Professors Margot Pollans and Noa Ben-Asher Honored with 2025 Dukeminier Award for Excellence in LGBTQ+ Scholarship

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The Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University is proud to announce that Margot Pollans, Professor of Law at Pace Haub Law and Noa Ben-Asher, Professor of Law at St. John’s University School of Law have been selected as 2025 Dukeminier Awards Winners for their article, Gender Regrets: Banning Abortion and Gender-Affirming Care (PDF), 2024 Utah L. Rev. 763 (2024). The Dukeminier Awards acknowledge, distribute, and celebrate the best sexual orientation and gender identity legal scholarship published during the previous academic year. The Williams Institute, a UCLA School of Law research center, and the student staff members of the Dukeminier Awards Journal administer the awards.

Gender Regrets: Banning Abortion and Gender-Affirming Care, examines how “regret” has long been to justify abortion bans and, more recently, has come to be used to support bans on gender-affirming care for minors. It identifies two overlapping legal threads. First, both campaigns against medical care point to the protection of patients from future regret as a legitimate state interest that justifies restrictions. Second, both rely on alleged concerns about regret to redefine the legal meaning of “informed consent.” In doing so, both treat the emotion of regret as a distinct injury that could lead to a variety of legal rights and responsibilities. Pollans and Ben-Asher argue that a strategic conservative legal movement has used “regret” as a disciplinary tool to promote “traditional family values,” especially those of natalism and “biological” sex difference.

“We are thrilled to have our article selected for a Dukeminier Award,” said Professor Pollans. “It is such an honor to be included among this distinguished group of scholars, and I’m a longtime fan of the Williams Institute, which does really fantastic and important work to combat bias against LGBTQ+ people.”

Professor Margot Pollans joined the Pace Haub Law faculty in 2015. She is the Faculty Director of the Pace Food Law Center and also the Joseph P. D’Alessandro Faculty Scholar. Previously, she was the James D. Hopkins Professor of Law for the 2023–2025 academic years and served as the Shamik and Adrienne Trivedi Faculty Scholar from 2020–2022. Professor Pollans is an accomplished scholar whose primary research interests lie in the areas of food and agriculture law, administrative law and social justice. Her academic work has appeared in a variety of journals and she is also the co-author of a casebook, Food Law: Cases & Materials. In 2022, she was named the recipient of Haub Law’s distinguished Goettel Prize for Faculty Scholarship for her article, "Eaters, Powerless by Design" published by Michigan Law Review (120 Mich. L. Rev. 643 (2022)).

Professor Noa Ben-Asher was previously a Professor of Law at Pace Haub Law from 2009 to 2023, when they joined the St. John’s Law faculty. Professor Ben-Asher’s scholarly interests include gender, sexuality, and legal theory. Their work has appeared in numerous legal journals and edited collections. Their forthcoming book, Secular-Christian Social Justice, will be published by NYU Press. Professor Ben-Asher teaches Torts, Family Law, and Law, Gender & Sexuality.

Gender Regrets has been republished in Volume 24 of the Dukeminier Awards Journal, along with this year’s other winning articles. . The goals of the journal and its awards are to encourage scholars to begin or continue writing about sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy; provide valuable recognition and support for scholars, law students, and lawyers who write in this area; and provide easy access to each year’s best scholarly materials for those outside of legal academia, including lawyers, judges, other legal actors, and policy makers. The Dukeminier Awards Journal is edited in partnership with the Williams Institute and staffed by students at the UCLA School of Law. A virtual event celebrating the winners will be held on September 17.