Sex Equality: Lesbian and Gay Rights

by Catharine A. MacKinnon

In SEX EQUALITY: LESBIAN AND GAY RIGHTS, the argument that gay and lesbian rights are sex equality rights is explored and advanced in depth with wide-ranging materials from theory, movements, and case law. Issues of language, history, and culture, as well as choice of doctrine of privacy, sexual orientation discrimination, and various approaches to sex equality, are presented.

The first half of the book, Foundations, examines conventional sex equality law and theory; the second half, Applications, extends the analysis onto social terrain not generally recognized by law as posing sex discrimination questions.

1190 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2003

About the author

Catharine A. MacKinnon is the Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan and the James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School (long-term). She holds a BA from Smith College, a JD from Yale Law School, and a PhD in political science from Yale, and specializes in sex equality issues under international and domestic (including comparative and constitutional) law.

Prof. MacKinnon pioneered the legal claim for sexual harassment and, with Andrea Dworkin, created ordinances recognizing pornography as a civil rights violation and the Swedish model for abolishing prostitution. The Supreme Court of Canada has largely accepted her approaches to equality, pornography, and hate speech, which have been influential internationally as well. Representing Bosnian women survivors of Serbian genocidal sexual atrocities, she won with co-counsel a damage award of $745 million in August 2000 in Kadic v. Karadzic under the Alien Tort Act, the first recognition of rape as an act of genocide.

(source: law.umich.edu)