Sexuality and the Law Commons^™

Two Wrongs Don't Make It Right: Title Vii, Sexual Orientation, And The Misuse Of Stare Decisis, Kenneth A. Pilgrim

Georgia Law Review

More than thirty years ago, LGBT employees across
the United States sought relief from discrimination
under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, claiming
protection under the statute's guarantee that employers
may not discriminate "because of sex." The federal
Courts of Appeals responded with a unanimous voice.
Title VII does not cover sexual orientation.
That conclusion was neither shocking nor
controversial in the early 1980's, but the Judiciary's
interpretationof Title VII has changed fundamentally in
the decades since. Multiple Supreme Court decisions
and newly recognized theories of sex discriminationhave
called into question the notion that Title VII has nothing
to …

Formative Projects, Formative Influences: Of Martha Albertson Fineman And Feminist, Liberal, And Vulnerable Subjects, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

This essay, contributed to a symposium on the work of Professor Martha Albertson Fineman, argues that Fineman is a truly generative and transformative scholar, spurring people to think in new ways about key terms like “dependency,” “autonomy,” and “vulnerability” and about basic institutions such as the family and the state. It also recounts Fineman’s role in creating spaces for the generation of scholarship by others. The essay traces critical shifts in Fineman’s scholarly concerns, such as from a theory of dependency to vulnerability theory and from a gender lens to a skepticism about a focus on identities and discrimination. In …

The Rights Of Marriage: Obergefell, Din, And The Future Of Constitutional Family Law, Kerry Abrams

Faculty Scholarship

In the summer of 2015 the United States Supreme Court handed down two groundbreaking constitutional family law decisions. One decision became famous overnight Obergefell v. Hodges declared that same-sex couples have the constitutional right to marry. The other, Kerry v. Din, went largely overlooked. That later case concerned not the right to marry but the rights of marriage. In particular, it asked whether a person has a constitutional liberty interest in living with his or her spouse. This case is suddenly of paramount importance: executive orders targeting particular groups of immigrants implicate directly this right to family reunification.

This Article …

Social Justice For Sex Trafficked Females And Sex Workers In Jordan, Nora Tawfiq Samoudi (Dekaidek)

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This thesis explores social practices, policies and laws constituting criminal and social justice approaches to providing services and amenities for the sex trafficked females in Jordan. As the discussion of sex trafficked females overlaps with sex workers, this research explores the human rights of both groups who experience different forms of gender-based violence. To understand the protection, care and support that Jordan provides, I interviewed seven service providers offering protection for victims of sex trafficking. Also, I analysed the semiprohibitionist Jordanian Penal Code and the Human Trafficking Legislation that criminalise sex trafficking perpetrators and sex-related actions. This research relies on …

Mutual Tolerance And Sensible Exemptions, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter focuses on three general themes that bear on the need to understand one another in society and how that understanding bears on appropriate exemptions relating to abortions and same-sex marriage, two questions that continue to divide the American people.

First, there is a need for mutual tolerance toward others who see things differently. Second, a great deal in life is not subject to rational answers. Third, people should generally not be required to do directly what they believe is deeply wrong. However, society can work only if people do not refuse to help those who, they believe, have …

Ermold Files Paperwork To Challenge Davis, The Morehead News

Media Collection

No abstract provided.

Ermold Filed His Paperwork With Davis, Raycom Media, The Daily Independent

Media Collection

No abstract provided.

Gay Man Denied A Marriage License By Kim Davis Wants To Run Against Her, Benjamin Butterworth

Media Collection

No abstract provided.

Who Is David Ermold? Gay Man Enters County Clerk Race After Discrimination, Preeti Maheshwari

Media Collection

No abstract provided.

Kim Davis Denied Him A Marriage License. He’S Running To Replace Her., Niraj Chokshi

Media Collection

No abstract provided.

Gay Man Denied Marriage License Hopes To Unseat County Clerk, Adam Beam

Media Collection

No abstract provided.

Kim Davis Denied His Right To Marry Another Man. Now David Ermold Is Going To Run Against Her., Eli Rosenberg

Media Collection

No abstract provided.

