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Full-Text Articles in Law

Finding Gold In The Rainbow Rights Movement, Shayna S. Cook May 2001

Finding Gold In The Rainbow Rights Movement, Shayna S. Cook

Michigan Law Review

In her history of the past fifty years of the gay and lesbian civil rights movement, Patricia Cain recounts the litigation successes and failures that contributed to the legal status of gays and lesbians in the Untied States today. Clearly an insider who has marched with the movement every step of the way, Cain provides a comprehensive account of all fronts of the battle in state and federal courts since 1950. But while Rainbow Rights serves as a good primer on the legal challenges and the key themes uniting them, the book reads like an account of a struggle ending …


Science Gone Astray: Evolution And Rape, Elisabeth A. Lloyd May 2001

Science Gone Astray: Evolution And Rape, Elisabeth A. Lloyd

Michigan Law Review

Throughout A Natural History of Rape, coauthors Randy Thomhill and Craig Palmer resort to what is known among philosophers of science as "The Galileo Defense," which amounts to the following claim: I am telling the Truth and doing excellent science, but because of ideology and ignorance, I am being persecuted. The authors have repeated and elaborated upon this defense during the si:lable media flurry accompanying the book's publication in February 2000. Now, history has accepted this defense from Galileo. But in order for it to work for Thornhill and Palmer, of course, they must be telling the Truth and doing …


Sexual Orientation And International Law: A Study In The Manufacture Of Cross-Cultural "Sensitivity", Eric Heinze Jan 2001

Sexual Orientation And International Law: A Study In The Manufacture Of Cross-Cultural "Sensitivity", Eric Heinze

Michigan Journal of International Law

Interest groups advocating rights of sexual minorities have been lobbying international organizations for years without success. A standard explanation for that failure is that human sexuality is something complex, even mysterious, which requires that international organizations proceed with special caution. In this essay, it will be argued that such an explanation amounts to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sexual orientation is neither more nor less complex than many other issues, such as race, ethnicity, religion or gender, which have nevertheless found wide recognition within leading intergovernmental organizations. It is not because sexual orientation is uniquely complex or mysterious that it is barred …


Brief For The Plaintiff-Appellant Lucas Rosa In The United States Court Of Appeals For The First Circuit Lucas Rosa V. Park West Bank And Trust Company On Appeal From The United States District Court For The District Of Massachusetts, Jennifer L. Levi, Mary L. Bonauto Jan 2001

Brief For The Plaintiff-Appellant Lucas Rosa In The United States Court Of Appeals For The First Circuit Lucas Rosa V. Park West Bank And Trust Company On Appeal From The United States District Court For The District Of Massachusetts, Jennifer L. Levi, Mary L. Bonauto

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

The District Court fundamentally misconceived the law as applicable to the Plaintiffs claim by concluding that there may be no relationship, as a matter of law, between telling a bank customer what to wear and sex discrimination. It also misapplied Rule 12(b)(6) to the extent that it resolved any factual questions beyond the allegations of the Complaint regarding the basis of the Bank's different treatment of the Plaintiff. Finally, because the District Court incorrectly dismissed the single federal claim in Plaintiffs Complaint, it improperly dismissed Plaintiffs pendant state claims for want of federal court jurisdiction.


Amicus Curiae Brief Of Now Legal Defense And Education Fund And Equal Rights Advocates In Support Of Plaintiff-Appellant And In Support Of Reversal In The United States Court Of Appeals For The First Curcuit Lucas Rosa V. Park West Bank And Trust Company On Appeal From The United States District Court For The District Of Massachusetts, Katherine M. Franke Jan 2001

Amicus Curiae Brief Of Now Legal Defense And Education Fund And Equal Rights Advocates In Support Of Plaintiff-Appellant And In Support Of Reversal In The United States Court Of Appeals For The First Curcuit Lucas Rosa V. Park West Bank And Trust Company On Appeal From The United States District Court For The District Of Massachusetts, Katherine M. Franke

