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Articles 1 - 11 of 11

Full-Text Articles in Legal History

Policing Queer Sexuality, Ari Ezra Waldman Jan 2023

Policing Queer Sexuality, Ari Ezra Waldman

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life Before Stonewall. By Anna Lvovsky.


Sex And Religion: Unholy Bedfellows, Mary-Rose Papandrea Apr 2018

Sex And Religion: Unholy Bedfellows, Mary-Rose Papandrea

Michigan Law Review

A review of Geoffrey R. Stone, Sex and the Constitution: Sex, Religion, and Law from America's Origins to the Twenty-First Century.


Sexual Orientation And The Paradox Of Heightened Scrutiny, Nan D. Hunter Jun 2004

Sexual Orientation And The Paradox Of Heightened Scrutiny, Nan D. Hunter

Michigan Law Review

In Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court performed a double move, creating a dramatic discursive moment: it both decriminalized consensual homosexual relations between adults, and, simultaneously, authorized a new regime of heightened regulation of homosexuality. How that happened and what we can expect next are the subjects of this essay. The obvious point of departure for an analysis of Lawrence is its decriminalization of much sexual conduct. Justice Scalia began this project with his dire warning that "[s]tate laws against bigamy, samesex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are . . . sustainable only in …


The Unknown Past Of Lawrence V. Texas, Dale Carpenter Jun 2004

The Unknown Past Of Lawrence V. Texas, Dale Carpenter

Michigan Law Review

On the night of September 17, 1998, someone called the police to report that a man was going crazy with a gun inside a Houston apartment. When Harris County sheriff's deputies entered the apartment they found no person with a gun but did witness John Lawrence and Tyron Gamer having anal sex. This violated the Texas Homosexual Conduct law, and the deputies hauled them off to jail for the night. Lawyers took the men's case to the Supreme Court and won a huge victory for gay rights. So goes the legend of Lawrence v. Texas. Do not believe it. …


Surviving Lawrence V. Texas, Marc Spindelman Jun 2004

Surviving Lawrence V. Texas, Marc Spindelman

Michigan Law Review

The lesbian and gay communities have reacted to the Supreme Court's decision in Lawrence v. Texas - striking down state sodomy laws on Due Process grounds - with unbridled enthusiasm. Lawrence has variously been praised as an unmitigated victory for lesbian and gay rights, a turning point in our community's history, and the moment when we have gone from second-class political outcasts to constitutional persons with first-class rights. Obviously, something remarkable happened in Lawrence. In an opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Court declared that John Geddes Lawrence and Tyrone Gamer, who had been convicted under Texas's sodomy …


Lawrence V. Texas And Judicial Hubris, Nelson Lund, John O. Mcginnis Jun 2004

Lawrence V. Texas And Judicial Hubris, Nelson Lund, John O. Mcginnis

Michigan Law Review

The republic will no doubt survive the Supreme Court's decision, in Lawrence v. Texas, to invalidate laws against private, consensual sodomy, including those limited to homosexual behavior. Such laws are almost never enforced, and the rare prosecutions for such acts are necessarily capricious. So the principal direct effect of the Court's decision is likely to be extremely limited, and largely salutary: a few individuals will be spared the bad luck of getting a criminal conviction for violating laws that are manifestly out of step with prevailing sexual mores. Nor are we likely to see anything like the intense political …


Some Effects Of Identity-Based Social Movements On Constitutional Law In The Twentieth Century, William N. Eskridge Jr. Aug 2002

Some Effects Of Identity-Based Social Movements On Constitutional Law In The Twentieth Century, William N. Eskridge Jr.

Michigan Law Review

What motivated big changes in constitutional law doctrine during the twentieth century? Rarely did important constitutional doctrine or theory change because of formal amendments to the document's text, and rarer still because scholars or judges "discovered" new information about the Constitution's original meaning. Precedent and common law reasoning were the mechanisms by which changes occurred rather than their driving force. My thesis is that most twentieth century changes in the constitutional protection of individual rights were driven by or in response to the great identity-based social movements ("IBSMs") of the twentieth century. Race, sex, and sexual orientation were markers of …


Marriage And Belonging, Ann Laquer Estin Jan 2002

Marriage And Belonging, Ann Laquer Estin

Michigan Law Review

Marriage is a quintessentially private institution. Justice Douglas put the point this way in 1965, writing for the Supreme Court in Griswold v. Connecticut: "We deal with a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights - older than our political parties, older than our school system. Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred. It is an association that promotes a way of life, not causes; a harmony in living, not political faiths; a bilateral loyalty, not commercial or social projects. Yet it is an association …


Finding Gold In The Rainbow Rights Movement, Shayna S. Cook May 2001

Finding Gold In The Rainbow Rights Movement, Shayna S. Cook

Michigan Law Review

In her history of the past fifty years of the gay and lesbian civil rights movement, Patricia Cain recounts the litigation successes and failures that contributed to the legal status of gays and lesbians in the Untied States today. Clearly an insider who has marched with the movement every step of the way, Cain provides a comprehensive account of all fronts of the battle in state and federal courts since 1950. But while Rainbow Rights serves as a good primer on the legal challenges and the key themes uniting them, the book reads like an account of a struggle ending …


History Unbecoming, Becoming History, Toni M. Massaro Jan 2000

History Unbecoming, Becoming History, Toni M. Massaro

Michigan Law Review

The last few decades have seen a torrent of legal commentary supporting gay equality and attacking the punishment, failure to protect, and refusal to affirm gay conduct and identity. William Eskridge, a prominent voice in this fin-de-siecle literature, now draws together and expands on his previous work in Gaylaw: Challenging the Apartheid of the Closet. Though far more successful in shaping the uses of the past than in showing the way to the future, the book instructs even where it fails. It augurs a century that could well witness the end of official discrimination against gay individuals, and the relegation …


Fornication, Cohabitation, And The Constitution, Michigan Law Review Dec 1978

Fornication, Cohabitation, And The Constitution, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

This Note begins with the indisputable assumption that laws prohibiting fornication and cohabitation are nowhere explioitly forbidden by the Constitution. If a right to engage in consensual adult heterosexual activity exists, it will most convincingly be inferred from the Court's cases establishing a right of "privacy." The Note first seeks to discover an adequate definition of privacy which might lead to a decision whether "privacy" encompasses the right .to fornicate or cohabit (a right which, for brevity's sake, we will somewhat imprecisely call the right to, sexual privacy), but it finds no such definition. The Note therefore proceeds to investigate …