Read the year's best law review articles concerning sexual orientation and gender identity
Congratulations to the 2020 Dukeminier Awards Winners
Recognizing the best sexual orientation and gender identity legal scholarship of 2019.
THE MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM PRIZE
Jessica A. Clarke
Professor of Law, Vanderbilt University Law School They, Them, and Theirs, 132 Harv. L. Rev. 894 (2019)
The idea of nonbinary gender as an identity itself appears only at the margins of U.S. legal scholarship. This Article assesses the legal interests in binary gender regulation in various contexts and argues that the law can recognize nonbinary gender identities, or eliminate unnecessary legal sex classifications, using familiar civil rights concepts.
THE STU WALTER PRIZE
J. Shahar Dillbary
Professor of Law, University of Alabama School of Law Griffin Edwards
Assistant Professor of Business, University of Alabama, Birmingham, Collat School of Business An Empirical Analysis of Sexual Orientation Discrimination, 86 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1 (2019)
This Article reports on the first study to empirically demonstrate widespread discrimination across the United States based on perceived sexual orientation, sex, and race in mortgage lending. While findings show that loan applications filed by same-sex male co-applicants are significantly less likely to be approved compared to a white heterosexual baseline, the pattern of discrimination diminishes in areas with anti–sexual orientation discrimination laws.
LGBT claims to employment rights have taken center stage in the struggle for LGBT equality. Some opponents argue that Title VII does not proscribe anti-LGBT discrimination because the “original public meaning” in 1964 would not have understood such discrimination as sex discrimination. This Article contends that the “original public meaning” approach has almost no pedigree in the federal statutory interpretation case law and should concern both civil rights advocates and originalists alike.
The private regulation seen in Masterpiece Cakeshop and #MeToo evinces a new turn in the regulation of sex and sexuality. In the absence of appropriate state regulation, private actors are taking on a more visible role in regulating sex and sexuality. In doing so, they have claimed parts of the public sphere as private space suitable for the imposition of their own norms and values.
THE JEFFREY S. HABER PRIZE FOR STUDENT SCHOLARSHIP
This Note analyzes LGBTQ rights in United States territories against the backdrop of the Insular Cases, a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions at the turn of the 12th century that reclassified these island territories as “distant possessions” no longer destined for statehood and therefore no longer bound to the same constitutional requirements as the states.
