Sexuality and the Law Commons^™

Bostock, Backlash, And Beyond The Pale: Religious Retrenchment And The Future Of Lgbtq Antidiscrimination Advocacy In The Wake Of Title Vii Protection, Kyler J. Palmer

DePaul Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Madeira Serves As Legal Commentator In Netflix’S “Our Father”, James Owsley Boyd

Keep Up With the Latest News from the Law School (blog)

No abstract provided.

"Sexual Activity": What Qualifies Under 18 U.S.C. § 2422?, Max Doherty

Boston College Law Review

On May 13, 2021, in United States v. Dominguez, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit joined a pre-existing circuit split regarding the meaning of “sexual activity” under 18 U.S.C. § 2422 and whether that term requires physical contact between the defendant and the victim. The statute prohibits individuals from coercing or enticing others to participate in illegal sexual activity, including when the victim is a minor. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth and Seventh Circuits previously reached opposite interpretations of the phrase’s meaning. The court in Dominguez agreed with the Fourth ...

Is The End Of Roe V. Wade Near? Leaked Scotus Brief Says Yes, Nicole Huberfeld, Linda C. Mcclain

Shorter Faculty Works

Protesters on both sides of the abortion debate descended on the US Supreme Court Monday night and into Tuesday after a leaked secret draft of a US Supreme Court opinion indicated that a majority of justices support overturning Roe v. Wade, after almost 50 years of legalized abortion rights in America. If finalized, possibly as soon as this summer, the bombshell could trigger a cultural tsunami across American life, forcing some women to travel to another state for an abortion and putting the divisive issue at the heart of the fall midterm elections.

Identity Documents For Transgender Texans: A Proposal For A Uniform System For Correcting Gender Markers In Texas, Lydia R. Harris

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

Texas’s lack of a codified gender correction process is unjust, illegal, and against public policy. This comment highlights the injustice faced by transgender Texans without gender concordant identity documents. These injustices include discrimination based on gender stereotypes, violation of the transgender individual’s right to privacy, and violations of public policy. This comment explores possible solutions to the injustices faced by transgender Texans due to the lack of a codified uniform way to correct gender markers in Texas modeled on other jurisdictions’ approaches to this problem.

First, this comment traces the history of the recognition of transgender people and ...

Sexual Profiling & Blaqueer Furtivity: Blaqueers On The Run, T. Anansi Wilson

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

This article has taken some time to recollect. I have been struggling to find the grammar to communicate a phenomenon that is both central to BlaQueer life and beyond BlaQueer living. This difficulty, the silences, the gaps, the nonsensical and agrammatical nature of this phenomena—that of BlaQueer furtivity, the strict scrutiny of Black life and sexual profiling—are central features not only of this project but of the legal, extralegal and social logics and powers that mark, make and remake BlaQueer folks as always, already furtive, subject to strict scrutiny and necessarily sexual profiling. I have been struggling with ...

Small Gestures And Unexpected Consequences: Textualist Interpretations Of State Antidiscrimination Law After Bostock V. Clayton County, Anastasia E. Lacina

Fordham Law Review

The U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Bostock v. Clayton County expanded Title VII’s coverage of victims of sex discrimination in employment by interpreting the statute to also protect LGBTQ+ employees who were discriminated against because of their sexual orientation and/or gender identity. Although Bostock only applies precedentially to Title VII, the long and interwoven history of state antidiscrimination statutes shows that the ruling may reach beyond federal law. This Note examines state court cases that have considered whether to apply Bostock’s reasoning to the interpretation of state antidiscrimination statutes. Furthermore, this Note argues in ...

Pornography Isn't The Problem: A Feminist Theoretical Perspective On The War Against Pornhub, Taylor Comerford

Boston College Law Review

Over the last year, Pornhub and its parent company, MindGeek, ignited public outcry against the prevalence of content users posted to their sites featuring sexual violence, nonconsensual pornography, and sex trafficking. Activists, journalists, and legislators allege that Pornhub and similar pornography sites are apathetic toward the victims in these videos and photos while profiting from the ad revenue such content brings to their sites. In December 2021, Senator Josh Hawley proposed the Survivors of Human Trafficking Fight Back Act, proposing to add criminal penalties and a federal cause of action against websites that either post or refuse to remove criminal ...

The Prep Penalty, Doron Dorfman

Boston College Law Review

Pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, is a novel treatment shown to be highly effective in preventing HIV infection. Although this preventive measure signals a new dawn in eliminating HIV/AIDS, this Article exposes the paradoxical legal treatment of PrEP. On one hand, PrEP has been approved by the FDA, endorsed by the CDC, and promoted through financial incentives in the Affordable Care Act. On the other, the FDA restricts PrEP users, predominately sexually active gay men, from donating blood through a legal policy known as the “blood ban.” This Article uses an innovative experimental study to demonstrate counterintuitive and illogical responses ...

Adjudicating Identity, Laura Lane-Steele

Texas A&M Law Review

Legal actors examine identity claims with varying degrees of intensity. For instance, to be considered “female” for the U.S. Census, self-identification alone is sufficient, and no additional evidence is necessary. To change a sex marker on a birth certificate to “female,” however, self-identification is not enough; some states require people to show that they do not have a penis to be considered “female.” Similar examples of discrepancies in the type and amount of evidence considered for identity claims abound across identities and areas of law. Yet legal actors rarely acknowledge that they are adjudicating identity in the first place ...