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

By dismissing the plaintiffs complaint under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act ("ECOA") on the ground that "the issue in this case is not [Rosa's] sex, but rather how he chose to dress when applying for a loan" (Bench Order at 1), the lower court erroneously established that there are no set of facts in which clothing-based sex stereotyping can form the basis of a legitimate claim of sex discrimination in access to credit. This view of the meaning and scope of the ECOA runs contrary to well-established Supreme Court precedent which prohibits, inter alia, the adverse treatment of a …


Lucas Rosa V. Park West Bank And Trust Company, Katherine M. Franke Jan 2001

Lucas Rosa V. Park West Bank And Trust Company, Katherine M. Franke

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

In July of 1998 something rather mundane happened: Lucas Rosa walked into Park West Bank in Holyoke, Massachusetts and asked for a loan application. Since it was a warm summer day, and because she wanted to look credit-worthy, Rosa wore a blousey top over stockings. Suddenly, the mundane transformed into the exceptional: When asked for some identification, Rosa was told that no application would be forthcoming until and unless she went home, changed her clothes and returned attired in more traditionally masculine/male clothing. Rosa, a biological male who identifies herself as female was, it seems, denied a loan application on …


Epilogue, Jennifer L. Levi Jan 2001

Epilogue, Jennifer L. Levi

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

The First Circuit reversed the district court's order dismissing Lucas Rosa's claim against Park West Bank. The appeals court's reversal seems to be part of an emerging nationwide rejection of cases from the 1970s and 1980s in which courts summarily dismissed sex discrimination claims brought by transgender plaintiffs, no matter how squarely the facts appeared to present a clear-cut case of discrimination based on sex. Creating what appeared to be a "transgender" exception to sex discrimination law, those earlier courts ignored what the First Circuit recognized here-that a bank officer who tells an applicant to go home, change, and return …


Law, Self-Pollution, And The Management Of Social Anxiety, Geoffrey P. Miller Jan 2001

Law, Self-Pollution, And The Management Of Social Anxiety, Geoffrey P. Miller

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This article considers the anxieties about masturbation and spermatorrhoea from the standpoint of cultural-legal analysis. Seen from this perspective, the worries about masturbation provided an object onto which social anxieties could be displaced and thereby managed. Norm entrepreneurs who played on public fears manipulated basic cultural polarities in order to present masturbation and spermatorrhoea as objects of horror and disgust-things that needed to be expelled, if possible, from the body social.


Identity Crisis: "Intersectionality," "Multidimensionality," And The Development Of An Adequate Theory Of Subordination, Darren Lenard Hutchinson Jan 2001

Identity Crisis: "Intersectionality," "Multidimensionality," And The Development Of An Adequate Theory Of Subordination, Darren Lenard Hutchinson

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Article arises out of the intersectionality and post-intersectionality literature and makes a case against the essentialist considerations that informed the Human Rights Campaign's endorsement of United States Senator Alfonse D'Amato. Part I discusses the pitfalls that occur when scholars and activists engage in essentialist politics and treat identities and forms of subordination as conflicting forces. Part II examines how essentialism negatively affects legal theory in the equality context. Part III considers the historical motivation for and the efficacy of the "intersectionality" response to the problem of essentialism. Part III also extensively analyzes the "multidimensional" critiques of essentialism offered by …


For The Best Of Friends And For Lovers Of All Sorts, A Status Other Than Marriage (Symposium: Unmarried Partners And The Legacy Of Marvin V. Marvin)" , David L. Chambers Jan 2001

For The Best Of Friends And For Lovers Of All Sorts, A Status Other Than Marriage (Symposium: Unmarried Partners And The Legacy Of Marvin V. Marvin)" , David L. Chambers

Articles

American governments have recently begun to experiment with new familial statuses for gay male and lesbian couples, who have demanded the right to marry but have been appeased with more modest forms of recognition.4 What I propose here is quite different. It is a status for people who have close bonds but do not want to be married to each other. I call this status "designated friends." Once registered, "designated friends" would obtain a limited number of privileges and undertake a limited number of responsibilities relating to the care for the other when ill or incapacitated or upon death, but …