Rectifying The Tilt: Equality Lessons From Religion, Disability, Sexual Orientation, And Transgender, Chai R. Feldblum

Maine Law Review

The joy and the challenge of being located in an academic setting is that I am also able to engage in forays (albeit intermittent forays) into scholarly analysis. Delivering this lecture, and publishing this piece, provides an excellent opportunity for me to engage in such a foray. This piece, then, is a scholarly reflection on my advocacy experiences. My goal is to use my experiences in advocacy as fertile soil from which to create, I hope, a lovely flower of theory and conceptual thought. Before setting out on this endeavor, however, I would like to offer two postulates. There are …

An Essay On The Production Of Youth Prostitution, Libby Alder

Maine Law Review

Youth prostitution is more multidimensional than I think most of us are prone to admit. This essay is designed to raise the profile of some of its less prominent aspects—aspects which are not unknown exactly, but which are underrecognized and generally ignored in the context of legal analysis. The phenomenon of youth prostitution involves some thorny, sometimes confusing, issues, but those issues are eclipsed by an ideology that fails to grapple with the complexity of youth agency and the consequent position of youth in law. The result is that some kids are left inadequately served and others are utterly unknowable. …

Gender Typing In Stereo: The Transgender Dilemma In Employment Discrimination, Richard F. Storrow

Maine Law Review

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII) prohibits discrimination against men because they are men and against women because they are women. This familiar characterization of the Act has been quoted in dozens of sex discrimination cases to support a narrow view of who is protected against sex discrimination in this country. When transsexuals file suit, “[e]mployment discrimination jurisprudence at both the federal and state levels ... captures transsexuals in a discourse of exclusion from social participation. This wide net, using a remarkably refined system of semantic manipulations, snags all claims launched by transsexuals and reveals …

Sex, Allies And Bfoqs: The Case For Not Allowing Foreign Corporations To Violate Title Vii In The United States, Keith Sealing

Maine Law Review

The extent to which foreign corporations as well as their domestic subsidiaries can discriminate against American employees on the basis of sex, age, religion, and national origin in a manner that would be acceptable under their own laws and customs but inimical to American law is currently determined by a muddled jumble of circuit court opinions interpreting a “[w]e express no view” Supreme Court footnote. As a result, American victims of sexual discrimination have much less protection under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when the discriminating actor is a foreign corporation or its domestic subsidiary than …

Lessons For Legalizing Love: A Case Study Of The Naz Foundation's Campaign To Decriminalize Homosexuality In India, Preston G. Johnson

Capstone Collection

In 1860, British colonizers codified Section 377 into the Indian Penal Code. 377 is an anti-sodomy law based on Victorian/Judeo-Christian values which criminalizes homosexuality through judicial interpretation and the manipulation of ambiguous language. On August 15^th, 2017, India celebrated 70 years of independence from British control, yet 377 still exerts oppressive control over the safety and freedom of Indian LGBTQI communities. Defining queerness as perversion has caused LGBTQI individuals to become victims of false accusations, blackmail, harassment, housing and workplace discrimination, familial rejection, forced “conversion therapy”, assault, rape, torture, and even murder because of this power imbalance and …

Working Sex Words, Anita Bernstein

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Imagine yourself tasked to speak for a few minutes about legal controls on sex-selling in the United States, or any other country you choose. You need not have thought about the particulars. As someone willing to read a law review article, you have enough to say because sex-selling overlaps with the subject knowledge you already have. Criminal law, contracts, employment law, immigration law, tort law, zoning, commercial law, and intellectual property, among other legal categories, all intersect with this topic. In your brief remarks on how law attempts to mediate the sale and purchase of sex, you have only one …

Dignity Denied: Religious Exemptions And Lgbt Elder Services, Elizabeth Boylan

Center for Gender & Sexuality Law

LGBT older adults, like many older Americans in the United States, rely on a network of service providers as they age–for community programming and congregate meals, for health care, and for housing ranging from independent living to skilled nursing. Research finds that a majority of these services are offered by religiously affiliated organizations.

The report was launched with a panel discussion program hosted at Columbia University's Union Theological Seminary on Friday, December 15th, 2017, detailing the increased risks LGBT older adults face as a result of recent religious exemption laws and policies.

Varieties Of Constitutional Experience: Democracy And The Marriage Equality Campaign, Nan D. Hunter

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Beginning in the 1970s, the overwhelming success of anti-gay ballot questions made direct democracy the most powerful bête noire of the LGBT rights movement. It is thus deeply ironic that, more than any other factor, an electoral politics-style campaign led to the national mandate for marriage equality announced by the Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges. This occurred because marriage equality advocates set out to change social and constitutional meanings not primarily through courts or legislatures, but with a strategy designed to win over moveable middle voters in ballot question elections. Successful pro-gay litigation arguments, followed by supportive reasoning …