Sex, although considered by many in our culture the quintessential private activity, is blanketed by a staggering number and variety of laws. This first concise compendium of the nation's sex laws brings together in one place and summarizes the laws regulating personal sexual activity. In doing so, it reveals gaps, anachronisms, anomalies, inequalities, and irrationalities, and provides an empirical basis for studies of sexual regulation. From Alabama to Wyoming, this informative and fascinating reference book will be an essential resource to a wide range of persons both within and outside the legal profession - specialists in the regulation of sexual behavior, students of the legislative process, lawyers involved in family and sex law, and anyone interested in social and political issues involving sexual orientation and sexual morality.
This looseleaf treatise explains the affect of the law on gay and lesbian clients in the areas of employment discrimination, civil rights, family law, immigration, criminal defense, and a wide variety of other areas. A collection of problem solving strategies, techniques, and materials are included in the work.
A rape victim charges that pornography caused her attacker to become a sex offender. A lesbian mother fights for custody of her child. A transsexual pilot is fired by a commercial airline after undergoing sex change and sues for sex discrimination. A homosexual is denied employment because of sexual orientation. A woman argues that her criminal behavior should be excused because she suffers from premenstrual syndrome. The law has much to say about sexual behavior, but what it says is rarely influenced by the findings of social science research over recent decades. This book focuses for the first time on the dynamic interplay between sexual science and legal decisionmaking. Reflecting the author's wide experience as a respected sex researcher, expert witness, and lawyer, Sexual Science and the Law provides valuable insights into some of the most controversial social and sexual topics of our time. Drawing on an exhaustive knowledge of the relevant research and citing extensively from case law and court transcripts, Richard Green demonstrates how the work of sexual science could bring about a transformation in jurisprudence, informing the courts in their deliberations on issues such as sexual privacy, homosexuality, prostitution, abortion, pornography, and sexual abuse. In each case he considers, Green shows how the law has been shaped by social science or impoverished by reliance on conjecture and received wisdom. He examines the role of sexual science in legal controversy, its analysis of human motivation and behavior, and its use by the courts in determining the relative weight to be given the desires of the individual, the standards of society, and the power of the state in limiting sexual autonomy. Unprecedented in its portrayal of sexuality in a legal context, this scholarly but readable book will interest and educate professional and layperson alike--those lawyers, judges, sex educators, therapists, patients, and citizens who find themselves standing nonplussed at the meeting place of morality and behavior.
Does Canada need any more collections about legal regulation of sex and sexuality? Volumes exist dealing with sex work and pornographies. Certainly, volumes abound dealing with emerging sexualities in Canada and new sexual freedoms. This book seeks to do more than tell a story of broad generalities about the law. It forges the links between the history of law and modern iterations of judgments pertaining to that law. Hence the uncomfortable line between Victorian morality (often) and modern regulation, is thematically explored through the book. More modern iterations of sexual regulation in Canada are being deployed and, in this book, the authors explore the interplay between emerging digital technologies and legal regulation. Newer laws in Canada have been drafted to recognize that sexual expression can be a means of violence inherently, and thus an exploration of modern sexual digital expression and its emerging jurisprudence represent a new frontier in the regulation of sex and sexuality in Canada. We explore how legal regulation has responded to these new crimes.This collection is founded upon the editors? joint experiences in teaching in law and society programs in Canada. The authors have witnessed cobbled together curriculums which rely upon a potpourri of sources from law, criminology, criminal justice and law and society disciplines. There exists a growing interest from university students and legal scholars alike for a reader in the context of law reform and legal change in respect of sexual politics and movements in Canada, especially in the context of more modern iterations of crime and sexual politics. Furthermore, while this collection is intended to be educational in the main, it will foster broader discussions in the context of legal regulation of sex and sexuality in Canadian jurisprudence.?
