Law Commons^™

Is "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" Unconstitutional After Lawrence? What It Will Take To Overturn The Policy, Diane H. Mazur

UF Law Faculty Publications

There can be a certain politeness to legal challenges to "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," the congressional policy that attempts - fitfully, incompletely, and arbitrarily - to exclude gay citizens from both the responsibilities and privileges of military service.' We consider whether the military has articulated a "rational basis" for the policy – some explanation of the military's belief that it is at least rational (as opposed to irrational) to classify servicemembers as straight or gay and accept or reject them accordingly, all in the interest of military effectiveness. We accept the fact that judges assume there is a need for …

Fun With Dick And Jane And Lawrence: A Primer On Education Privacy As Constitutional Liberty, Susan P. Stuart

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Querying Lawrence, Berta E. Hernández-Truyol

UF Law Faculty Publications

In 2003, the Supreme Court in the landmark decision Lawrence v. Texas found a Texas law, banning homosexual, but not heterosexual, sodomy to be unconstitutional. Thus, Lawrence ended the Bowers era in which morality was deemed to be a justification for discrimination against gays and lesbians. While the decision did bring to United States Constitutional analysis the radical idea that gays and lesbians are people too, it stopped short of addressing the real problem the case presents--the existence of a second-class citizenry. This Article examines the Lawrence decision in light of both the international, regional, and foreign jurisprudence and the …

Lawrence V. Texas: The Decision And Its Implications For The Future, Martin A. Schwartz

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

The Unknown Past Of Lawrence V. Texas, Dale Carpenter

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This Article is an attempt to fill in some of the gaps in the public's knowledge of the case Lawrence v. Texas. Much of the rich post-arrest history of the case has been ignored. But for the courage, insight, and initiative of three men in particular, the arrest might have been another forgotten episode in what the author calls the under history of the Texas sodomy law, the history not told in appellate opinions or in most other accounts.

Section II reviews the "somewhat known" past, tracing the evolution of the Texas sodomy law from a statute so facially …

Is Lawrence Libertarian?, Dale Carpenter

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas is no doubt a shock to those pursuing an antihomosexual agenda. To most Americans, however, the decision is less an ipse dixit announcing radical social change than it is a belated recognition of what they had already learned about the humanity and dignity of gay people. Rather than radically changing constitutional principle, the Court has corrected its own erroneous understanding of the facts that underlay its application of constitutional principle in the past. Rather than leading the nation, the Court has caught up to it.

Part I of this essay lays out …

The Domesticated Liberty Of Lawrence V. Texas, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

In this Commentary, Professor Franke offers an account of the Supreme Court's decision in Lawrence v. Texas. She concludes that in overruling the earlier Bowers v. Hardwick decision, Justice Kennedy does not rely upon a robust form of freedom made available by the Court's earlier reproductive rights cases, but instead announces a kind of privatized liberty right that affords gay and lesbian couples the right to intimacy in the bedroom. In this sense, the rights-holders in Lawrence are people in relationships and the liberty right those couples enjoy does not extend beyond the domain of the private. Franke expresses …

"You Are Entering A Gay And Lesbian Free Zone": On The Radical Dissents Of Justice Scalia And Other (Post-) Queers – [Raising Questions About Lawrence, Sex Wars, And The Criminal Law], Bernard Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

The most renowned substantive criminal law decision of the October 2002 Term, Lawrence v. Texas, will go down in history as a critical turning point in criminal law debates over the proper scope of the penal sanction. For the first time in the history of American criminal law, the United States Supreme Court has declared that a supermajoritarian moral belief does not necessarily provide a rational basis for criminalizing conventionally deviant conduct. The Court's ruling is the coup de grâce to legal moralism administered after a prolonged, brutish, tedious, and debilitating struggle against liberal legalism in its various criminal …

Lawrence & The Road From Liberation To Equality, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

To think about the future of lesbian and gay rights in the wake of Lawrence v. Texas, we inevitably need to look to the past. After all, the movement that first sparked efforts to challenge statutes like the Texas "Homosexual Conduct" law was not a rights movement at all. Instead, when lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals began organizing in 1969, their rallying cry was for liberation. To gauge what Lawrence means, then, we need to think in terms of both liberation, as the movement's early aim, and legal equality, which is the dominant demand of today's activists and advocates. …