CHLP Publications

This resource for lawyers and community advocates outlines punitive laws, policies, and cases affecting people living with HIV (PLHIV) and other communicable diseases in all 50 states, the military, federal prisons, and U.S. territories.

This resource provides a concise overview of the implications of the 2025 repeal of North Dakota’s HIV criminal offense.

This resource explains the legal challenge in OUTMemphis v. Skrmetti, a Tennessee case contesting the state’s “aggravated prostitution” law, which imposes felony penalties on people who know they are living with HIV while treating otherwise identical conduct as a misdemeanor.

For more than a decade CHLP has produced an HIV criminalization map that portrays the variety and prevalence of laws used to prosecute and punish PLHIV. This new release of the maps represents a substantial update resulting from a comprehensive research process and updated methodology based on CHLP’s Sourcebook on State and Federal HIV Criminal Law and Practice.

CHLP's Impact Report for 2024-2025 recounts how we build the infrastructure for liberation. It's how we create the relationships, leadership, legal strategies, movement infrastructure, and collective power that make positive justice possible.

CHLP attorneys Jada Hicks and Sean McCormick presented two posters at AIDS 2026, the 26th International AIDS Conference, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Wednesday and Thursday, July 29 and 30, 2026.

On July 13, 2026, CHLP submitted a comment demanding a full withdrawal of the proposed rule OMB-2026-0034-0001 “Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance,” which would catastrophically overhaul the federal process of issuing and administering grants and cooperative agreements.

On March 31, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Tennessee issued a ruling in OUTMemphis v. Lee, a challenge to Tennessee’s Aggravated Prostitution statute.

HIV BASIC is a group of advocates, including people living with HIV (PLHIV), abolitionists, researchers, racial justice and human rights organizers, and public health policy and legal experts working together to address the crisis connecting health status criminalization, public health, and the e

In May 2024, CHLP embarked on the organization’s first-ever strategic visioning process. The intention of this process and the strategic plan it produced is to provide clear guidance for mapping CHLP’s activities and efficiently allocating resources over the next four years. It also serves as a living framework for reflection and assessment as our work unfolds within an ever-changing terrain.

More than 79 million people in the U.S. have a criminal record and may face tens of thousands of collateral consequences long after their sentence ends. For people living and aging with HIV, these barriers stack up quickly, making it harder to access housing, healthcare, employment, and other essentials. These two new record-clearing resources were created to assist people living and aging with HIV in the record-clearing process.

The Positive Justice Project (PJP) is CHLP’s national campaign to end the criminalization of HIV and other stigmatized health conditions. These Guiding Principles describe the Black feminist, harm reductionist, and abolitionist framework that motivates PJP’s decriminalization work. They are intended to guide PJP’s internal decision-making, assist in training and supporting national and local decision-makers and advocates, inform coalition strategy, promote accountability inside and outside of PJP, and publicly communicate PJP’s commitments.