Professor Noa Ben-Asher is a 2025 Dukeminier Award Winner for their article, Gender Regrets: Banning Abortion and Gender-Affirming Care, 2024 Utah L. Rev. 763 (2024) (co-authored with Margot J. Pollans) (PDF format).

Here is a partial press release from the UCLA School of Law Williams Institute:

Congratulations to the 2025 Dukeminier Awards Winners

The Williams Institute and student editors of the Dukeminier Awards Journal are pleased to announce the best sexual orientation and gender identity legal scholarship published during the 2023-2024 academic year. These four articles and the winner of our Jeffrey S. Haber Prize for Student Scholarship are featured in Volume 24 of the Dukeminier Awards Journal.

Thank you to our generous donors who have made these awards possible.

“The Michael Cunningham Prize”

Noa Ben-Asher
Professor of Law, St. John’s University School of Law

Margot J. Pollans
Professor of Law, Pace University Elisabeth Haub School of Law

Gender Regrets: Banning Abortion and Gender-Affirming Care, 2024 Utah L. Rev. 763 (2024)

This article examines how “regret” is used in bans on abortion and 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.