LGBT Legal Materials: After Obergefell

LET'S REVISE THIS LIST INTO ONE BOX; SHORTEN THE ANNOTATIONS; LONG LIST - COULD IT BE DIVIDED INTO OTHER GROUPINGS - CALL IT BOOKS NOT TREATISES
Laws affecting LGBT couples are changing rapidly, and while it's an exciting time for all gay and lesbian partners, keeping up with the myriad ways the shifting legal landscape touches your family life can be daunting. Now more than ever, it's important that you take the proper legal steps to define and protect your relationship in the eyes of the law. If you don't, you run the risk of being shut out of each other's lives -- and the lives of children you co-parent -- in times of medical, financial or person al crisis. Fortunately, this practical guide is updated with the latest legal information and legislation that will help you and your same-sex partner protect and exercise your rights, and make sound decisions as a couple. A Legal Guide for Lesbian & Gay Couples covers: making practical decisions about living together planning for medical emergencies -- making medical decisions for one another and taking care of each other's finances when one partner is incapacitated domestic partner benefits and how to obtain them buying property together providing for each other upon death practical and legal aspects of having and raising children marriage laws for all 50 states The updated edition provides the latest information on same-sex marriage, civil unions, and domestic partnerships. This book teaches couples how to protect their relationships by entering into "living together" agreements, making wills and medical directives, jointly buying a house or other property, and making other practical decisions about living together, marrying, or registering as legal partners. All forms are now downloadable via a special link at nolo.com.

Originally created by Roberta Achtenberg in 1985, Sexual Orientation & the Law was the nation’s first comprehensive legal treatise dedicated to the concerns of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and others who form alternative families or conduct lives outside societal “norms” regarding gender or sexuality. Over the past two decades, the treatise has grown to two volumes, and is now updated twice a year. Experienced practitioners from all across the country have contributed to Sexual Orientation and the Law. Replete with numerous sample forms and briefs, the treatise is an invaluable tool for new and experienced attorneys alike. The two volumes offer innumerable and varied creative approaches to problems facing attorneys representing lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transsexuals, people living with HIV, or any clients in alternative families or who face discrimination for perceived alternative lifestyles. Societal changes to do with sexuality, family relations, and gender have been rapid over the past few decades. Sexual Orientation and the Law has kept abreast of these changes, to assist attorneys nationwide not only in the larger movement for legal reform and equality, but also in the small struggles for individual happiness, which day to day create our lives.

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.

Victory may sometimes look like a sudden revolution when, in truth, it rests on years of struggle. The June 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges is a sweeping victory for the freedom to marry, but it was one step in a long process. Love Unites Us is the history of activists’ passion and persistence in the struggle for marriage rights for same-sex couples in the United States, told in the words of those who waged the battle. Launching the fight for the freedom to marry was neither an obvious nor an uncontested strategy. To many activists, achieving marriage equality seemed far-fetched, but the skeptics were proved wrong. Proactive arguments in favor of love, family, and commitment were more effective than arguments that focused on rights and the goal of equality at work. Telling the stories of people who loved and cared for one another, in sickness and in health, cut through the antigay noise and moved people--not without backlash and not overnight, but faster than most activists and observers had ever imagined. With compelling stories from leading attorneys and activists including Evan Wolfson, Mary L. Bonauto, Jon W. Davidson, and Paul M. Smith, Love Unites Us explains how gay and lesbian couples achieved the right to marry.

A renowned legal scholar tells the definitive story of Hollingsworth v. Perry, the trial that will stand as the most potent argument for marriage equality Speak Now tells the story of a watershed trial that unfolded over twelve tense days in California in 2010. A trial that legalized same-sex marriage in our most populous state. A trial that interrogated the nature of marriage, the political status of gays and lesbians, the ideal circumstances for raising children, and the ability of direct democracy to protect fundamental rights. A trial that stands as the most potent argument for marriage equality this nation has ever seen. In telling the story of Hollingsworth v. Perry, the groundbreaking federal lawsuit against Proposition 8, Kenji Yoshino has also written a paean to the vanishing civil trial--an oasis of rationality in what is often a decidedly uncivil debate. Above all, this book is a work of deep humanity, in which Yoshino brings abstract legal arguments to life by sharing his own story of finding love, marrying, and having children as a gay man. Intellectually rigorous and profoundly compassionate, Speak Now will stand as the definitive account of a landmark civil-rights trial.