Sexual Offences: Law and Context presents the substantive law governing sexual offending in England and Wales in its socio-legal and historical context. It outlines the complexities of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, associated pieces of legislation and the common law offences in a clear, linear narrative. The book highlights and discusses key themes in the contemporary law including rape and consent, sexual offences against children, abuse of people with mental disorders, pornography offences, and prostitution. It offers a critical discussion of challenges for the law and potential ways forward for the future. Designed to be a comprehensive overview, Sexual Offences: Law and Context will be an invaluable resource for students of law and criminology taking courses on sexual offences or pursuing research in this area.
div When it was published twenty-five years ago, Catharine MacKinnon’s pathbreaking work Sexual Harassment of Working Women had a major impact on the development of sexual harassment law. The U.S. Supreme Court accepted her theory of sexual harassment in 1986. Here MacKinnon collaborates with eminent authorities to appraise what has been accomplished in the field and what still needs to be done. An introductory essay by Reva Siegel considers how sexual harassment came to be regulated as sex discrimination. Contributors discuss how law can best address sexual harassment; the importance and definition of consent and unwelcomeness; issues of same-sex harassment; questions of institutional responsibility for sexual harassment in both employment and education settings; considerations of freedom of speech; effects of sexual harassment doctrine on gender and racial justice; and transnational approaches to the problem. An afterword by MacKinnon assesses the changes wrought by sexual harassment law in the past quarter century. /DIV
This monumental study of medieval law and sexual conduct explores the origin and develpment of the Christian church's sex law and the systems of belief upon which that law rested. Focusing on the Church's own legal system of canon law, James A. Brundage offers a comprehensive history of legal doctrines–covering the millennium from A.D. 500 to 1500–concerning a wide variety of sexual behavior, including marital sex, adultery, homosexuality, concubinage, prostitution, masturbation, and incest. His survey makes strikingly clear how the system of sexual control in a world we have half-forgotten has shaped the world in which we live today. The regulation of marriage and divorce as we know it today, together with the outlawing of bigamy and polygamy and the imposition of criminal sanctions on such activities as sodomy, fellatio, cunnilingus, and bestiality, are all based in large measure upon ideas and beliefs about sexual morality that became law in Christian Europe in the Middle Ages. "Brundage's book is consistently learned, enormously useful, and frequently entertaining. It is the best we have on the relationships between theological norms, legal principles, and sexual practice."—Peter Iver Kaufman, Church History
In Sexual States Jyoti Puri tracks the efforts to decriminalize homosexuality in India to show how the regulation of sexuality is fundamentally tied to the creation and enduring existence of the state. Since 2001 activists have attempted to rewrite Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which in addition to outlawing homosexual behavior is often used to prosecute a range of activities and groups that are considered perverse. Having interviewed activists and NGO workers throughout five metropolitan centers, investigated crime statistics and case law, visited various state institutions, and met with the police, Puri found that Section 377 is but one element of how homosexuality is regulated in India. This statute works alongside the large and complex system of laws, practices, policies, and discourses intended to mitigate sexuality's threat to the social order while upholding the state as inevitable, legitimate, and indispensable. By highlighting the various means through which the regulation of sexuality constitutes India's heterogeneous and fragmented "sexual state," Puri provides a conceptual framework to understand the links between sexuality and the state more broadly.
Convicted sex offenders released from custody at the end of their criminal sentences pose a risk for re-offense. In many US states, Sexually Violent Predator (SVP) laws have been enacted that allow for the post-prison preventive detention of high risk sex offenders. SVP laws require the courts to make dispositions that protect the public from harm while at the same time respecting the civil rights of the offender. This book describes these SVP laws, their constitutionality, and aspects of their operation. Courts hear expert risk testimony based heavily on the results of actuarial risk assessment. Problems associated with this testimony include the lack of a theory of recidivism risk, bias due to human decision-making, and the insularity of scholarship and practice along developmental lines. The authors propose changes in legal standards, as well as a unified developmental model that treats sexual violence as an "evolving" condition, with roots traceable to childhood and paths that extend into adolescence and adulthood.
