Katherine Franke

Katherine M. Franke 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. 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.

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. 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). Franke is out and has spoken on her experiences as a member of the gay community in the 1980s and '90s, and on being one of few out lesbian professors earlier in her career.

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. The Israeli authorities accused her of ties to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.

In October 2023, following the Hamas massacre of Israelis in southern Israel, Franke authored a letter, signed by over 150 Columbia faculty, “supporting our students' right to contextualize the war in Israel/Gaza within the 75 yr occupation of Palestine”. The letter was criticized in a subsequent letter signed by 300 other Columbia faculty members as an attempt to “‘recontextualize’ [Hamas] as a ‘salvo,’ as the ‘exercise of a right to resist’ occupation, or as ‘military action.’”

In April 2024, Professor Franke was one of three Columbia Faculty members mentioned at a hearing of the Congressional Committee on Education and the Workforce investigating Columbia's response to widespread campus and faculty anti-Semitism and its impact on the safety of Jewish students. During the hearing, Columbia University president Nemat Shafik confirmed that Professor Franke was "under investigation for discriminatory remarks."