly as a form of reparation, yet after President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated the land was stolen back from freed people and given to former slave owners.
