Law Commons^™

Court Rejects Web Designer’S Challenge To Colorado Anti-Discrimination Law, Arthur S. Leonard

Other Publications

No abstract provided.

Amen Over All Men: The Supreme Court’S Preservation Of Religious Rights And What That Means For Fulton V. City Of Philadelphia, Christopher Manettas

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

No abstract provided.

Brief Of Amici Curiae Legal Scholars In Support Of Equality In Support Of Respondents, Fulton V. City Of Philadelpha, Kyle Velte, David Cruz, Michael Higdon, Anthony Michael Kreis, Shirley Lin, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

This Brief of Amici Curiae Legal Scholars in Support of Equality in Support of Respondents filed in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia addresses the propriety of an analogy to race discrimination in public accommodation cases involving sexual orientation discrimination. The race analogy in sexual orientation cases proceeds as follows: Advocates and judges widely agree that courts should, and would, reject a religious exemption claim by a public accommodation—such a foster care agency—seeking to turn away an African-American or interracial couple based on the public accommodation’s religious beliefs that Blacks are inferior to whites or that the races should not mix. …

Privacy's Double Standards, Scott Skinner-Thompson

Publications

Where the right to privacy exists, it should be available to all people. If not universally available, then privacy rights should be particularly accessible to marginalized individuals who are subject to greater surveillance and are less able to absorb the social costs of privacy violations. But in practice, there is evidence that people of privilege tend to fare better when they bring privacy tort claims than do non-privileged individuals. This disparity occurs despite doctrine suggesting that those who occupy prominent and public social positions are entitled to diminished privacy tort protections.

This Article unearths disparate outcomes in public disclosure tort …

State & Federal Religious Accommodation Bills: Overview Of The 2015-2016 Legislative Session, Public Rights/Private Conscience Project

Center for Gender & Sexuality Law

Since the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which held that laws limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples were unconstitutional, opponents of marriage equality and LGBT rights have largely turned their attention to the enactment of religious exemption laws. These exemptions allow individuals and organizations to violate certain federal, state, and local laws and regulations that conflict with their religious faith. While some proposed bills are state-level variations on the extremely broad and general federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), passed in 1993, a new variety of legislation provides narrower accommodations specifically relating to religious views about sex, …

First Amendment; Freedom Of Speech; Obscenity; Pinkus V. United States, Cary Douglass Caesa

Akron Law Review

“In its latest attempt to define a workable standard for obscenity rulings, the United States Supreme Court has held that children may not be included in a court's instruction as to the social group to whom the material would or would not be obscene. However, the Court held that sensitive persons and deviant groups may be included without unduly lowering the threshold of a finding of obscenity. Thus, Pinkus v. United States clarified the "community" whose judgment should define obscenity.”

Gay Talk: Protecting Free Speech For Public School Teachers, Stephen J. Elkind, Peter D. Kauffman

Stephen J Elkind

In Garcetti v. Ceballos, the Supreme Court held that public employees are not entitled to free speech when speaking “pursuant to their official duties.” In most situations, this strips teachers of First Amendment protection when they discuss controversial subjects, such as homosexuality, with their students. To ensure their classrooms are tolerant and accepting environments for homosexual and questioning youth, teachers need free speech protection against adverse employment action their schools might take. The Garcetti Court, acknowledging that “expression related to academic scholarship and classroom instruction implicates” unique constitutional concerns, explicitly left open whether its decision applied in the education …

Mirror, Mirror On The Wall, Who Are You To Say Who Is Fairest Of Them All?, Ashley R. Brown

Ashley R Brown

No abstract provided.

Sex Exceptionalism In Intellectual Property, Jennifer E. Rothman

All Faculty Scholarship

The state regulates sexual activity through a combination of criminal and civil sanctions and the award of benefits, such as marriage and First Amendment protections, for acts and speech that conform with the state’s vision of acceptable sex. Although the penalties for non-compliance with the state’s vision of appropriate sex are less severe in intellectual property law than those, for example, in criminal or family law, IP law also signals the state’s views of sex. In this Article written for the Stanford symposium on the Adult Entertainment industry, I extend my consideration of the law’s treatment of sex after Lawrence …

How Equality Constitutes Liberty: The Alignment Of Cls V. Martinez, Julie Nice

Julie A. Nice

Across the constitutional doctrines protecting individual liberty from governmental interference, judicial inquiry often focuses on the unequal infringement of liberty. Many of the most important individual rights have emerged from the synergy between equality and liberty. But the Court has not yet provided any framework for understanding the various ways that liberty and equality interrelate. Neither has any consensus developed around any scholarly attempt to understand the relationship between liberty and equality. Without any grand theory, the search for understanding this important relationship is thus left to induction, as scholars examine one case at a time to glean both specific …

Traditional Values, Or A New Tradition Of Prejudice? The Boy Scouts Of America Vs. The Unitarian Universalist Association Of Congregations, Eric Alan Isaacson

ExpressO

President William Howard Taft, a Unitarian leader whose liberal faith had been viciously attacked by religious conservatives in the 1908 presidential campaign, used the White House as a platform in 1911 to launch a new nonsectarian organization for youth: The Boy Scouts of America (“BSA”). Lately, however, the BSA itself has come under the control of religious conservatives – who in 1992 banned Taft’s denomination from the BSA’s Religious Relationships Committee, and in 1998 threw Taft’s denomination out of its Religious Emblems Program. The denomination’s offense: A tradition of teaching its children that institutionalized discrimination is wrong. Unitarian Universalist religious …

Political Representation And Accountability Under Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Tobias Barrington Wolff

All Faculty Scholarship

The U.S. military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy constitutes a singular type of speech regulation: an explicit prohibition on identity speech by a defined population of individuals that mandates a state of complete social invisibility in both military and civilian life. The impact of such a regulation upon the public speech values protected by the First Amendment should not be difficult to apprehend. And yet, as the tenth anniversary of the policy approaches, First Amendment scholars have largely ignored this seemingly irresistible subject of study, and the federal courts have refused to engage with the policy's implications for public speech …

The First Amendment's Petition Clause As An Alternative Basis For Challenging Voter Initiatives That Burden The Enactment Of Anti-Discrimination Protection For Gays, Lesbians, And Bisexuals, Kevin F. O'Neill

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

In the battle for gay, lesbian, and bisexual rights, most of the fighting has centered on two sources of constitutional protection: substantive due process and equal protection. Unfortunately, courts have been reluctant to find in either of those constitutional guarantees a broad source of protection for gays, lesbians, and bisexuals. The purpose of my remarks today is to suggest that the First Amendment—specifically, the Petition Clause of the First Amendment—provides an alternative basis for vindicating gay, lesbian, and bisexual rights in certain cases. At least in the context of voter initiatives that seek to abolish anti-discrimination protection for sexual orientation, …

Regulating Violent Pornography, Deana Pollard

Vanderbilt Law Review

In recent years the regulation of pornography has received much attention. Traditionally, conservatives have scorned pornography of all types on the basis that pornography is immoral. More recently, some feminists have attacked pornography from a civil rights perspective,claiming that pornography is the sexually explicit subordination of women that leads to discrimination against women in all aspects of life. Nonetheless, the first amendment currently protects all forms of pornography from regulation unless the material is deemed "obscene.

"Researchers, however, have shown that certain types of pornography, such as violent, sexually explicit materials, specifically harm women. The proven relationship between violent pornography …