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Varieties Of Constitutional Experience: Democracy And The Marriage Equality Campaign, Nan D. Hunter
Varieties Of Constitutional Experience: Democracy And The Marriage Equality Campaign, Nan D. Hunter
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Beginning in the 1970s, the overwhelming success of anti-gay ballot questions made direct democracy the most powerful bête noire of the LGBT rights movement. It is thus deeply ironic that, more than any other factor, an electoral politics-style campaign led to the national mandate for marriage equality announced by the Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges. This occurred because marriage equality advocates set out to change social and constitutional meanings not primarily through courts or legislatures, but with a strategy designed to win over moveable middle voters in ballot question elections. Successful pro-gay litigation arguments, followed by supportive reasoning …
Intersectionality And The Constitution Of Family Status, Serena Mayeri
Intersectionality And The Constitution Of Family Status, Serena Mayeri
All Faculty Scholarship
Marital supremacy—the legal privileging of marriage—is, and always has been, deeply intertwined with inequalities of race, class, gender, and region. Many if not most of the plaintiffs who challenged legal discrimination based on family status in the 1960s and 1970s were impoverished women, men, and children of color who made constitutional equality claims. Yet the constitutional law of the family is largely silent about the status-based impact of laws that prefer marriage and disadvantage non-marital families. While some lower courts engaged with race-, sex-, and wealth-based discrimination arguments in family status cases, the Supreme Court largely avoided recognizing, much less …