Sexuality, gender, and the law now constitutes an important field of legal inquiry and scholarship. This Article traces the evolution of the “big idea” in this area: Contrary to natural law assumptions, the nation is moving decisively toward the norm that sexual and gender variation are typically benign and not malignant. Today, this liberal norm is hotly contested by both traditionalists who...
Sticky Intuitions and the Future of Sexual Orientation Discrimination
As once-accepted empirical justifications for discriminating against lesbians and gay men have fallen away, the major stumbling block to equality lies in a set of intuitions, impulses, and so-called common sense views regarding sexual orientation and gender. This Article takes up these impulses and views, which I characterize as “sticky intuitions,” to consider both their sustained influence and...
The Dissident Citizen
We have arrived at a crossroads in terms of the intersection between law, sexuality, and globalization. Historically, and even today, the majority of accounts of LGBT migration tend to remain focused, in one scholar’s words, on “a narrative of movement from repression to freedom, or a heroic journey undertaken in search of liberation.” Within this narrative, the United States is usually cast as a...
Raping Like a State
It is a remarkable fact that rhetorically the state is gendered male, while state-on-state violence is continually represented as sexual violence. This Article applies the insights of queer theory to examine this rhetoric of sexual violation. More specifically, it analyzes the injury of colonialism as a kind of homoerotic violation of non-Western states’ (would-be) sovereignty. It does so by...
The Gay Tipping Point
In a 1999 assessment, New York Times journalists Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney stated that “it seems likely that the movement for gay identity and gay rights has come further and faster, in terms of change, than any other that has gone before it in this nation.” The evidence supports their claim. The Encyclopedia of Associations, for instance, shows that the number of organizations devoted...
In Support of a Referendum on the Golan Heights
On December 9, 2009, the Knesset voted to advance legislation requiring that the handover of any land under the administrative and judicial authority of the State of Israel pass a national referendum. The legislation—termed the Golan Heights and Jerusalem Referendum Bill—passed its first reading by a margin of sixty-eight to twenty-two (with one abstention). It now returns to committee for...
Melville B. Nimmer Memorial Lecture: Facts and the First Amendment
Each year, the UCLA School of Law hosts the Melville B. Nimmer Memorial Lecture. Since 1986, the lecture series has served as a forum for leading scholars in the fields of copyright and First Amendment law. In recent years, the lecture has been presented by many distinguished scholars. The UCLA Law Review has published these lectures and proudly continues that tradition by publishing an Article...
Revising the Revision: Procedural Alternatives to the Arbitration Fairness Act
In the past decade, debate on the fairness of pre-dispute agreements to arbitrate has intensified. Recently, Congress has joined the chorus of opposition to these agreements and is attempting to outlaw them via the proposed Arbitration Fairness Act (AFA). Both proponents and critics of the AFA, including certain members of Congress, take hard-line stances on the perceived ills or benefits of...