The Indian Supreme Court’s landmark decision on Sept. 6, overturning an 1860 law that criminalized “carnal intercourse against the order of nature,” has been hailed as a giant step for LGBT rights in the world’s largest democracy.
It was also a professional triumph for two Indian public-interest litigators at Columbia Law School. Menaka Guruswamy and Arundhati Katju ’17 LL.M. were the prime architects of a creative, multi-year advocacy campaign to rid India of what Guruswamy called “a colonial stain on our collective national conscience”—an archaic law that sowed debilitating fear and stigma among sexual minorities. [More]