Taking The "Fam" Out Of Family: Adjudicating The State Department's Discriminatory Treatment Of Same-Sex Parents On The Merits, Camrin M. Rivera

Maine Law Review

Cisgender same-sex male married couples, unlike cisgender opposite-sex married couples, will always require artificial reproductive technology (ART) for at least one of the spouses to attain biological parenthood. Due to legal and financial barriers to ART, many of these couples turn to international ART services to grow their families. In doing so, these families may face immigration battles when they apply for recognition of their child’s United States citizenship. For example, a prior State Department policy sparked three lawsuits after the State Department refused to recognize children as United States citizens from birth because the children were not biologically ...

Queer And Convincing: Reviewing Freedom Of Religion And Lgbtq+ Protections Post-Fulton V. City Of Philadelphia, Arianna Nord

Washington Law Review

Recent increases in LGBTQ+ anti-discrimination laws have generated new conversations in the free exercise of religion debate. While federal courts have been wrestling with claims brought under the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment since the nineteenth century, city and state efforts to codify legal protections for LGBTQ+ individuals in the mid-twentieth century birthed novel challenges. Private individuals who do not condone intimate same-sex relationships and/or gender non-conforming behavior, on religious grounds seek greater legal protection for the ability to refuse to offer goods and services to LGBTQ+ persons. Federal and state courts must determine how to resolve ...

Pleasure Patents, Andrew Gilden, Sarah R. Wasserman Rajec

Boston College Law Review

The United States Patent and Trademark Office has granted thousands of patents for inventions whose purpose is to facilitate the sexual pleasure of their users. These “pleasure patents” raise a range of novel questions about both patent theory and the relationship between law and sexuality more broadly. Given that “immoral” inventions were long excluded from the patent system, and that sexual devices were widely criminalized for much of the past 150 years, how have patentees successfully framed the contributions of their sexual inventions? If a patentable invention must be both new and useful, how have patentees described the utility of ...

Is A Rainbow Pink Or Blue? Creating Jail Policies For Transgender Inmates, Hunter Schultz

Master of Arts in Criminal Justice Leadership

The United States prison system functions on a binary of male and female inmates. Transgender, non-binary, gender non-conforming, and intersex individuals challenge the limits of these systems and their policies. This paper addresses how to create policy for transgender individuals and what the policies should include. The best practice for creating policies involves basing them in solid ethics. Looking at different ethical theories will help solve ethical dilemmas involving housing, searching, and other policies for transgender and gender non-conforming inmates. To ensure that policies coincide with the law, an examination of case law provides the legal background for these policies ...

Justice For All? Impeding The Villainization Of Human Trafficking Victims Via The Expansion Of Vacatur Laws, Sarah Devaney

Pepperdine Law Review

It is common for human trafficking victims to acquire a criminal record as a result of the activities they are forced to engage in whilst being trafficked. Once these victims become survivors, their criminal record hinders them from wholly reacclimating to society. The current state of human trafficking laws provides little to no relief for human trafficking survivors in regard to alleviating their criminal records. Accordingly, human trafficking survivors are perpetually victimized by the United States criminal justice system. This Article explores the current state of human trafficking laws and their enduring effect on survivors. Specifically, the Article examines California ...

Curing Corrective Rape: Socio-Legal Perspectives On Sexual Violence Against Black Lesbians In South Africa, Waruguru Gaitho

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

Corrective rape can be defined as a hate crime that entails the rape of any member of a group that does not conform to gender or sexual orientation norms, where the motive of the perpetrator is to “correct” the individual, fundamentally combining gender-based violence and homophobic violence. In the South African context, these biases intersect with systemic racism, producing a disproportionate impact on Black, queer, womxn. While the legal framework has evolved to better address sexual violence crimes, Black lesbians remain prone to falling through the legal cracks, and South African society continues to sanction the homophobia and misogyny that ...

Rice And Beans With A Side Of Queer: Socio-Legal Developments In The Cuban Lgbtq+ Community, Carlos A. Figueroa

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

Over the last century, the LGBTQ+ community has occupied a peculiar space in Cuba that has both resisted and acclimated to the ever-changing sociopolitical dynamics on the Island. This Article examines the Cuban queer community’s socio-legal history in pre- and post-Revolution Cuba along with its tumultuous synthesis into U.S. culture.

Pleasure Patents, Andrew Gilden, Sarah R. Wasserman Rajec

Faculty Publications

The United States Patent and Trademark Office has granted thousands of patents for inventions whose purpose is to facilitate the sexual pleasure of their users. These "pleasure patents" raise a range of novel questions about both patent theory and the relationship between law and sexuality more broadly. Given that "immoral" inventions were long excluded from the patent system, and that sexual devices were widely criminalized for much of the past 150 years, how have patentees successfully framed the contributions of their sexual inventions? If a patentable invention must be both new and useful, how have patentees described the utility of ...

Superior Status: Relational Obstacles In The Law To Racial Justice And Lgbtq Equality, Osamudia James

Boston College Law Review

Animus and discrimination are the two legal lenses through which inequality is typically assessed and understood. Insufficient attention, however, is paid to the role of status in animating inequality, even in landmark cases thought to be equality-promoting. More than an animating force between intractable political conflicts, status also informs the development of equality law in the United States. When courts, advocates, and policymakers affirm, ignore, miss, or concede to status hierarchies instead of dismantling them, those groups that perceive a decrease in their status relative to others will only use “equality-promoting” doctrine to rebalance status hierarchy in their favor. Public ...

European Court Won’T Review Case Against Baker In Northern Ireland, Arthur S. Leonard

Other Publications

No abstract provided.