Sexuality and the Law Commons^™

Recently Arrested Adolescents Are At High Risk For Sexually Transmitted Diseases, Steven Belenko, Richard Dembo, Doris Weiland, Matthew Rollie, Christopher Salvatore, Alexandra Hanlon, Kristina Childs

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Adolescent offenders may be at high risk for sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). With previous research and interventions focused on incarcerated adolescents, data are needed on STD prevalence and risk factors among newly arrested youth released to the community, a far larger subgroup.Participants were recruited from all arrested youth processed at the Hillsborough County, Florida Juvenile Assessment Center during the last half of 2006 (506 males, 442 females). Participants voluntarily providing urine samples for drug testing as part of standard protocol were also consented to having their specimens split and tested for chlamydia and gonorrhea, using an FDA-approved nucleic acid amplification …

A Woman’S Right To Be Spanked: Testing The Limits Of Tolerance Of S/M In The Socio-Legal Imaginary, Ummni Khan

Studio for Law and Culture

What conditions must be in place for s/m sexuality to be tolerated in law and culture? In this article, I consider the film Secretary as a lens to explore the imaginative limits of our socio-legal culture regarding sadomasochism. In Part One, I compare Secretary to the film 9 ½ weeks. I deconstruct the narrative and aesthetic components of the two films that uphold their contrasting normative visions, arguing that Secretary did indeed chart new ground for the sadomasochist sexual subject. Yet, a close discursive analysis reveals that the narrative relied upon other hegemonies to make the s/m couple acceptable and …

An Open Letter To The Political Science Community, Daniel R. Pinello

Human Rights & Human Welfare

In 2003, the American Political Science Association (APSA) selected New Orleans as the site for its 2012 annual meeting.

In 2004, 78 percent of Louisiana voters (including 54 percent in Orleans Parish) passed the following amendment to their state constitution:

Marriage in the state of Louisiana shall consist only of the union of one man and one woman. No official or court of the state of Louisiana shall construe this constitution or any state law to require that marriage or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon any member of a union other than the union of one man and …

Discrimination And Inclusivity: Why Apsa Should Not Meet In New Orleans, Martha Ackelsberg, Mary Lyndon Shanley

Human Rights & Human Welfare

The American Political Science Association (APSA) should move the site of its 2012 Annual Meeting from New Orleans for two reasons: first, because the legal recognition and protection of same-sex unions is an issue of human rights and equal citizenship, and second to fulfill its own long-stated commitment not to go to localities with policies that discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. As a professional organization, it has a responsibility to ensure that every member of the association enjoys the full benefits of membership and an inclusive environment at meetings

Three Liberal - But Mistaken - Arguments For Same-Sex Marriage, Gerard V. Bradley

Journal Articles

From the Introduction

The constitutional argument for legally recognizing same-sex relationships as "marriages" is a straightforward non-discrimination claim: because there is no relevant difference between the capacity of same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples for marriage, restrictive laws arbitrarily withhold the recognition and benefits which legal marriage entails. If the statutory category - in this case, a couple's sex - does not contribute to the realization of any legitimate state goal, the law lacks a basis in reason. And, it is unconstitutional. As the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court concluded in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, the state "failed to …

Cultural Rage: A Severe Threat To Gay Men, Rhoda Howard-Hassmann

Human Rights & Human Welfare

Men who have sex with men have become a world cultural flashpoint. Fomenting and exploiting cultural rage at the West is a useful way for Islamists to gain electoral and other types of support, even though the motives of the Islamists may have more to do with the drive for power, regional influence, or economic benefit.

The Politics Of Teen Women’S Sexuality: Public Policy And The Adolescent Female Body, Michelle Fine, Sara I. Mcclelland

Publications and Research

Teen women's sexual and reproductive lives are shaped by laws and public policies that expand or constrict their educational and health supports. Most adolescents depend substantially on the public sector to help support their healthy sexual development and to protect them from sexual violence, disease, and pregnancy. Thus, it is critical to examine the ways in which public policies concerning young women's sexualities have been forged within religious and "moralizing" discourses. The explicit pairing of law and religious ideology has transformed the role of law and public policy in young women's lives from a supportive function to one that censures …

Colonial Constructs And Legally Sanctioned Sexually Violent Consequences In R V. Edmondson, Nicholas Bonokoski

