AALS Workshop on Changing Society, Changing Laws: Conflicts Over Sexuality and the Evolving American Family

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This day-long workshop considers a broad range of historical, empirical, and theoretical perspectives on sexual orientation and gender identity issues in family and constitutional law.  Social movements and counter-movements in the U.S. have been fighting an increasingly pitched battle over the understandings of family that should be reflected in law.   The use of history and social science literature in legal arguments is common but deeply contested.  In the family law arena, there is a particular tension between nationalizing doctrines of citizens’ equal rights and interstate relations on one hand and the localizing impulse of “our federalism,” which views state diversity as a valuable means of developing social policy and new legal approaches to common problems.  The workshop seeks to reveal and to question the descriptive and normative assumptions behind the competing positions being fought out in conflicts over sexuality, gender, and “the family.”

The workshop explores emerging questions of family law and constitutional law while addressing a variety of broader themes.  Legal questions considered go beyond marriage equality to include issues of parenting (such as adoption and alternative reproductive technologies), and require facing issues of federalism and civil rights.  Because LGBT communities are heterogeneous, the legal regulation of families is inevitably embedded in issues of race, gender, and class.  Throughout, the workshop considers cross-cutting questions concerning law and interdisciplinarity, social movements and legal change, and the complicated processes by which we reconstitute ourselves as a political community governed by a written but interpreted Constitution.