Congratulations to the 2023 Dukeminier Awards Winners

The Williams Institute and the student editors of the Dukeminier Awards Journal are pleased to announce the best sexual orientation and gender identity legal scholarship of 2022. 

This Article tracks how name change law has served as a vehicle for liberation. Women, African Americans, immigrants, and LGBTQ individuals have all turned to the law of name change to assert their individual rights. Today, the common law of name change is still good law but is undermined by a judicial process that reflects systemic biases against oppressed groups. By exploring the law and its history, the Article argues for a name change system that promotes a more robust application of common law while deemphasizing the gatekeeping role played by judges. It also illustrates the case for understanding the American law of name change as a uniquely progressive legal doctrine in the movement for civil rights and liberation.

This Article intervenes in the debate concerning the conflict between religious liberties and LGBTQ rights. Strictly focusing on the market, it makes three salient contributions. First, it reveals the appearance of a preemptive legal strategy that has started to generate unprecedented jurisprudence in lower courts, the peak of an ecopolitical practice called “market evangelism.” Second, the Article adds to the current understanding of the harm that market evangelism inflicts on LGBTQ people. Third, the Article proposes an original resolution particularly tailored to the market, arguing that business activity that relies on corporations and contracts must include a duty to serve all—an obligation that flows “market citizenship.”

Ryan Thoreson
Assistant Professor of Law, University of Cincinnati College of Law
“Discriminalization”: Sexuality, Human Rights, and the Carceral Turn in Antidiscrimination Law, 110 Cal. L. Rev. 432 (2022)

As LGBT rights gain traction around the globe, many states have turned toward carceral punishment as a means of sanctioning discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The carceral turn has been scrutinized in racial justice and feminist literature, but few queer scholars have grappled with the growing use of incar­ceration globally to punish offenses like discrimination, degrading or insulting speech, or conversion practices. The use of carceral punishment to deter and punish these offenses—what Thoreson calls discriminalization—raises questions about whether or when incarceration is appropriate to address affronts to equal dig­nity.

T. Anansi Wilson
Director, Center for the Study of Black Life and the Law and Associate Professor of Law, Mitchell Hamline School of Law
Sexual Profiling & BlaQueer Furtivity: BlaQueers on the Run, 24 The Scholar: St. Mary’s L. Rev. Race & Social Justice 180 (2022)

This Article focuses on the phenomena of furtive Blackness—the marking on and of the body as a furtive gesture, and the Black strategy of furtively navigating a white supremacist sociolegal world—and strict scrutiny, the precedents on how to investigate, consider and regard Black presence and claims to rights, goods, services, and humanity. Wilson employs the personal, the cinematic and the affective and couples them with the legal, the mythological and scenes from BlaQueer life, both past and present; characterizing the project as a witnessing, testimony, recollecting, record-setting, and an attempt at care.

Payton Moody
UCLA School of Law, Class of 2023
Busting Bostock: The CRT Critique, 22 Dukeminier Awards J. 219 (2023)

This Note addresses Bostock v. Clayton County’s impact on queer people of color. After exploring the LGBT movement’s role in the racialization of “gay identity” as White, Moody argues that the strategic decision to center certain policy goals marginalized queer people of color and undermined an intersectional comprehension of discrimination. The Note continues by examining central lessons from Critical Race Theory and the Black antiracist movement. Lastly, it presents a critique of Bostock by applying the context and concepts of the previous section.

Taylor Roberts-Sampson
UCLA School of Law, Class of 2023
Queer and Trans Foster Youth of Color: Mapping the Margins of the Child Welfare System, 22 Dukeminier Awards J. 253 (2023)

This Note centers the experiences of queer and transgender foster youth of color, exploring what barriers they may face and what protection they may rely on within the child welfare system. The note exposes and explores the overrepresentation of queer and trans youth in the foster care system, in addition to existing federal and state protections for queer and trans foster youth of color and concludes by presenting possible policy solutions.

Williams Institute's 23rd Annual Update 

The Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law is an academic research institute dedicated to conducting rigorous, independent research on sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy.

Did someone forward this to you? Sign up to receive your own Williams Institute newsletter.

The Williams Institute
UCLA School of Law
Box 951476
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1476
williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu

Support our work