Harvard Law School has appointed William Rubenstein as a full Professor of Law. Rubenstein is not only openly gay but is one of the nation’s foremost legal experts on all things gay and the law.

The appointment is significant because, although Harvard has had other openly gay and lesbian law professors, Rubenstein’s appointment is the first for someone who is a Harvard grad and whose entire career has been devoted to GLBT legal advocacy.

Law schools with a liberal tradition like Harvard usually offer a class or two in “sexual orientation and the law,” but few other schools do so. (Locally, California Western may be the only one.) Consequently, what we need is not simply to “ghettoize” GLBT law, but to include GLBT curricula into all courses.

Further, for those students who want to devote their careers to GLBT practice, there should be a law school with a GLBT focus.

The idea is not so strange. When black people were prohibited from attending law schools, they started their own, such as the non-sectarian Howard University, established in 1867. Thurgood Marshall, the first black person to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States, attended Howard University. And, through the years, many law schools have been founded with a religious focus.

So why not a GLBT focus – after all, Regent University School of Law, founded by Rev. Pat Robertson, has an anti-gay agenda. The curriculum is dedicated to restricting equality for gay folks and their children. (A recent edition of the school’s law review contained articles suggesting courts should refuse gay men into the Boy Scouts because there is “proof” gay men recruit and molest young boys. Your federal tax dollars support the school.) With at least one law school devoted to negating our rights, shouldn’t there be a law school that exists to advance them?

Not to mention that practicing law in the GLBT arena is complex – the rules are always changing.

For example, while law schools teach contracts, they don’t teach attorneys who draft contracts for non-marital unions whether standard clauses in a marriage contract are enforceable. While a contract between a married couple with a clause stipulating that one spouse receive property in exchange for caring for the other is not valid, that isn’t necessarily the case in a domestic partnership.

Property law is similarly ambiguous with regard to GLBT concerns.

If, for example, a parent dies and leaves property to a child with the condition that the child remain single, the clause is void in California. But would it be if the child entered a domestic partnership?

And the area of criminal law is especially complex. For example, some states impose longer sentences if a 19-year-old male has oral sex with a 17-year-old male rather than vaginal intercourse with a female.

But most complicated of all are federal and state laws against employment and educational discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. There are 13 federal court circuits, and each one has its own body of law on the topic. Attorneys examining constitutional questions that could come before the U.S. Supreme Court have to know where the nine justices stand on related issues and how they are likely to decide an issue.

While establishing a GLBT law school may take a while, there is some progress in terms of GLBT curricula.

In a recent article in the Journal of Legal Education, Professor Henry F. Fradella, chair of the Department of Criminology at Cal State Long Beach, proposes that law schools integrate the study of sexual orientation into the core law school curriculum. He specifically notes how he does this through a course in criminal law, in which he focuses on GLBT cases. There are certainly plenty of them these days, and there will be even more as GLBT civil rights become increasingly established.