Law Commons^™

Risky Arguments In Social-Justice Litigation: The Case Of Sex Discrimination And Marriage Equality, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay takes up the puzzle of the risky argument or, more precisely, the puzzle of why certain arguments do not get much traction in advocacy and adjudication even when some judges find them to be utterly convincing. Through a close examination of the sex discrimination argument's evanescence in contemporary marriage litigation, this Essay draws lessons about how and why arguments become risky in social-justice cases and whether they should be made nonetheless. The marriage context is particularly fruitful because some judges, advocates, and scholars find it "obviously correct" that laws excluding same-sex couples from marriage discriminate facially based on …

The Curious Relationship Of Marriage And Freedom, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

This essay explores why and how today’s marriage equality movement for same-sex couples might benefit from lessons learned by African Americans when they too were allowed to marry for the first time in the immediate post-Civil War era. Why has the right to marry, rather than say, employment rights, educational opportunity or political participation, emerged as the preeminent vehicle by and through which the freedom, equality and dignity of gay men and lesbians is being fought in the present moment. Why marriage? In what ways are the values, aspirations, and even identity of an oppressed community shaped when they are …

Dignifying Rights: A Comment On Jeremy Waldron’S Dignity, Rights, And Responsibilities, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

In Dignity, Rights, and Responsibilities1 Jeremy Waldron offers a characteristically thoughtful and elegant account of rights, or as he calls it, responsibility-rights. As Waldron rightfully acknowledges, rights understood as a form of responsibility are not meant to capture every species of rights, but to provide us with a new analytic resource for better understanding a particular subset of rights that curiously entail a form of responsibility on the part of the rights holder. The link between rights and responsibility, Waldron argues, is built upon a strong foundational commitment to human dignity. The most compelling contribution of Waldron's paper is his …

Public Sex, Same-Sex Marriage, And The Afterlife Of Homophobia, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

The summer of 2011 marked an important turning-point in the geography and politics of sex: public sex, previously a domain dominated by the specter of a hypersexualized gay man, became the province of the irresponsible, foolish, and self-destructive heterosexual man, such as Anthony Weiner. Meanwhile, homosexuals were busy domesticating their sexuality in the private domain of the family. Just as hetero-sex shamefully seeped out into the open, homo-sex disappeared from view into the dignified pickets of private kinship. In this essay I examine the panic that unfolded in connection with Representative Weiner’s tweets as a kind of afterlife of homophobia; …

Eve Sedgwick, Civil Rights, And Perversion, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

It is hard to imagine where queer theory would be without Eve Sedgwick. Indeed, I can't imagine where my own thinking would be had it not been informed, enriched, challenged, repulsed, and seduced by Sedgwick's writing. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire and The Epistemology of the Closet, the early work, gave me the tools to think about the fundamental landscapes of my intellectual world in ways that decoupled and reconfigured the binaries of male/ female, heterosexual/homosexual, friend/lover, and public/private. Sedgwick gave us the idea of homosociality and a critique of identity and identification that exploded the …

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 …

"You Are Entering A Gay And Lesbian Free Zone": On The Radical Dissents Of Justice Scalia And Other (Post-) Queers – [Raising Questions About Lawrence, Sex Wars, And The Criminal Law], Bernard Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

The most renowned substantive criminal law decision of the October 2002 Term, Lawrence v. Texas, will go down in history as a critical turning point in criminal law debates over the proper scope of the penal sanction. For the first time in the history of American criminal law, the United States Supreme Court has declared that a supermajoritarian moral belief does not necessarily provide a rational basis for criminalizing conventionally deviant conduct. The Court's ruling is the coup de grâce to legal moralism administered after a prolonged, brutish, tedious, and debilitating struggle against liberal legalism in its various criminal …

Parallel Lives: Women's Rights And Lesbian Rights Litigation, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

I love the title of this panel because it gave me a chance to think about the historical themes and emerging issues in law related to women's rights, which of course is a mere endless set of possibilities.

I spent much of the last decade doing lesbian and gay civil rights litigation, and the question that I will focus on today grows out of that work and is a comparative one or at least a relational one. The question is this: What is the relationship between women's rights litigation as it has evolved in the last thirty years and lesbian …

Gay Rights Through The Looking Glass: Politics, Morality, And The Trial Of Colorado's Amendment 2, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Courts have long struggled to resolve the question of how far a community may go in exercising its power to treat minority members differently. Popular prejudice, "community morality" and invidious stereotypes repeatedly have had their day in court as judges work to reconcile equal protection and privacy rights with their own attitudes about the place of people of color, women and gay people in society. In the early 1990s, the tension between the American ideal of equality and the reality of human diversity starkly emerged. A national wave of citizen-sponsored initiatives seeking to amend state constitutions and local charters to …