Sexuality and the Law Commons^™

The Fearful Symmetry Of Gay Rights, Religious Freedom, And Racial Equality, Walter J. Walsh

Articles

A decade has now passed since Julia Cooper Mack authored her most controversial judicial opinion, Gay Rights Coalition of Georgetown University Law Center v. Georgetown University. That opinion provoked two acts of Congress aimed at its reversal, newspaper editorials from coast to coast, and over one hundred scholarly authors debating its wisdom. In this short essay, I shall suggest that this extended hermeneutic debate has yet to touch upon the deepest implications of Judge Mack's Georgetown opinion. While recent scholarship on this story praises Judge Mack's unusual ability to reconcile clashing interest groups, a more accurate account might be …

Legal Ordering Of Family Values: The Case Of Gay And Lesbian Families, Craig W. Christensen

Cardozo Law Review

In the ordinary course of events, an adoption proceeding in the New York County Surrogate's Court is an unlikely candidate for attention in the editorial pages of the New York Times. But In re the Adoption of a Child Whose First Name is Evan was not an everyday proceeding, as Times columnist Anna Quindlen observed.

Honesty, Privacy, And Shame: When Gay People Talk About Other Gay People To Nongay People, David L. Chambers, Steven K. Homer

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

There is a longstanding convention among lesbians and gay men in the United States: Do not reveal the sexuality of a gay person to a heterosexual person; unless you are certain that the gay person does not regard his sexuality as a secret. Lie if necessary to protect her secret. Violating the convention by "outing" another person is widely considered a serious social sin.

Homosexuals, Torts, And Dangerous Things, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

Negligent, intentional, and strict liability torts. From a canonical standpoint, whatever else one might teach, it is not a first-year torts course if these three concepts are not covered. Torts has a canon, even a Restatement. Yet a canon evolves only after some criteria of value has been established such that privileged texts can be identified according to some authoritative standard. In other words, a canon is the result of a process by which a rule of recognition identifies authoritative texts.

At what point can we say that torts became a field and an intact legal subject, the canon …

Juno Moneta: On The Erotics Of The Marketplace, Jeanne L. Schroeder

Articles

The article explores how property and the feminine, as legal fictions, facilitate the creation of subjectivity through the lens of Hegelian philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis. It critiques the liberal individual as an insufficient concept for subjectivity, arguing that subjectivity is constructed, not natural. The analysis examines how legal frameworks privilege masculine metaphors, such as possession, while repressing feminine ones, and posits that the pursuit of a perfect market represents a destructive ideal that undermines freedom and subjectivity.

Without Narrative: Child Sexual Abuse, Lynne N. Henderson

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Acts Of Power, Crimes Of Knowledge: Some Observations On Desire, Law And Ideology In The Politics Of Expression At The End Of The Twentieth Century, Francisco Valdes

Articles

No abstract provided.

Free Speech At Work: Verbal Harassment As Discriminatory (Mis)Treatment, Deborah Epstein

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In his reply to my article on workplace harassment law and freedom of speech, Professor Volokh does not respond to my most important critiques of his earlier work. For example, he fails to grapple with the true complexity of the problem by focusing exclusively on one side of this conflict of rights-the burden that the law imposes on workplace expression. Equal attention must be paid to the other side: the harm inflicted by discriminatory speech on employees of a single gender. As I describe in detail in my original piece, these harms may include: an adverse effect on the quantity …

Introduction, Paul F. Campos

Publications

No abstract provided.

Foreward (Symposium: Critical Perspectives On Megan’S Law: Protection Vs. Privacy), Nadine Strossen

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

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 …

Polygamy And Same-Sex Marriage, David L. Chambers

Articles

In the American federal system, state governments bear the responsibility for enacting the laws that define the persons who are permitted to marry. The federal government, throughout our history, has accepted these definitions and built upon them, fixing legal consequences for those who validly marry under state law. Only twice in American history has Congress intervened to reject the determinations that states might make about who can marry. The first occasion was in the late nineteenth century when Congress enacted a series of statutes aimed at the Mormon Church, prohibiting polygamy in the Western territories and punishing the Church and …

Marriage Today: Legal Consequences For Same Sex And Opposite Sex Couples, David L. Chambers

Articles

Laws that treat married persons in a different manner than they treat single persons permeate nearly every field of social regulation in this country -- taxation, otrts, evidence, social welfare, inheritance, adoption, and on and on.

The Good Of Marriage And The Morality Of Sexual Relations: Some Philosophical And Historical Observations, John M. Finnis

Journal Articles

This article examines the morality of sexual relations, referencing the views of many other scholars on the subject including Acquinas, Grisez, Noonan, and Koppelman.