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Full-Text Articles in Law
Silencing And Surveillance: The Struggle Of Same-Sex Desire In The Shadow Of The 20th-Century Police State, Ethan Dunn
Silencing And Surveillance: The Struggle Of Same-Sex Desire In The Shadow Of The 20th-Century Police State, Ethan Dunn
Honors Theses
This paper investigates the intersection of social perceptions of vice and gender norms in shaping the policing of sexual orientation and sexuality during the turn of the twentieth century. Employing a legal analysis rooted in the law and society movement and critical legal studies, this study examines how social anxieties surrounding vice and vice crimes prompted swift legislative measures at both federal and state levels, resulting in statutes characterized by broad language that granted extensive discretion to law enforcement officials and judges. The emergence of morals and vice police squads further intensified the targeting of individuals who deviated from prevailing …
Topology Of The Closet, Michael Boucai
Topology Of The Closet, Michael Boucai
Journal Articles
Despite the closet’s centrality to queer culture and theory, the metaphor’s various meanings have yet to be disaggregated and defined. Following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s identification of the closet with a “crisis of homo/heterosexual definition, indicatively male, dating from the end of the nineteenth century,” the present article uses an array of late-Victorian sources—especially The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds and Teleny, a pornographic novel sometimes attributed to Oscar Wilde—to describe and distinguish: (1) so-called latent homosexuality (“the unconscious closet”); (2) deliberate strategies of suppression, abstention, and reformation (“the conscious closet”); (3) clandestine pursuits of gay sex and sociability (“the double …
Western Universalism And African Homosexualties, Nicholas Kahn-Fogel
Western Universalism And African Homosexualties, Nicholas Kahn-Fogel
Faculty Scholarship
This article draws on original historical research, queer theory, communitarian philosophy, and an array of anthropological sources to suggest that efforts by Western liberals to protect practitioners of same-sex intimate conduct in Africa may be relatively unsuccessful and could further endanger the intended beneficiaries of advocacy.
Privacy Torts: Unreliable Remedies For Lgbt Plaintiffs, Anita L. Allen
Privacy Torts: Unreliable Remedies For Lgbt Plaintiffs, Anita L. Allen
All Faculty Scholarship
In the United States, both constitutional law and tort law recognize the right to privacy, understood as legal entitlement to an intimate life of one’s own free from undue interference by others and the state. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (“LGBT”) persons have defended their interests in dignity, equality, autonomy, and intimate relationships in the courts by appealing to that right. In the constitutional arena, LGBT Americans have claimed the protection of state and federal privacy rights with a modicum of well-known success. Holding that homosexuals have the same right to sexual privacy as heterosexuals, Lawrence v. Texas symbolizes the …
Dimensions Of Equality In Regulating Assisted Reproductive Technologies, Mary Crossley
Dimensions Of Equality In Regulating Assisted Reproductive Technologies, Mary Crossley
Articles
Although concerns about individual liberty and the nature and extent of reproductive freedom have tended to dominate discussions regarding the proliferation of and access to reproductive technologies, questions about the implications of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) for equality have also arisen. Despite the high number of invocations of equality in the literature regarding ARTs, to date little effort has been made to comprehensively examine the implications of ARTs for equality. This short Article seeks to highlight the variety of equality issues that ARTs present and to develop a framework for classifying different types of equality issues. Specifically, I suggest that …
Gay And Lesbian Applicants To The Bar: Even Lord Devlin Could Not Defend Exclusion, Joel J. Finer
Gay And Lesbian Applicants To The Bar: Even Lord Devlin Could Not Defend Exclusion, Joel J. Finer
Law Faculty Articles and Essays
In 1957, the publication of a report to Parliament, the Wolfenden Report, which recommended the repeal of laws criminalizing private homosexual conduct between consenting adults, sparked an intensely debated controversy in political philosophy and jurisprudence. The issue: is society justified in criminalizing behavior which, although causing no secular harm, transgresses widely held moral values? The principal proponent of morals legislation was Lord Patrick Devlin, who responded to the Wolfenden recommendation with a paper disputing the report's premises--that criminal law had no proper business punishing private immorality.Oxford Professor of Jurisprudence H.L.A. Hart, a philosophical successor to the libertarianism of John Stuart …
Brief Against Homophobia At The Bar: To Law School Dean-Mid 1960s, Joel J. Finer
Brief Against Homophobia At The Bar: To Law School Dean-Mid 1960s, Joel J. Finer
Law Faculty Articles and Essays
In the mid-1960s, the author addressed the following "brief" to the Dean of a major law school on behalf of a law student, successfully urging that the Dean not report the student's homosexual activities to the state Bar committee which screened applicants for "good moral character." My own view, to be presently elaborated, is that to deprive a law student of the well-earned fruits of his labor on the basis of psychiatric findings that he might, at some future time commit a homosexual act that might become public and might merely embarrass a client, employer or associate, would manifest gross …
Coming Out: Decision-Making In State And Federal Sodomy Cases, Susan Ayres
Coming Out: Decision-Making In State And Federal Sodomy Cases, Susan Ayres
Faculty Scholarship
In 1791, American states were enacting laws against sodomy at the same time they ratified the Bill of Rights, the first ten constitutional amendments meant to safeguard fundamental rights of individuals in a free society. In a March 1789 letter to James Madison, Thomas Jefferson asserted that a bill of rights was necessary to give the judiciary the power to protect such individual rights. Ironically, that which the judiciary gives, it may also take away, since "[t]he legislator is a writer. And the judge a reader."
This Article deconstructs recent sodomy cases in order to challenge judicial adoption or reinscription …
Bowers V. Hardwick, Romer V. Evans, And The Meaning Of Anti-Discrimination Legislation, Marc A. Fajer
Bowers V. Hardwick, Romer V. Evans, And The Meaning Of Anti-Discrimination Legislation, Marc A. Fajer
Articles
No abstract provided.
Some Thoughts On Harassment: A Gay Male Perspective, Marc A. Fajer
Some Thoughts On Harassment: A Gay Male Perspective, Marc A. Fajer
Articles
No abstract provided.
Sex, Reason, And A Taste For The Absurd, Robin West
Sex, Reason, And A Taste For The Absurd, Robin West
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Like much of Richard Posner's best work, Sex and Reason does many things, and for that reason will no doubt attract a large and diverse readership. This heavily footnoted, exhaustively researched, and imminently accessible book is a welcome introduction to the interdisciplinary study of sex. For the lay reader it presents an arresting set of speculations about human sexuality, drawn from the author's evident familiarity with a sizeable library of studies representing at least half a dozen scientific and social scientific disciplines, assembled in a readable and lively way. Of more interest, perhaps, to academicians and social scientists familiar with …
Legal Images Of Battered Women: Redefining The Issue Of Separation, Martha R. Mahoney
Legal Images Of Battered Women: Redefining The Issue Of Separation, Martha R. Mahoney
Articles
No abstract provided.