Areas of Expertise

• Civil Rights and Discrimination
• Comparative and Foreign Law
• Constitutional Law
• Family Law
• Fourteenth Amendment
• Gender and the Law
• Human Rights Law
• International Human Rights
• Race and the Law
• Sexuality and the Law

Biography

Holning Lau is the Willie Person Mangum Distinguished Professor of Law. He is an internationally recognized expert on international and comparative approaches to equality rights, especially in the contexts of sexuality, gender, and family life. His writing has appeared in leading law reviews, interdisciplinary journals, books, and mass media outlets. He is currently writing a book titled The Global Vanguard of LGBTQ Rights: North, South, East, West (under contract with Stanford University Press) and is co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Constitutional Law in Asia (Oxford University Press, available online with print edition forthcoming). While Professor Lau is based at UNC, he is also currently a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at UCLA’s Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Law and Public Policy.

Professor Lau has served as an independent consultant on LGBTQI rights to organizations such as the Asian Development Ban, Danish Institute for Human Rights, and International Commission of Jurists. From 2013 to 2015, Professor Lau was president of the ACLU of North Carolina’s Board of Directors. He came to UNC in 2009 from Hofstra University, where he was an associate professor and co-directed Hofstra’s LGBT Rights Fellowship Program. He has also served twice as a visiting fellow at the University of Hong Kong and as an adjunct professor at Duke University School of Law. Professor Lau received his JD from the University of Chicago, where he was an editor of the University of Chicago Law Review and a staff member of the Chicago Journal of International Law. At the University of Chicago, he was named a Stonewall Scholar for excellence in his work related to LGBT rights and was awarded the Ignacio Martín-Baró Human Rights Paper Prize.

Education

• B.A., University of Pennsylvania
• J.D., University of Chicago

Selected Publications

LGBT+ Inclusion and Human Rights in Taiwan: A Scoping Review of the Literature (with Y. Huang et al.), SOC. POL'Y & SOC'Y (forthcoming 2025). 
Document Link

Scrutinizing Transgender Healthcare Bans Through Intersex Exceptions (H. Lau & B. Fedders), 36 YALE J. L. & FEMINISM 1 (2025). 
Westlaw | SSRN

Decriminalizing Same-Sex Sexual Activity: Jurisprudence from the Global South, 22 INT'L J. CONST. L. (forthcoming 2025).
SSRN

Legal Gender Recognition in Nepal and Comparative Context (with M. Malagodi), 45 U. Pa. J. Int'l L. 269 (2024).
Westlaw | Lexis/Nexis | SSRN | Hein | BEPress

Comparative Law and Freedom to Marry in Hong Kong (with X. Dyer), 53 HONG KONG L.J. 51 (2023).
Westlaw | SSRN | Hein

LGBT+ Inclusion and Policy Development in Thailand: A Scoping Review, SEXUALITY RES. & SOC. POL'Y (Springer 2022).
Document Link

Barring Married Same-Sex Couples from Joint Adoption: Comparative Perspectives on the Adoption of Children by Married Same-Sex Couples, 15 NAT'L TAIWAN U. L. REV. 177 (2021). 
Westlaw | Lexis/Nexis | SSRN | Hein | BEPress

Nonmarriage and Choice in South Africa and the United States (with S. Kim), 99 WASH. U. L. REV. 1983 (2022).
Westlaw | Lexis/Nexis | SSRN | Hein | BEPress

Courts, the Law, and LGBT Rights in Asia, in OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIAS: POLITICS (W. Thompson ed., 2020).
SSRN

Gender Recognition as a Human Right, in CAMBRIDGE HANDBOOK OF NEW HUMAN RIGHTS: RECOGNITION, NOVELTY, RHETORIC (A. von Arnauld, K. von der Decken & M. Susi, eds., 2020).
SSRN | JC571 .C36 2020

SSRN Author Page