Biography
Courses
Holning Lau
Lecturer in Law
Harvey S. Shipley Miller Teaching Fellow, Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy
B.A. University of Pennsylvania, College of Arts & Sciences, 2000
J.D. University of Chicago, 2005
lau@law.ucla.edu
Holning Lau serves as the Harvey S. Shipley Miller Teaching Fellow at the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy. During the fall 2006 term, Lau will teach Law & Sexuality at UCLA School of Law.
Lau completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude. He received his J.D. from the University of Chicago, where he served as the Executive Topics & Comments Editor of the University of Chicago Law Review and as a staff member of the Chicago Journal of International Law. At the University of Chicago, Lau was named a Stonewall Scholar for excellence in his work related to LGBT rights and was awarded the Ignacio Martín-Baró Award for the best human rights paper by a professional or master’s degree student.
In the University of Chicago Law Review, Lau published a comment arguing that the United States’ cultural relativist position on sexual orientation rights jeopardizes the universality of other human rights such as women’s rights and the right to political expression. In the Chicago Journal of International Law, he published a comment arguing that the persistent objector doctrine, as it is commonly understood, should not apply to international human rights law.
Lau currently researches and writes on antidiscrimination law, international human rights, and children’s rights. His next major publication, “Transcending the Individualist Paradigm in Sexual Orientation Law,” is forthcoming in the California Law Review. In the article, Lau argues that collective entities such as couples should have aggregate rights that are irreducible to the individual rights of the collective’s members. Furthermore, he shows that, as analytical frameworks for antidiscrimination law, individual rights and couples’ rights produce disparate legal outcomes.
Prior to becoming the Harvey S. Shipley Miller Teaching Fellow, Lau served as a Public Policy Fellow at the Williams Institute. Before joining UCLA, he had worked for the Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor, Children’s Rights and the law firm of Debevoise & Plimpton in New York.
