Law Commons^™

On Making Anti-Essentialist And Social Constructionist Arguments In Courts, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

One of my most intense disagreements with another lawyer during nearly a decade of lesbian and gay rights litigation concerned social constructionism. The lawyer (a law professor, if truth be told) wanted to argue in an amicus brief to the United States Supreme Court that sexual orientation, like race, was a social constructed category. He reasoned that since the Court had condemned race discrimination even while recognizing the "socio-political, rather than biological" nature of race, it would similarly be willing to invalidate a measure discriminating against lesbians, gay men and bisexuals, even while recognizing the socially constructed nature of sexual …

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 …