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Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around: The Supreme Court Is Harming People With Its Inscrutable Gay Marriage Actions, Sonja R. West, Dahlia Lithwick
Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around: The Supreme Court Is Harming People With Its Inscrutable Gay Marriage Actions, Sonja R. West, Dahlia Lithwick
Popular Media
The Supreme Court’s decision Monday (Oct. 5, 2014) to decline the appeals of decisions striking down same-sex marriage bans in five states was, to most court-watchers, a huge surprise. It was also a deeply strange move given the magnitude of the constitutional issue and the general confusion about what a non-decision actually means. While Monday’s denial of certiorari was not technically a decision on the merits, most supporters of same-sex marriage celebrated the move as part of the justices’ inexorable crawl toward marriage equality. And in Virginia, Oklahoma, Colorado, and other affected states, gay couples who have waited—in many cases …
Common And Uncommon Families In The American Constitutional Order, Linda C. Mcclain
Common And Uncommon Families In The American Constitutional Order, Linda C. Mcclain
Faculty Scholarship
This essay reviews Professor Mark E. Brandon’s aptly named book, States of Union: Family and Change in the American Constitutional Order, which challenges the familiar story that the U.S. constitutional and political order have rested upon a particular, unchanging form of family – monogamous, heterosexual, permanent, and reproductive – and on the family values generated by that family form. That story also maintains that such family form and the legal norms that sustained it remained relatively undisturbed for centuries until the dramatic transformation spurred in part, beginning the 1960s, by the U.S. Supreme Court’s constitutionalizing of family and marriage through, …
Adoption Law In The United States: A Pathfinder, Glen-Peter Ahlers Sr.
Adoption Law In The United States: A Pathfinder, Glen-Peter Ahlers Sr.
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Is There A Federal Definitions Power?, Ernest A. Young
Is There A Federal Definitions Power?, Ernest A. Young
Faculty Scholarship
Although the Supreme Court decided United States v. Windsor on equal protection grounds, that case also raised important and recurring questions about federal power. In particular, defenders of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) argued that Congress may always define the terms used in federal statutes, even if its definition concerns a matter reserved to the States. As the DOMA illustrates, federal definitions concerning reserved matters that depart from state law may impose significant burdens on state governments and private citizens alike. This Article argues that there is no general, freestanding federal definitions power and that sometimes—as with marriage—federal law …