Botched Bans: Analyzing Conversion Therapy Bans After a Decade of Legal Challenges.

Despite empirical evidence documenting its harms and substantial legislative efforts to ban its practice, conversion therapy remains a tragically prevalent practice in the United States. Recently, a circuit split between the Ninth and Eleventh Circuits has developed, raising questions about the future of conversion therapy regulation. This Note takes a retrospective look at the last ten years of conversion therapy bans and related legal challenges, questions the effectiveness of enacted bans, and explores routes for more effective regulation. This Note ultimately argues that conversion therapy bans must shift their focus to the regulation of unlicensed practitioners in order to better protect minors from the empirically demonstrated harms of conversion therapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]