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LGBT Law Reading Room to Open Today
By Charlotte Hsu The first-ever comprehensive collection of media related to sexual orientation law will be housed at the School of Law in the Williams Project Reading Room that opens today. The Charles R. Williams Project, a think tank on sexual orientation law, was created in fall 2001 to support scholarship and inform various audiences, including judges, lawyers and policymakers, about an area of law in which few people have expertise. "Our role is developing the ideas and theories that will lead to the advancement of lesbian and gay rights ... producing reliable data and disseminating that information to the public and policymakers," said Bradley Sears, director of the project. Sears said it is especially important to educate judges in the field, as most judges residing today received their education before the emergence of sexual orientation law as an important area of study and before college courses were offered on the subject. Sexual orientation law is a vital field because it is a channel through which the rights of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transsexuals can be advanced, said William Rubenstein, faculty director of the project. "Traditionally, the legal system has worked to oppress gay people, and sexual orientation law focuses on all the myriad efforts to change the legal system's relationship to gay people's lives," Rubenstein said. "People are looking at the law as a mechanism for social change." Sexual orientation law has the potential to have a lasting impact on not only the LGBT community but on the lives of all people, said Pamela Karlan, a professor at Stanford Law School who will be attending the opening of the reading room today. "It's also important in the more general development in constitutional and anti-discrimination law," Karlan said. Some areas of law that could be affected are equality and rights to privacy. Rubenstein argued before the New York Court of Appeals in 1989 in a case where, for the first time, a state supreme court recognized a gay couple as the legal equivalent of a family. He said though civil rights of the LGBT community have progressed considerably since then, there is more work to be done. "In some forty states it's still perfectly legal for an employer to fire someone for their orientation," Rubenstein said. "In California we have such protection and it's taken for granted." The opening of the Williams Project Reading Room will be preceded by an update, which will be held annually, that will include a discussion on Lawrence and Garner v. Texas, a case contesting Texas' sodomy law that is to be decided by the Supreme Court this year. If the Supreme Court rules against Texas, it could issue a narrow opinion that would strike down the Texas law and laws in Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma that prohibit sodomy among only gay people, said Karlan, who will be attending the update as a guest speaker on the case. Another possibility, Rubenstein said, is for the court to issue a ruling that could have a tremendous impact on the civil rights of people belonging to the LGBT community. "They could rule in a broad fashion, saying strong things about discrimination against gay people, setting high standards," Rubenstein said. "It'll be a very important social victory." A ruling against Texas in Lawrence and Garner v. Texas would be just one step in a two-decade journey that continues to move toward securing civil rights for the LGBT community, Sears said. "The right to marry still doesn't exist in any state," Sears said. "Most states have a law specifically saying only people of opposite sexes can get married. Sexual orientation law is very important and we still have a lot of challenges." | ||||||