Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 3 of 3
Full-Text Articles in Law
Civil Rights Reform And The Body, Tobias Barrington Wolff
Civil Rights Reform And The Body, Tobias Barrington Wolff
All Faculty Scholarship
Discrimination on the basis of gender identity or expression has emerged as a major focus of civil rights reform. Opponents of these reforms have structured their opposition around one dominant image: the bathroom. With striking consistency, opponents have invoked anxiety over the bathroom -- who uses bathrooms, what happens in bathrooms, and what traumas one might experience while occupying a bathroom -- as the reason to permit discrimination in the workplace, housing, and places of public accommodation. This rhetoric of the bathroom in the debate over gender-identity protections seeks to exploit an underlying anxiety that has played a role in …
Collegiality And Individual Dignity, Tobias Barrington Wolff
Collegiality And Individual Dignity, Tobias Barrington Wolff
All Faculty Scholarship
This Essay identifies and describes the tension between the norms of collegiality and basic principles of individual dignity that LGBT scholars and lawyers encounter when confronted with the dehumanizing arguments that are regularly advanced by opponents of equal treatment under law for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. It is a transcript of remarks delivered at a March 2012 symposium on the Defense of Marriage Act at Fordham Law School, with minimal edits for publication.
Privacy Torts: Unreliable Remedies For Lgbt Plaintiffs, Anita L. Allen
Privacy Torts: Unreliable Remedies For Lgbt Plaintiffs, Anita L. Allen
All Faculty Scholarship
In the United States, both constitutional law and tort law recognize the right to privacy, understood as legal entitlement to an intimate life of one’s own free from undue interference by others and the state. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (“LGBT”) persons have defended their interests in dignity, equality, autonomy, and intimate relationships in the courts by appealing to that right. In the constitutional arena, LGBT Americans have claimed the protection of state and federal privacy rights with a modicum of well-known success. Holding that homosexuals have the same right to sexual privacy as heterosexuals, Lawrence v. Texas symbolizes the …