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Conjuring "Equal Dignity": Mapping The Constitutional Dialogue To And From Same-Sex Marriage, Julie Nice Dec 2014

Conjuring "Equal Dignity": Mapping The Constitutional Dialogue To And From Same-Sex Marriage, Julie Nice

Julie A. Nice

What a long, strange trip it’s been from Bowers v. Hardwick to Obergefell v. Hodges. Less than thirty years after the Supreme Court notoriously upheld the criminalization of same-sex sexuality, the Court now has declared that laws may not exclude gays and lesbians from marriage. How did the majority in Obergefell conjure this “equal dignity” for same-sex couples that they insist the Constitution requires? This essay analyzes the Court's approach by closely examining the majority and dissenting opinions and then providing a synthesis of trends reflected, rationales rejected, issues ignored, and opportunities opened. 

First, as to trends reflected, the majority …


How Equality Constitutes Liberty: The Alignment Of Cls V. Martinez, Julie Nice Dec 2010

How Equality Constitutes Liberty: The Alignment Of Cls V. Martinez, Julie Nice

Julie A. Nice

Across the constitutional doctrines protecting individual liberty from governmental interference, judicial inquiry often focuses on the unequal infringement of liberty. Many of the most important individual rights have emerged from the synergy between equality and liberty. But the Court has not yet provided any framework for understanding the various ways that liberty and equality interrelate. Neither has any consensus developed around any scholarly attempt to understand the relationship between liberty and equality. Without any grand theory, the search for understanding this important relationship is thus left to induction, as scholars examine one case at a time to glean both specific …


The Gay Agenda, Libby Adler Dec 2008

The Gay Agenda, Libby Adler

Libby S. Adler

The Gay Agenda argues that the current gay rights agenda has been overly determined by the culture war and calls for a deliberate step outside of culture war discourse in order to see law reform possibilities that have largely been obscured. When anti-gay forces speak in terms of traditional family values, the paper observes, pro-gay rejoinders tend to come in the form of rights claims accompanied by rhetorical efforts to depict the gay family as morally indistinct from an idealized version of the heterosexual family (i.e., monogamous, bourgeois, and more about love than sex). These dual strategies of rights - …