"We’ve been together in sickness and in health, through the death of his mother, through the adoption of our children, through four long years of this legal battle,” Jason Morgan told reporters of himself and his partner, Chuck Swaggerty. "And if being together through all of that isn’t love and commitment or isn’t family or isn’t marriage, then I don’t know what is.” Just minutes earlier on that day, April 3, 2009, the justices of the Iowa Supreme Court had agreed. The court’s decision in Varnum v. Brien made Iowa only the third state in the nation to permit same-sex couples to wed--moderate, midwestern Iowa, years before such left-leaning coastal states as California and New York. And unlike the earlier decisions in Massachusetts and Connecticut, Varnum v. Brien was unanimous and unequivocal. It catalyzed the unprecedented and rapid shift in law and public opinion that continues today. Equal Before the Law tells the stories behind this critical battle in the fight for marriage equality and traces the decision’s impact. The struggle began in 1998 with the easy passage of Iowa’s Defense of Marriage Act and took a turn, surprising to many, in 2005, when six ordinary Iowa couples signed on to Lambda Legal’s suit against the law. Their triumph in 2009 sparked a conservative backlash against the supreme court justices, three of whom faced tough retention elections that fall. Longtime, award-winning reporters Tom Witosky and Marc Hansen talked with and researched dozens of key figures, including opponent Bob Vander Plaats, proponents Janelle Rettig and Sharon Malheiro, attorneys Roger Kuhle, Dennis Johnson, and Camilla Taylor, and politicians Matt McCoy, Mary Lundby, and Tom Vilsack, who had to weigh their careers against their convictions. Justice Mark Cady, who wrote the decision, explains why the court had to rule in favor of the plaintiffs. At the center of the story are the six couples who sacrificed their privacy to demand public respect for their families. Through these voices, Witosky and Hansen show that no one should have been surprised by the 2009 decision. Iowans have a long history of leadership on civil rights. Just a year after Iowa became a state, its citizens adopted as their motto the phrase, "Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain.” And they still do today.

No one could have predicted that the night of September 17, 1998, would be anything but routine in Houston, Texas. Even the call to police that a black man was "going crazy with a gun" was hardly unusual in this urban setting. Nobody could have imagined that the arrest of two men for a minor criminal offense would reverberate in American constitutional law, exposing a deep malignity in our judicial system and challenging the traditional conception of what makes a family. Indeed, when Harris County sheriff’s deputies entered the second-floor apartment, there was no gun. Instead, they reported that they had walked in on John Lawrence and Tyron Garner having sex in Lawrence’s bedroom. So begins Dale Carpenter’s "gripping and brilliantly researched" Flagrant Conduct, a work nine years in the making that transforms our understanding of what we thought we knew about Lawrence v. Texas, the landmark Supreme Court decision of 2003 that invalidated America’s sodomy laws. Drawing on dozens of interviews, Carpenter has taken on the "gargantuan" task of extracting the truth about the case, analyzing the claims of virtually every person involved. Carpenter first introduces us to the interracial defendants themselves, who were hardly prepared "for the strike of lightning" that would upend their lives, and then to the Harris County arresting officers, including a sheriff’s deputy who claimed he had "looked eye to eye" in the faces of the men as they allegedly fornicated. Carpenter skillfully navigates Houston’s complex gay world of the late 1990s, where a group of activists and court officers, some of them closeted themselves, refused to bury what initially seemed to be a minor arrest. The author charts not only the careful legal strategy that Lambda Legal attorneys adopted to make the case compatible to a conservative Supreme Court but also the miscalculations of the Houston prosecutors who assumed that the nation’s extant sodomy laws would be upheld. Masterfully reenacting the arguments that riveted spectators and Justices alike in 2003, Flagrant Conduct then reaches a point where legal history becomes literature, animating a Supreme Court decision as few writers have done. In situating Lawrence v. Texas within the larger framework of America’s four-century persecution of gay men and lesbians, Flagrant Conduct compellingly demonstrates that gay history is an integral part of our national civil rights story.

