Ryan Thoreson

Ryan Thoreson’s scholarship examines the legal and social regulation of gender and sexuality and spans constitutional law, comparative and international law, and human rights law.

Thoreson’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in the California Law Review, Cardozo Law Review, Clinical Law Review, Harvard International Law Journal, Tulane Law Review, and Yale Law Journal, among other publications. He is a co-editor of The SAGE Handbook of Global Sexualities (2020) and the author of Transnational LGBT Activism: Working for Sexual Rights Worldwide (2014). Thoreson is a 2023 recipient of the Williams Institute’s Dukeminier Award to recognize the best legal scholarship on sexual orientation and gender identity, a 2024 recipient of the University of Cincinnati’s Faculty Excellence Award, and a 2025 recipient of the University of Cincinnati LGBTQ Center’s Meem & Gibson Outstanding Service Award for faculty and the College of Law’s Goldman Prize for Excellence in Teaching.

Previously, Thoreson taught as an Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong and was a Clinical Lecturer and Cover-Lowenstein Fellow at Yale Law School. Prior to entering academia, he was a researcher at Human Rights Watch and clerked for Judge Scott M. Matheson, Jr. on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. Thoreson received his J.D. from Yale, where he was Executive Editor of the Yale Law Journal and Managing Editor of the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism. A Rhodes Scholar, he also holds a D.Phil. in Anthropology from Oxford and an A.B. magna cum laude in Government and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality from Harvard University.

• JD, Yale Law School
• DPhil, Oxford University
• AB, Harvard University

Dignifying Queerness, 46 Cardozo L. Rev. 63 (2024).

Integrating Human Rights in Domestic Clinical Practice, 30 Clin. L. Rev. 345 (2024), with Tamar Ezer, Elizabeth Brundige & Aya Fujimura-Fanselow.

“Discriminalization”: Sexuality, Human Rights, and the Carceral Turn in Antidiscrimination Law, 110 Calif. L. Rev. 431 (2022).

The Limits of Moral Limitations: Reconceptualizing “Morals” in Human Rights Law, 59 Harv. Int’l L.J. 197 (2018). 

From Child Protection to Children’s Rights: Rethinking Homosexual Propaganda Bans in Human Rights Law, 124 Yale L.J. 1327 (2015).