Law Commons^™

Currents In The Stream: The Evolving Legal Status Of Gay And Lesbian Persons In Kentucky, Matthew M. Morrison

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Romer, Hurley, And Dale: How The Supreme Court Languishes With "Special Rights", Christopher S. Hargis

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

“Gay Rights” For “Gay Whites”?: Race, Sexual Identity, And Equal Protection Discourse, Darren Lenard Hutchinson

UF Law Faculty Publications

While the resolution of the problem of gay and lesbian inequality will ultimately turn on a host of social, legal, political, and ideological variables, this Article argues that the success or failure of efforts to achieve legal equality for gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered individuals will depend in large part on how scholars and activists in this field address questions of racial identity and racial subjugation. Commonly, these scholars and activists currently discuss race by use of analogies between “racial discrimination” and “sexual orientation discrimination,” or between “people of color” and “gays and lesbians.” On one level, the “comparative approach” …

A Review Essay: Limits Of Gaylaw, Dale Carpenter

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Part of Professor William Eskridge's mission in Gaylaw (Gaylaw: Challenging the Apartheid of the Closet by William N. Eskridge, Jr., Harvard University Press, 1999) is to describe the historical development of the complex legal and, to some extent the cultural, landscape for gays. (pp. 17-137) Though not much of Eskridge's presentation of the history of American law's treatment of gays draws from original research, its synthesis of the available secondary sources is a useful contribution and will likely become a staple of classes treating the subject.

The larger part of Gaylaw is the book's greatest challenge and the place where …

Second-Parent Adoption, Patricia J. Falk

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

The topic of this article is second-parent adoption. I hope to accomplish four things in my discussion. First, I will define second-parent adoption and give some reasons that it is desirable for both parents and children. Second, I will summarize the state of the law in terms of legislative enactments and case law in the United States. Third, I will discuss the role of social science in second-parent adoption cases. Finally, I will discuss some of the implications of recognizing second-parent adoptions.

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, …

Personal Harms And Political Inequities, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

When we think back to where the legal battle for gender equality and the rights of gay people stood a century ago, we see that, in fact, there was not much of a battle. Indeed, advocates for change were seldom triumphant. A survey in 1900 would have shown that American women were twenty years away from obtaining the right to vote, were unfit to be lawyers according to the U.S. Supreme Court, and were nowhere near being eligible-let alone required-to serve on juries. The survey would also have revealed a wide-ranging web of federal and state laws and policies that …

Domestic Partnership Benefits: Why Not Offer Them To Same-Sex Partners And Unmarried Opposite Sex Partners, Debbie Zielinski

Journal of Law and Health

Employers offering these benefits to same-sex domestic partners only, may face legal challenges such as marital status and sexual orientation discrimination or equal protection arguments from their unmarried heterosexual employees. In addition, states and municipalities have been increasing the potential of such litigation by passing laws that prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and marital status especially in the areas of housing and employment. This Note examines the potential of such legal challenges when employers use the narrow definition in structuring their domestic partner benefit programs. In addition, avoiding challenges by simply not offering benefits will be discussed. However, before …

Book Review, Reviewing Robert Wintemute, Sexual Orientation And Human Rights: The United States Constitution, The European Convention, And The Canadian Charter (1995), John Culhane

John G. Culhane

No abstract provided.

Nothing And Everything: Race, Romer, And (Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual) Rights, Robert S. Chang, Jerome Mccristal Culp Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

In this Article, Professors Chang and Culp propose that the Supreme Court's decision in Romer v. Evans, viewed by some scholars as a progressive case about gay/lesbian/bisexual rights, has little to do with gay/lesbian/bisexual rights as such. They argue that whatever protection Romer provides to gays, lesbians, and bisexuals is provided not because of their sexuality but, rather, despite it. The authors demonstrate their thesis by examining the racial underpinnings of the Court's opinion, which begins with Justice Harlan's famous dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson and which relies on a specific vision of color-blindness. This submerged racial jurisprudence provides the …

Playing Defense, Robert F. Nagel

Publications

Noting that the Romer opinion condemns the motives behind Amendment 2 without pausing even briefly to examine the social context in which it was enacted, Professor Nagel describes the decision as a model of the intolerant impulse in action. He traces this impulse to the Justices' unwillingness to examine their own role--and that of the rest of the constitutional law establishment--in creating the underlying conditions that produced Amendment 2.

In order to identify those conditions, Professor Nagel analyzes the primary document used by Colorado for Family Values during its campaign on behalf of the initiative. He argues that this document …

Introduction, Paul F. Campos

Publications

No abstract provided.

Bowers V. Hardwick: Diverging Interpretations, Warren D. Leishman

Brigham Young University Prelaw Review

Rarely does the serving of a simple misdemeanor warrant result in a case tried before the highest court in the land, but this is what happened to Michael Hardwick in August, 1982. Police officers arriving at his house were let in by a houseguest who led the policemen to the bedroom. At this point they stumbled upon Hardwick engaged in a sexual act with another man, an act which, under Georgia Code 16-6-2, constituted sodomy and was thus punishable "by imprisonment for not less than one nor more than twenty years." Michael Hardwick was arrested and charged, the first such …

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 …

Equal Protection: In Re Cooper

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

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 …

Outing In The Time Of Aids: Legal And Ethical Considerations, John F. Hernandez

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Name-Calling And The Clear Error Rule, Robert F. Nagel

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Question Of Family: Lesbians And Gay Men Reflecting A Redefined Society, Libby Post

Fordham Urban Law Journal

The cutting edge issue in the gay community is now the fight for domestic partnership rights. The absence of domestic partnership rights have resulted in the unequal treatment of an entire class of citizens, with gays and lesbians routinely denied jobs, housing, economic benefits such as health care, insurance, public accommodations, and may even result in these individuals being fired or facing eviction solely because of their sexual orientation. The author argues that to rectify these injustices, we must redefine the definition of family to be more in line with that used in New York's Braschi v. Stahl Assocs. Co., …

The Rights Of Gay Prisoners: A Challenge To Protective Custody, Joan W. Howarth

Scholarly Works

This Note focuses on the specific issues raised by the traditional method of dealing with homosexuals in prison: isolation from the general prison population. This traditional segregation often results in almost twenty-four hour-a-day confinement to a cell, which severely limits access to programs and opportunities normally enjoyed by prisoners.

This Note first discusses the history and current practice of segregation of gay prisoners' as well as the broader subject of protective custody, and then outlines the judicial response to the problems of protective custody prisoners generally and gay prisoners specifically. It then critiques the judicial confusion and resulting reluctance to …