Law Commons^™

Queer Sacrifice In Masterpiece Cakeshop, Jeremiah A. Ho

Faculty Publications

This Article interprets the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision, Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission , as a critical extension of Derrick Bell’s interest convergence thesis into the LGBTQ movement. Chiefly, Masterpiece reveals how the Court has been more willing to accommodate gay individuals who appear more assimilated and respectable—such as those who participated in the marriage equality decisions—than LGBTQ individuals who are less “mainstream” and whose exhibited queerness appear threatening to the heteronormative status quo. When assimilated same-sex couples sought marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges, their respectable personas facilitated the alignment between their interests to marry and …

Truth Seeking: The Lenahan Case And The Search For A Human Rights Remedy, Margaret B. Drew

Faculty Publications

Part I of this essay addresses the role of determining truth as part of human rights remedies. Truth is essential so that all involved may provide appropriate remedies to those harmed, as well as to open a gateway to whatever level of healing and change is possible under the circumstances. Part II discusses the procedural history of Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales and explores the comparative findings and goals of the U.S. legal system within the human rights framework. The U.S. and IACHR Gonzales-Lenahan cases are used as comparative exemplars. The application of truth seeking principles to the Lenahan …

Law As Instrumentality, Jeremiah A. Ho

Faculty Publications

Our conceptions of law affect how we objectify the law and ultimately how we study it. Despite a century’s worth of theoretical progress in American law—from legal realism to critical legal studies movements and postmodernism—the formalist conception of “law as science,” as promulgated by Christopher Langdell at Harvard Law School in the late-nineteenth century, still influences methodologies in American legal education. Subsequent movements of legal thought, however, have revealed that the law is neither scientific nor “objective” in the way the Langdellian formalists once envisioned. After all, the Langdellian scientific objectivity of law itself reflected the dominant class, gender, power, …

Magna Carta’S Freedom For The English Church, Dwight G. Duncan

Faculty Publications

Even after, eight centuries, this provision of Magna Carta is one of the few that remains in effect. A statement of principle that the Church in England should be free from outside domination, it is an ancestor of our American belief in separation of Church and State and the guarantee of free exercise of religion contained in the First Amendment. In English history, people died for this principle, on various sides of the denominational divides. It was not always vindicated in practice. But, since at least the end of the thirteenth century, it has ever been on the statute books …

Denying Choice Of Forum: An Interference By The Massachusetts Trial Court With Domestic Violence Victims’ Rights And Safety, Margaret B. Drew, Marilu E. Gresens

Faculty Publications

On May 4, 2009, the Chief Justice of Administration and Management of the Massachusetts Trial Court launched a pilot program in the Norfolk Division of the Probate and Family Court Department through an Administrative Order entitled, in pertient part, “for the Interdepartmental Transfer of Certain Abuse Prevention Proceedings”. This pilot program authorizes a judge of the Norfolk Division of the Probate and Family Court to initiate interdepartmental transfers of civil protection order petitions pending in other court departments where the parties have related domestic relations matters pending in the Probate and Family Court.

This article discusses how the pilot program …

Looseleafing The Flow: An Anecdotal History Of One Technology For Updating, Howard T. Senzel

Faculty Publications

This work will show that there is a great gulf between the culture of lawmakers and the culture of those who comply. Lawmakers - legislators, administrators, and especially judges - function by producing primary authorities in law. The texts of these authorities are the law itself. Because they were created in the course of deciding actual cases - cases which produced insights to a truth of lasting value, these texts have an authority equal to all the other insights produced down through the ages. The excitement that accompanies such insights tends to blind lawmakers to the chore of compliance. Those …