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

What kind of a system or process would portray a twelve-year-old girl from the Yellow Quill First Nation as a sexual threat to three twenty-something white men, who promising her a ride home, picked her up and got her drunk? The answer: The Canadian legal system. In R v Edmondson a twelve-year old Aboriginal girl, who was sexually assaulted by Dean Edmondson, Jeffrey Brown, and Jeffrey Kindrat from Tisdale Saskatchewan, was portrayed by the judge as a "sexual aggressor". This paper focuses on the trial of Dean Edmondson in which, according to Judge Kovatch, the girls "sexual aggression" led to …

Transnational And Intimate Crossings: The 'Threatening Body' Of The 'Migrant Sex-Worker', Melissa Autumn White

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This paper introduces the rubric of the "migrant sex-working body" in order to theorize the affective and geopolitical valences of power 'threatened' by such bodies. The everyday and affective labours of migrant sex-workers whose bodies have been positioned as a 'threat' to the imagined community of the nation and to Hetero Factory's (Rossi 2003) family are fetishized in a Marxian sense in order to make an exploration of the collusion of transnational "structures of feeling" and border security regimes possible. In other words, the focus of the paper is not on or about the "migrant sex-working body", but rather on …

Protecting Parent-Child Relationships: Determining Parental Rights Of Same-Sex Parents Consistently Despite Varying Recognition Of Their Relationship, Linda S. Anderson

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

[Excerpt] “The family and parental relationship appears secure as long as the members of the family stay within the borders of the states that recognize their relationship. What happens, though, when the family ventures beyond the borders of Vermont, Massachusetts, California, and Connecticut, has yet to be determined. Legislation in almost every other state has addressed whether each state will recognize the couples’ relationship,27 but no state has determined how it will treat the legal relationship between the children of these couples and their parents.28 This article will focus on the fragile legal relationship between same-sex parents and their children …

Religious Groups And The Gay Rights Movement: Recognizing Common Ground, J. Brady Brammer

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Complete Property Right Amendment, John H. Ryskamp

ExpressO

The trend of the eminent domain reform and "Kelo plus" initiatives is toward a comprehensive Constitutional property right incorporating the elements of level of review, nature of government action, and extent of compensation. This article contains a draft amendment which reflects these concerns.

Letter From The Executive Director, Paisley Currah

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

Heterosexuality is under attack--not by the authors of a new "I hate straights" broadsheet, not by vacationers in Provincetown, but by state judges in the US. In August, New York's highest court ruled that the New York State Constitution "does not compel recognition of marriages between members of the same-sex." Their reasoning? In part, the decision declared, because opposite-sex relationships are "often too casual," and thus result in the production of children by "accident or impulse." And so, "unstable relationships between people of the opposite sex present a greater danger that children will be born into or grow up in …

Taking The Stand: The Lessons Of The Three Men Who Took The Japanese American Internment To Court, Lorraine K. Bannai

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Breaking The Bank: Revisiting Central Bank Of Denver After Enron And Sarbanes-Oxley, Celia Taylor

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

Gay Is Good: The Moral Case For Marriage Equality And More, Chai R. Feldblum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The struggle for marriage equality in this country is ripe for an intervention. If the effort continues along in the manner in which it has been headed, gay couples may or may not succeed in gaining access to civil marriage. But even if gay couples succeed in "getting marriage," the gay rights movement may have missed a critical opportunity-a chance to make a positive moral case for gay sex and gay couples. In other words, it will have missed the opportunity to argue that "gay is good."

Moreover, to the extent that the struggle for marriage equality focuses solely on …

Love, Change, Mari J. Matsuda

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This is morality: to include all as human and entitled to the deepest love and care. This is the distillation of everything the author fights for as a feminist, a critical race theorist, and a peace activist. Since we are at war, having sent to date 1,500 U.S. soldiers off to die, speaking against war and for peace is a current imperative. Then comes this invitation to speak as a critical race theorist on the subject of same-sex marriage.

Without marriage you can do everything that counts in marriage except that which requires the imprint of the state. What you …

Clags Launches Disability/Queerness Programming, Sarah Chinn

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

CLAGS kicked off our initial year of Disability and Queerness: Centering the Outsider programming on September 22nd with an evening celebrating the release of Desiring Disability, a special issue of GLQ on disability and Disability Studies, and Haworth Press's forthcoming Queer Crips, a collection of essays and stories by disabled gay men.

