Human Rights Law Commons^™

The New Pornography Wars, Julie A. Dahlstrom

Faculty Scholarship

The world’s largest online pornography conglomerate, MindGeek, has come under fire for the publishing of “rape videos,” child pornography, and nonconsensual pornography on its website, Pornhub. As in the “pornography wars” of the 1970s and 1980s, lawyers and activists have now turned to civil remedies and filed creative anti-trafficking lawsuits against MindGeek and third parties, like payment processing company, Visa. These lawsuits seek not only to achieve legal accountability for online sex trafficking but also to reframe a broader array of online harms as sex trafficking.

This Article explores what these new trafficking lawsuits mean for the future regulation of …

Trafficking To The Rescue?, Julie A. Dahlstrom

Faculty Scholarship

Since before the dawn of the #MeToo Movement, civil litigators have been confronted with imperfect legal responses to gender-based harms. Some have sought to envision and develop innovative legal strategies. One new, increasingly successful tactic has been the deployment of federal anti-trafficking law in certain cases of domestic violence and sexual assault. In 2017, for example, victims of sexual assault filed federal civil suits under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (“TVPRA”) against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. Plaintiffs argued that the alleged sexual assault conduct amounted to “commercial sex acts” and sex trafficking. Other plaintiffs’ lawyers have similarly invoked trafficking …

Covid-19 And Lgbt Rights, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Even in the best of times, LGBT individuals have legal vulnerabilities in employment, housing, healthcare and other domains resulting from a combination of persistent bias and uneven protection against discrimination. In this time of COVID-19, these vulnerabilities combine to amplify both the legal and health risks that LGBT people face.

This essay focuses on several risks that are particularly linked to being lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender, with the recognition that these vulnerabilities are often intensified by discrimination based on race, ethnicity, age, disability, immigration status and other aspects of identity. Topics include: 1) federal withdrawal of antidiscrimination protections; 2) …

Penal Welfare And The New Human Trafficking Intervention Courts, Kate Mogulescu, Aya Gruber, Amy J. Cohen

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Public Defender As Anti-Trafficking Advocate, An Unlikely Role: How Current New York City Arrest And Prosecution Policies Systematically Criminalize Victims Of Sex Trafficking, Kate Mogulescu

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Dating The State: The Moral Hazards Of Winning Gay Rights, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

On August 1, 2009, a masked man dressed in black carrying an automatic weapon stormed into Beit Pazi in Tel Aviv, the home of the Aguda, the National Association of GLBT in Israel. He opened fire on a group of gay and lesbian teenagers who were meeting in the basement for "Bar-Noar," or "Youth Bar," killing two people and wounding at least ten others. This terrible act of violence attracted immediate national and international attention and condemnation. President Simon Peres declared the next day:

[T]he shocking murder carried out in Tel Aviv yesterday against youths and young people is a …

Same Sex Marriage And Its Implications For Employee Benefits: Proceedings Of The 2005 Meeting Of The Association Of American Law Schools Sections On Employee Benefits, And Sexual Orientation And Gender Identity Issues, Maria O'Brien, Constance Hiatt, Shannon Minter, Teresa S. Collett

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Maria O'Brien Hylton*: Welcome to this session on "Same Sex Marriage and its Implications for Employee Benefits." I'm Maria Hylton and I will introduce our speakers and moderate the program.

Our first speaker is Constance Hiatt, who is a partner with the Hanson Bridgett law firm here in San Francisco. She represents mostly large employers and large employee benefit plans, including the State of California's 401(k) and 457 plans as well as the University of California's benefits office. So, she has extensive experience in the employee benefits area and she came to us, to me really, through several …

Protecting Transgender Families: Strategies For Advocates, Taylor Flynn

Faculty Scholarship

For a transgender (trans) man or woman, what begins as the dissolution of a relationship may be transformed into a public nightmare in which the individual is forced to defend the authenticity of his or her gender in the face of relentless, brutal, and humiliating questions about the most intimate details of personal anatomy and sexual practices. This Article discusses this reality in the case of Michael Kantaras, a transsexual man in Clearwater, Florida in 2002.

Regarding Rights: An Essay Honoring The Fiftieth Anniversary Of The Universal Declaration Of Human Rights Introduction: Locating Culture, Identity, And Human Rights Symposium In Celebration Of The Fiftieth Anniversary Of The Universal Declaration Of Human Rights, Tracy E. Higgins

Faculty Scholarship

The half-century since the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights' has been famously heralded as the "Age of Rights" and the concept of human rights described as "the only political-moral idea that has gained universal acceptance." During the same period, however, both terms defining the subject-human and rights-have become increasingly contested. Informed by the emergence of identity-based political movements, critics have attacked the category human has as bearing the baggage of Western Enlightenment assumptions about personhood and community, inherently racist, sexist, and classist. Theorists across the political spectrum have criticized the concept of rights as indeterminate, destructive of …

Hate Crimes, Homosexuals, And The Constitution, Anthony S. Winer

Faculty Scholarship

This Article begins with an analysis of certain features of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and demonstrates that this clause establishes a fundamental right to the equal benefit of laws protecting personal security. Laws protecting personal security must be applied evenhandedly. Any discriminatory application of such laws is presumptively invalid under the Equal Protection Clause. This Article next shows that gay men and lesbians are among the most common victims of hate crime, that hate crimes against gays and lesbians are significant, persistent and widespread, and that gays and lesbians have a substantial stake in the manner …

Parading Ourselves: Freedom Of Speech At The Feast Of St. Patrick, Larry Yackle

Faculty Scholarship

Three things are true. First, American society is now absorbed in yet another great civil rights movement, this one on behalf of gay, lesbian, and ambisexual citizens, which will lead ineluctably to the elimination of legal burdens on the basis of sexual orientation.' Change will come slowly, with much backing and filling, and at an awful price measured in human pain. Intolerance for the homosexualities that exist among us, and the homosexual behavior in which many of us engage, will persist in quarters where the law cannot reach.2 Yet private homophobia, deprived of legal sanction, will ultimately be discredited and …