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Full-Text Articles in Law
Instead Of Enda, A Course Correction For Title Vii, Jennifer S. Hendricks
Instead Of Enda, A Course Correction For Title Vii, Jennifer S. Hendricks
Publications
In September 2008, the D.C. federal court issued a landmark decision holding that discrimination against a transgender person was sex discrimination under Title VII. This decision throws into sharp relief the ongoing debates among supporters of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act about whether the compromise on including protection for gender identity claims. Consideration of ENDA in some form will likely be early on the agenda of the next Congress, especially under a Democratic administration likely to support the bill. This essay proposes an alternative to ENDA that would embrace the theoretical connections between sex, gender, and sexual orientation, with important practical …
Equality Opportunity: Marriage Litigation And Iowa's Equal Protection Law, Suzanne B. Goldberg
Equality Opportunity: Marriage Litigation And Iowa's Equal Protection Law, Suzanne B. Goldberg
Faculty Scholarship
Discrimination claims against longstanding rules invite the public and the courts to rethink the status quo and address overarching legal and social commitments to equality together with questions specific to the case at hand. Lawsuits seeking marriage rights for same-sex couples quintessentially illustrate this multilayered nature of law reform litigation, as the debates they provoke focus not only on the rights of same-sex couples but also on the meaning of marriage and the meaning of equality more generally. While few other than lawyers, judges, and perhaps some reporters actually read the equal protection and due process arguments that the presiding …
Intuition, Morals, And The Legal Conversation About Gay Rights, Suzanne B. Goldberg
Intuition, Morals, And The Legal Conversation About Gay Rights, Suzanne B. Goldberg
Faculty Scholarship
When lawyers and judges converse in litigation, factual and legal analysis typically takes center stage. Yet, when the legal conversation turns to the rights of lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals, the ground shifts. Intuition and morals rationales often displace evidence-based reasoning. More specifically, arguments to limit the rights of lesbians and gay men tend to depend explicitly on intuition, and sometimes morality, in ways that contemporary arguments to restrict the rights of other social groups rarely do.
In addressing this dissonance, this essay has two central aims. The first is simply to observe the disproportionate openness to arguments based on …
Moral Conflict And Conflicting Liberties, Chai R. Feldblum
Moral Conflict And Conflicting Liberties, Chai R. Feldblum
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
The authors' goal in this chapter is to surface some of the commonalities between belief liberty and identity liberty and to offer some public policy suggestions for what to do when these liberties conflict. She first wants to make transparent the conflict that she believes exists between laws intended to protect the liberty of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people so that they may live lives of dignity and integrity and the religious beliefs of some individuals whose conduct is regulated by such laws. The author believes those who advocate for LGBT equality have downplayed the impact of such …
Tax As Urban Legend, Anthony C. Infanti
Tax As Urban Legend, Anthony C. Infanti
Articles
In this essay, I review UC-Berkeley history professor Robin Einhorn's book, American Taxation, American Slavery. In this provocatively-titled book, Einhorn traces the relationship between democracy, taxation, and slavery from colonial times through the antebellum period. By re-telling some of the most familiar set piece stories of American history through the lens of slavery, Einhorn reveals how the stories that we tell ourselves over and over again about taxation and politics in America are little more than the stuff of urban legend.
In the review, I provide a brief summary of Einhorn's discussion of the relationship between slavery and colonial taxation, …
Tax Equity, Anthony C. Infanti
Tax Equity, Anthony C. Infanti
Articles
Simply put, this article stands the traditional concept of tax equity on its head. Challenging the notion that tax equity is an unequivocal good, this article deconstructs the concept of tax equity to reveal the subtle, yet pernicious ways in which it shapes tax policy debates and impinges upon contributions to those debates. The article describes how tax equity, with its narrow focus on income - as the sole relevant metric for judging tax fairness, presupposes a population that is homogeneous along all other lines. Through this insidious homogenization, tax equity performs both a sanitizing and a screening function in …
(E)Racing Jennifer Harris: Sexuality And Race, Law And Discourse In Harris V. Portland, Kristine E. Newhall, Erin E. Buzuvis
(E)Racing Jennifer Harris: Sexuality And Race, Law And Discourse In Harris V. Portland, Kristine E. Newhall, Erin E. Buzuvis
Faculty Scholarship
In 2007 Penn State basketball coach Rene Portland retired shortly after a confidential settlement ended a discrimination lawsuit brought by former player Jennifer Harris against Portland and Penn State. Because of Portland's infamous policy of not allowing lesbians on her team, her departure was celebrated as a victory against homophobia in sports. Yet although Harris's claims of sexual orientation discrimination were validated in the media, her allegations of racial discrimination were ignored or dismissed as implausible. In this Article, the authors examine the omission of race from the discourse surrounding this case and suggest that both legal and cultural factors …