GAY & LESBIAN LAW

PENN LAW FACULTY

TOLL PUBLIC INTEREST CENTER PARTNERS AT PENN

PRO BONO PLACEMENTS

American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania
Berner & Klaw
Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN)
Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations

Penn Law Courses

This seminar changes every year to cover cases and legal issues that occur during the term and throughout the previous two years. Topics to be covered this semester will include the terrorism cases, the torture memos, gay marriage, the right to die, affirmative action, sentencing guidelines, the death penalty, election law controversies, and other topics that come up during the term.

This survey course will provide an introduction to the field of family law. It will examine the importance of “family” and “marriage” as categories of legal regulation. The course will cover the legal requirements for entering into marriage, the legal consequences of marital status, common law incidents of marriage and reforms of the common law, legal responses to domestic violence, and alternatives to marriage. It will explore changing and contested definitions of marriage and family, including the ongoing political and legal debates over same-sex marriage and over the recognition of alternatives to marriage, such as civil unions and domestic partnerships. Family contracts, such as premarital agreements and separation agreements, will be a topic of study. The course will examine rules concerning family dissolution, including traditional and “no-fault” divorce, property division, spousal support, child support, and custody. It will also consider how family law determines legal parenthood and regulates adoption and alternative reproductive technologies. The course is intended to introduce students to family law as a dynamic field of law, one in which, in recent decades, there has been significant modification in doctrine. Another aim is to expose students to how family law intersects with the social sciences and with many other fields of law, including property, contracts, constitutional law, conflict of laws, and torts.   

This course will study legal material as expressive of, and as supportive of, differing concepts of equality and its role as a social value, rather than as simply part of a course of doctrinal development or a system of analytical reasoning. Its premise is that differences in those concepts are often not recognized, and the contestability and bases of one's approach to equality issues are often not acknowledged. Substantively, the course will include aspects of legal regulation affecting the status of racial, religious and ethnic "minorities," women, gay and lesbian people, and people perceived as disabled, as well as, the interaction between the law and inequality in the distribution of wealth and income. It will do this in part by examining "antidiscrimination," "equal protection," or "poverty" law, but will focus also on issues of equality implicit in such mainstream first-year subjects as Procedure and Contracts.

In this course, we will examine some of the rapidly expanding legal responses to developing sexual orientation and gender identity communities. Substantive issues to be covered include the recognition of lesbian and gay relationships, including marriage and civil unions, employment discrimination and sexual harassment, gender identity issues, and the rights of expression, association, citizenship and political representation. We will look at trends in these issues through out the country and analyze the law's changing regulation of these fundamentally diverse and fluid communities.