I just learned that the UCLA School of Law will have — thanks to a $1 million gift — a chair in sexual orientation law. I expect that my colleague Bill Rubenstein, one of the nation's leading scholars of sexual orientation law, will fill it, though that's just my guess.

Note that $1 million isn't enough to add a whole new faculty position: The money will just result in the creation of a title for a worthy academic, and the money will either be used for general law school programs, or specially routed to programs and research related to the subject matter. At UCLA, though not at some other schools, a professor's holding a chair does not mean that he personally gets some of the money that the donors gave.

I'll likely be on KSLR-AM (630) in San Antonio today from 4 to 4:30 Central talking about the chair. I'm naturally delighted that the school has gotten the donation, that my colleague will get a well-deserved honor, and that sexual orientation law — an obviously important subject, given the range of legal questions (sodomy laws, substantive due process, marriage, choice of law, employee benefits, child custody law, wills and trusts law, tax law, don't ask/don't tell, and so on) in which sexual-orientation-and-the-law questions arise — is being studied in the legal academy generally and at my institution in particular.

For my own, quite limited, work in sexual orientation law, see Same-Sex Marriage and Slippery Slopes, 33 Hofstra Law Review 1155 (2006), which I'm delighted to say received a Jesse Dukeminier Award (as one of the best sexual orientation law articles of 2006) from the Williams Institute.

UPDATE: I was supposed to be on for about half an hour, but it turned out that they weren't getting any calls on the subject, so it got cut short at about 20 minutes (just fine by me). Maybe I just persuaded all the listeners.