Transgender Persons and the Law, 2nd Edition further solidifies the ABA s position as the forerunner and champion of combatting transgender discrimination and safeguarding the legal rights of all transgender individuals. This new edition is an excellent resource for lawyers as well as lay-activists engaged in transgender human and civil rights albeit in the courts or in legislative lobbying.The following areas of the law are thoroughly explained in the book: . What is transgendered'. Identification documents. Public facilities. Housing concerns. Military and veterans issues. Family law. School matters. Health care. Personal safety concerns. Keeping and securing employment. Immigration problems. Criminal imprisonment disputes Transgender Persons and the Law, 2nd Edition includes the latest regulations and policy statements (including the looming Executive Order by President Obama on LGBT discrimination by federal contractors) regarding transgenderism in addition to new cases that have been brought before the courts since the publication of the first edition of this book in summer 2013. As a bonus, the book includes a link to an online database that features a complete set of legal forms for all fifty states and the District of Columbia for name changes and for those jurisdictions that allow it, changes to birth certificates.

The need to allow for a legal change of sex/gender, in certain cases, is no longer disputed in most jurisdictions. For European countries, there is no question as to whether such a change should be allowed after the decision of the European Court of Human Rights in Goodwin v. United Kingdom (Application No. 28957/95). The question has therefore shifted to what the requirements should be for such a legal change. Many jurisdictions have legislated or developed an administrative approach to changing sex/gender, but the requirements differ significantly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, particularly with regard to age, nationality, and marital status, as well as the medical and psychological requirements. The latter, in some jurisdictions, still include surgery and sterility as a precondition, thus potentially forcing the persons concerned to choose between the recognition of their sex/gender identity and their physical integrity. This book examines questions that are thus far under-researched, namely what the full legal consequences of a legal change of sex/gender should be - for example, with regard to the existing legal relationships, such as marriages and registered partnerships, but also concerning children and parentage. The Legal Status of Transsexual and Transgender Persons is the result of an international research project, including not only national reports from 14 European and non-European jurisdictions, but also two chapters that look at legal sex/gender changes from a Christian perspective, and one chapter from a medical-psychological perspective. The final chapter compares and contrasts the different approaches and requirements and makes recommendations for best practice and law reform.

What's wrong with rights? It is usually assumed that trans and gender nonconforming people should follow the civil rights and "equality" strategies of lesbian and gay rights organizations by agitating for legal reforms that would ostensibly guarantee nondiscrimination and equal protection under the law. This approach assumes that the best way to address the poverty and criminalization that plague trans populations is to gain legal recognition and inclusion in the state's institutions. But is this strategy effective? In Normal Life Dean Spade presents revelatory critiques of the legal equality framework for social change, and points to examples of transformative grassroots trans activism that is raising demands that go beyond traditional civil rights reforms. Spade explodes assumptions about what legal rights can do for marginalized populations, and describes transformative resistance processes and formations that address the root causes of harm and violence.

A distinguished professor of law and philosophy at the University of Chicago, a prolific writer and award-winning thinker, Martha Nussbaum stands as one of our foremost authorities on law, justice, freedom, morality, and emotion. In From Disgust to Humanity, Nussbaum aims her considerable intellectual firepower at the bulwark of opposition to gay equality: the politics of disgust. Nussbaum argues that disgust has long been among the fundamental motivations of those who are fighting for legal discrimination against lesbian and gay citizens. When confronted with same-sex acts and relationships, she writes, they experience "a deep aversion akin to that inspired by bodily wastes, slimy insects, and spoiled food--and then cite that very reaction to justify a range of legal restrictions, from sodomy laws to bans on same-sex marriage." Leon Kass, former head of President Bush's President's Council on Bioethics, even argues that this repugnance has an inherent "wisdom," steering us away from destructive choices. Nussbaum believes that the politics of disgust must be confronted directly, for it contradicts the basic principle of the equality of all citizens under the law. "It says that the mere fact that you happen to make me want to vomit is reason enough for me to treat you as a social pariah, denying you some of your most basic entitlements as a citizen." In its place she offers a "politics of humanity," based not merely on respect, but something akin to love, an uplifting imaginative engagement with others, an active effort to see the world from their perspectives, as fellow human beings. Combining rigorous analysis of the leading constitutional cases with philosophical reflection about underlying concepts of privacy, respect, discrimination, and liberty, Nussbaum discusses issues ranging from non-discrimination and same-sex marriage to "public sex." Recent landmark decisions suggest that the views of state and federal courts are shifting toward a humanity-centered vision, and Nussbaum's powerful arguments will undoubtedly advance that cause. Incisive, rigorous, and deeply humane, From Disgust to Humanity is a stunning contribution to Oxford's distinguished Inalienable Rights series.