Queering Legal Education: A Project Of Theoretical Discovery, Kim Brooks, Debra Parkes

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The article has two parts. Part II discusses the materials we reviewed to inform the development of a queer legal pedagogy. In particular, it examines the categories of queer legal scholarship and highlights the contributions of other outsider scholars to legal education debates. Early in our research, we found limited material on queer legal pedagogy, and we discovered nothing that posited a theoretical approach. We did, however, find rich resources written by other outsiders to law from which some design principles for queer legal pedagogy might be drawn. We should note at the outset that our goal in this Part …

The Political Psychology Of Cybersexuality: The Example Of Child Pornography, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This article analyzes rationales behind legislation banning certain aspects of cybersexuality.

Nietzschean Critique And Philosophical Hermeneutics, Francis J. Mootz Iii

Scholarly Works

This article appears as part of a Symposium on "Nietzsche and Legal Theory" published by the Cardozo Law Review. It addresses connections between philosophical hermeneutics and Nietzschean critique, and the relevance that these connections might have for legal theory.

Legal practice inevitably is hermeneutical, with lawyers and judges interpreting governing legal texts and the social situations in which they must be applied. Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics describes this practice well, but he treats the question of the possibility of a critical hermeneutics in an ambiguous and under-developed manner. Consequently, Gadamer is frequently (and unfairly) accused of conventionalism and quietism. At …

Anna Marie Smith On Welfare Reform And Sexual Regulation, Richard Blum

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

"Why is 'welfare reform' a queer issue?" That question was posed to a gathering of New York-based social services and LGBTQ advocates a couple of years ago at a meeting that launched the Queer Economic Justice Network (QEJN). Since then, QEJN has reached out to mainstream LGBTQ organizations to help them recognize the myriad ways that "welfare reform" has harmed poor queers.

The Complex Uses Of Sexual Orientation In Criminal Court, Abbe Smith

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Times may or may not be changing for gay people in the criminal justice system--and for the import of sexual orientation in criminal law. It depends on the nature of the case and, more importantly, exactly whose sexual orientation we are talking about.

Signs of positive change include the recent high profile Matthew Shepard and Diane Whipple cases, in which gay and lesbian homicide victims were mourned not only by the gay community, but also by the entire country. It was no doubt helpful that both Shepard and Whipple presented very appealing images of gay people: each was young, attractive, …

Celibacy, Sexual Exclusivity, And Illicit Drug Abstinence: Giving Up The Life As Taboo In Aids Prevention, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This article highlights social cognitions that seem to impede cost-effective approaches to AIDS prevention.

Why Do They Strike Us?, James Polchin

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

Over the past two years since the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie Wyoming, the circumstances of his death have held a symbolic place in the story of violence against gay men and lesbians nationally. University of Wyoming Professor Beth Loffreda's book Losing Matt Shepard: Life and Politics in the Aftermath of Anti-Gay Murder is on the "Lambda Book Report" best-sellers list and MTV has recently premiered "Anatomy of a Hate Crime: The Matthew Shepard Story" that dramatized the events of October 6th, 1998. The telling and retelling of Shepard's murder in both academic books and popular culture suggests …

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

Faculty Articles

This Article arises out of the intersectionality and post-intersectionality literature and makes a case against the essentialist considerations that informed HRC's endorsement of 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 the most recent school of thought in …

Trends. Homosexual Politics And Security: The American Psychological Association (Apa) Brief Of Amicus Curiae No. 99-699, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This article discusses the American Psychological Association's (APA's) brief of amicus curiae, which the APA submitted in order to provide a context for the Supreme Court of the United States to review the policy of the Boy Scouts of America and Monmouth Council, Boy Scouts of America, which involved the Boy Scouts, homosexuality, and claims about discrimination against homosexuals.

United States Government Policies On Lesbians And Gays In The Military: Don't Ask, Don't Tell If Many Wrongs Make A Right, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This article describes problems with United States Government (USG) personnel policies on lesbians and gays in the uniformed services and assesses whether there are significant redeeming features of these problems.

Michael Warner's "The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, And The Ethics Of Queer Life": Implications For Sex And Security, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This article continues a series of IBPP articles on sex and security by exploring the implications of a new book on the appropriateness of public policy that bears on sexuality.

Sexual Policy And The Military: A Need For A Primer On The Birds And The Bees, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This article describes some basic misconceptions about sex as explicated in the personnel and security policies of the United States Department of Defense (DOD).