Courses

LGBT Litigation Clinic
Robert Solomon and Matt Alsdorf
Students will conduct legal research and assist in drafting briefs and memoranda in cases pursuing the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual people. The principal source for these cases will be the American Civil Liberties Union LGBT Rights Project; there will also be opportunities to work in support of other LGBT rights organizations, such as the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, Servicemembers’ Legal Defense Network, and Immigration Equality. The substantive issues will include such matters as employment discrimination, marriage equality, student rights, religious and public discrimination, and HIV/AIDS discrimination.

Sexuality, Gender, and the Law
William Eskridge
This course will explore the historical, comparative, statutory, constitutional, and theoretical dimensions of law's regulation of sexuality and gender. Because sex, gender, and sexual orientation issues are at the cutting edge of privacy, equality, and free speech litigation in this and other countries, the course can be viewed as an advanced constitutional law course. The exploration of natural law, law and economics, feminist, and gay legal theory in many different contexts also gives this course a jurisprudential focus. Enrollment limited to seventy-five. Self-scheduled examination.

Regulating Sexuality
Robert A. Burt and Barbara Marcus
In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its diagnostic designation as a mental disease. In 2003, the United States Supreme Court ruled that states could not treat same-sex sodomy as a criminal offense (reversing its 1986 decision constitutionally approving such treatment). How do we explain these changes? How do we understand the previous psychological and legal prescriptions? Do the changes arise from new psychological conceptions of Anormality, of societal welfare, of morality? What are the proper institutional roles of professional organizations, constitutional courts and popularly elected legislatures for recognizing these changes? The seminar will explore such questions at the intersection of legal and psychological perspectives in shaping the regulation of sexuality. In addition to same-sex relations, the seminar will address issues of gender identity, domestic violence, prostitution, and pornography. The seminar is open to law students and to candidates in psychoanalysis at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis, and will be jointly taught by a law professor and psychoanalyst. Paper required. Enrollment limited to twenty.

Employment Discrimination Law
Vicky Schultz
This course will examine the regulation of employment discrimination through Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of l964 and related laws. It is an introductory, but comprehensive course that emphasizes the major analytical frameworks for conceptualizing race and sex discrimination-and equality-in the workplace. The course will combine a pragmatic, litigation-oriented perspective with a theoretical, sociological one, as it investigates the assumptions underlying various legal approaches and situates legal trends within larger social and historical contexts. The course will provide a solid theoretical foundation for understanding differing conceptions of discrimination and equality in other areas of law, such as anti-discrimination law and constitutional law. It will also provide students with the background necessary to deal with discrimination problems in a clerkship or practice setting.

Family Law
Vicky Schultz
This course will address laws and legal policies relating to constitutional privacy, marriage and divorce, civil unions, child custody, the parent-child relationship, intimacy and sexuality, reproductive technologies, and other areas as time permits. The interplay between the State, family, and market, and the formation of personal identity in and through these arenas, will be explored throughout the course. Issues of gender, race, sexuality and class will arise in many of the areas we study over the course of the semester. Enrollment will be capped at forty. Scheduled examination.

Regulating Love, Sex, and Marriage
Robert A. Burt
The current controversy about state recognition of same-sex marriage implicates broader issues of the justification for any state role in regulating the entry by adults into intimate, consensual relationships. In some contexts, state criminal sanctions have been used to prohibit such relationships—for example, prostitution, pornography exchanged between willing sellers and buyers, polygamous relationships, same-sex intercourse. In other contexts, state authority has been deployed to encourage some formats for such relationships without criminally prohibiting alternative arrangements—for example, restricting marriage licenses on various grounds (no same-sex, no mixed-race, no incest, no bigamy), or providing such financial incentives as tax benefits for preferred relationships. The seminar will explore and evaluate the justifications that have been advanced, both in past times and today, for such state regulations. Paper required. Enrollment limited to twenty.

Work and Gender
Vicky Schultz
This course will examine how workplaces, jobs, and workers come to be structured along gendered lines. The class will read theoretical accounts, empirical studies, ethnographies, and legal cases to obtain an understanding of the mechanisms through which work becomes gendered. Among the questions the course will address are: Does the workplace reflect or rather actively reproduce gendered social relations and identities? What is the relationship among wage work, citizenship, and gender? How do structural features of organizations tend to reproduce sex segregation and gender harassment? How should we understand the relationship between gender and sexuality at work? Which theories ground past and present interpretations of the law’s ban on sex discrimination? Which theories should do so? The representation of gender and work in the popular media will also be explored, through an accompanying, required in-class film series.