In this book, Susan Gluck Mezey examines LGBT policymaking over the last several decades, highlighting advances in LGBT rights as well as formidable challenges that still confront the LGBT community. With an emphasis on courts, she traces developments in the struggles for LGBT rights in the United States and abroad. The chapters focus on employment discrimination, transgender rights, marriage equality, and the ongoing battles over discrimination against same-sex couples and transgender persons in education, employment, and public accommodations. It also adds a global perspective by appraising issues affecting LGBT rights in other parts of the world, discussing claims of discrimination in the Canadian and South African courts as well as in the European Court of Human Rights. Mezey provides a succinct and accessible guide to the debates over sexual orientation and gender identity, evaluating the roles played by state and federal courts, legislatures, and chief executives in formulating and implementing LGBT policy. Suitable as an up-to-date resource for anyone interested in LGBT rights, Beyond Marriage will also help students in upper-level classes focusing on judicial politics, public policymaking, family law, civil rights, gender policy, and minority group politics understand ways forward for the LGBT community in the political realm.

Conservative opponents of LGBT equality in the United States often couch their opposition in claims of free speech, free association, and religious liberty. It is no surprise, then, that many LGBT supporters equate First Amendment arguments with resistance to their cause. The First Amendment and LGBT Equality tells another story, about the First Amendment's crucial yet largely forgotten role in the first few decades of the gay rights movement. Between the 1950s and 1980s, when many courts were still openly hostile to sexual minorities, they nonetheless recognized the freedom of gay and lesbian people to express themselves and associate with one another. Successful First Amendment cases protected LGBT publications and organizations, protests and parades, and individuals' right to come out. The amendment was wielded by the other side only after it had laid the groundwork for major LGBT equality victories. Carlos A. Ball illuminates the full trajectory of this legal and cultural history. He argues that, in accommodating those who dissent from LGBT equality on grounds of conscience, it is neither necessary nor appropriate to depart from the established ways in which American antidiscrimination law has, for decades, accommodated equality dissenters. But he also argues that as progressives fight the First Amendment claims of religious conservatives and other LGBT opponents today, they should take care not to erode the very safeguards of liberty that allowed LGBT rights to exist in the first place.

Engaging and largely untold, From the Closet to the Courtroom explores how five pivotal lawsuits have altered LGBT history. Beginning each case narrative at the center-with the litigants and their lawyers-law professor Carlos Ball follows the stories behind each crucial lawsuit. He traces the parties from their communities to the courtroom, while deftly weaving in rich sociohistorical context and analyzing the lasting legal and political impact of each judicial outcome.

Winner of the 2021 ABA Silver Gavel Award The definitive history of the marriage equality debate in the United States, praised by Library Journal as "beautifully and accessibly written. . . . An essential work." "[A] comprehensive history of the battle for equal marriage rights in America. . . . LGBTQ allies and legal students will be rewarded by the impressive survey of how far the gay rights movement has come."--Publishers Weekly As a legal scholar who first argued in the early 1990s for a right to gay marriage, William N. Eskridge Jr. has been on the front lines of the debate over same‑sex marriage for decades. In this book, Eskridge and his coauthor, Christopher R. Riano, offer a panoramic and definitive history of America's marriage equality debate. The authors explore the deeply religious, rabidly political, frequently administrative, and pervasively constitutional features of the debate and consider all angles of its dramatic history. While giving a full account of the legal and political issues, the authors never lose sight of the personal stories of the people involved, or of the central place the right to marry holds in a person's ability to enjoy the dignity of full citizenship. This is not a triumphalist or one‑sided book but a thoughtful history of how the nation wrestled with an important question of moral and legal equality.

Out and About: The LGBT Experience In the Legal Profession is intended to address the experiences of LGBT attorneys, academics, and jurists in the legal profession. Through their own words, our authors help educate and promote justice in and through the legal profession for the LGBT community in all its diversity. This book also celebrates LGBT members of the bar by recognizing this diverse group, their contributions, and their struggles. Being an individual, doing your own thing no matter what everyone else is doing, is the heart of the essays that comprise this book. The writers share their experience of at once blending in and yet feeling different, vulnerable, and exposed. They speak of the ever-present potential to be treated differently simply because of who they are, giving these essays deeper meaning. Some of these authors endured secret pain, suffering in private, hiding personal lives from colleagues. Others barely soldiered through, endeavoring just to make the lives of their clients better. And some openly achieved great success, personally, professionally, or both. Each and every one merits attention. Each chapter of this book informs and inspires readers to broaden horizons, opening minds to the vast diversity of LGBT individuals. The book aims to improve the legal profession and the justice system itself by demonstrating the vast potential within all of us. There always have been people who "dance to the beat of a different drummer." The contributors to this collection of essays hope you dance to whatever music suits you! Book jacket.

A groundbreaking work that turns a "queer eye" on the criminal legal system, and winner of the2011 PASS (Prevention for a Safer Society) Award from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency Drawing on years of research, activism, and legal advocacy, Queer (In)Justice is a searing examination of queer experiences--as "suspects," defendants, prisoners, and survivors of crime. The authors unpack queer criminal archetypes--like "gleeful gay killers," "lethal lesbians," "disease spreaders," and "deceptive gender benders"--to illustrate the punishment of queer expression, regardless of whether a crime was ever committed. Tracing stories from the streets to the bench to behind prison bars, the authors prove that the policing of sex and gender both bolsters and reinforces racial and gender inequalities. A groundbreaking work that turns a "queer eye" on the criminal legal system, Queer (In)Justice illuminates and challenges the many ways in which queer lives are criminalized, policed, and punished.