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Series

Cleveland State University

Civil Rights and Discrimination

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Homosexuality

Publication Year

Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in Law

Gay And Lesbian Applicants To The Bar: Even Lord Devlin Could Not Defend Exclusion, Joel J. Finer Jan 2001

Gay And Lesbian Applicants To The Bar: Even Lord Devlin Could Not Defend Exclusion, Joel J. Finer

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

In 1957, the publication of a report to Parliament, the Wolfenden Report, which recommended the repeal of laws criminalizing private homosexual conduct between consenting adults, sparked an intensely debated controversy in political philosophy and jurisprudence. The issue: is society justified in criminalizing behavior which, although causing no secular harm, transgresses widely held moral values? The principal proponent of morals legislation was Lord Patrick Devlin, who responded to the Wolfenden recommendation with a paper disputing the report's premises--that criminal law had no proper business punishing private immorality.Oxford Professor of Jurisprudence H.L.A. Hart, a philosophical successor to the libertarianism of John Stuart …


Brief Against Homophobia At The Bar: To Law School Dean-Mid 1960s, Joel J. Finer Jan 2000

Brief Against Homophobia At The Bar: To Law School Dean-Mid 1960s, Joel J. Finer

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

In the mid-1960s, the author addressed the following "brief" to the Dean of a major law school on behalf of a law student, successfully urging that the Dean not report the student's homosexual activities to the state Bar committee which screened applicants for "good moral character." My own view, to be presently elaborated, is that to deprive a law student of the well-earned fruits of his labor on the basis of psychiatric findings that he might, at some future time commit a homosexual act that might become public and might merely embarrass a client, employer or associate, would manifest gross …


The Prevalence Of Social Science In Gay Rights Cases: The Synergistic Influences Of Historical Context, Justificatory Citation, And Dissemination Efforts, Patricia J. Falk Jan 1994

The Prevalence Of Social Science In Gay Rights Cases: The Synergistic Influences Of Historical Context, Justificatory Citation, And Dissemination Efforts, Patricia J. Falk

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Disjunctive legal change is often accompanied by a period of frantic activity as the competing forces of stasis and evolution vie for domination. Nowhere is the battle for legal change likely to be more sharply joined than when the findings of modern science, in their varied and multifarious forms, are pitted directly against prevailing moral or societal precepts. One of the latest incarnations of this trend is the battle over the legal recognition of gay "rights." In recent history, the courts have been inundated by gay litigants seeking the rights and protections already afforded other discrete groups within society. In …