In this piece, introducing the January 1998, panel on "Race and Sexual Orientation in Legal Scholarship" at the American Association of Law Schools conference, Professor Cox reflects on her own scholarship, concluding that "[w]e need to change the whiteness of gay and lesbian scholarship...to eliminate a notion that, when we talk of issues concerning gay and lesbian liberation, we are only talking about liberating white people from the heterosexism of our society."
In this piece, based on her presentation at the January 1998, panel on "Race and Sexual Orientation in Legal Scholarship" at the American Association of Law School's conference, Professor Arriola examines her development as a Latina Lesbian legal scholar. She urges her academic colleagues to examine their privilege and underlying assumptions and exhorts them to focus on the intersections between race and sexual orientation to "produce healing, community and a commitment to coalition, not divisiveness in the politics of identity."
In this piece, Kevin McNeill, a Sociology graduate student, examines twenty years of empirical literature regarding the parenting styles of gay and lesbian parents, to determine what effects, if any, these alternative family groups have on their children, as compared to those raised in heterosexual families. He finds that children of gay and lesbian parents do not significantly differ from those of heterosexual parents with regard to gender identity, psychosocial development, and prevalence of homosexuality and that negative attitudes about gay and lesbian parents have no basis in the current empirical research.
In this piece, a memorandum from Frank Valdes, the 1997 Chair of the American Association of Law School (AALS) Section of Gay and Lesbian Legal Issues, to the Section, Prof. Valdes analyzes the "Solomon II amendment"--federal legislation that denies certain types of federal student-loan funds to law schools which prohibit the United States military, an employer that openly and formally discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation, from recruiting on their campuses. It suggests a variety of methods of "ameliorating" the conflict between the commitment of the AALS, individual law schools and local laws to non-discrimination and the legal requirement of "reasonable access"--not equal access--to military recruiters.
Immorality and Illegality: Hard Time For a Victimless Crime?
In this brief essay, Jeremy Patrick, a student at Chadron State College in Western Nebraska argues that, based on John Stuart Mill's "Harm Principle," the law should not prohibit a person from doing something unless and until "he reasonably and substantially harms another or intentionally creates a situation with a reasonable likelihood of harming another." Examining gambling, sodomy and drug laws, he concludes that paternalism has no place in a society based on individual liberty and free will, and that to prohibit a person from committing an act that does not harm others is "a grave injustice."
Law, Morality and Sodomy: The Bowers Majority in Bed with Lord Devlin
This brief piece examines Bowers v. Hardwick in light the philosophical debate about the relationship law to private morality-acts which do not harm others, but which are considered immoral and therefore prohibited by the criminal law. It lays out the philosophical debate among Lord Patrick Devlin, H.L.A. Hart and Joel Feinberg, and concludes that the majority in Bowers adopted the antiquated notion that law may enforce private morality, despite the dissent ably pointing out the more current philosophical arguments against this position.