Same-Sex Couples and Immigration in the United States

This report uses Census Bureau data to provide a portrait of same-sex couples affected by United States immigration policy. Using data from the American Community Survey (ACS) it presents demographic profiles of three different types of same-sex couples: binational couples in which one partner is a U.S. citizen and one is not; dual non-citizen couples; and couples that include a naturalized U.S. citizen. Binational couples and non-citizen couples in which only one partner is a permanent resident would gain protections and rights if U.S. immigration law were changed to treat same-sex couples as their different-sex counterparts are treated. As of 2010, nearly 79,200 same-sex couples living in the United States include at least one partner who is currently not a U.S citizen or was naturalized as a citizen. Of the nearly 650,000 same-sex couples in the US: 4.4% or 28,574 are binational couples (one partner is a U.S. citizen and one is not)1.8% or 11,442 are dual non-citizen couples6.1% or 39,176 are dual citizen couples with at least one naturalized partne

Revoking Rights

In important areas of law, such as the vested rights doctrine, and in several important cases--including those involving the continued validity of same-sex marriages and the Affordable Care Act--courts have scrutinized the revocation of rights once granted more closely than the failure to provide the rights in the first place. This project claims that in so doing, courts seek to preserve important constitutional interests. On the one hand, based on our understanding of rights possession, rights revocation implicates autonomy interests of the rights holder to a greater degree than a failure to afford rights at the outset. On the other hand, the institution revoking rights is more likely to exhibit impermissible behavior when taking away rather than failing to provide the right. This is the first of two articles, and tackles the first of the project\u27s claims. It examines the autonomy interests of the rights holder that are implicated in rights revocation. It relies on philosophical understandings of ownership, backed by empirical research, to argue that our identities and indeed, our ability to think of ourselves as separate beings apart from the collective, are partially based on what we possess at a given point in time. The rights we possess both allow us to do things that aid in our flourishing and allow us to conceive of ourselves as individuals. Important legal concepts, such as the vested rights doctrine, among others, rely on this understanding of rights. However, the notion of rights, possession, and revocation are all constructed and subject to contestation. Courts and other institutional actors often face adversaries making (conflicting) rights claims. They must determine when a change in rights allocation is a rights revocation or a restoration of the status quo ante. In taking sides, courts and legislatures adopt rights revocation/restoration frames, claiming that the winners have rights that are being restored, and that losers never had rights to begin with, or that their rights existed temporarily subject to correction. In so doing, institutional actors also shore up their own legitimacy, often at the cost of each other. This dynamic provides an insight, not just into the work that rights do in constructing individuals, but also in developing institutional legitimacy. It shows how institutions themselves exploit rights claims in order to--consciously or not--further their own agendas

Drugs\u27 Other Side Effects

Drugs often induce unintended, adverse physiological reactions in those that take them—what we commonly refer to as “side-effects.” However, drugs can produce other, broader, unintended, even non-physiological harms. For example, some argue that taking Truvada, a drug that prevents HIV transmission, increases promiscuity and decreases condom use. Expensive Hepatitis C treatments threaten to bankrupt state Medicaid programs. BiDil, which purported to treat heart conditions for self-identified African-Americans, has been criticized for reifying racial categories. Although the Food & Drug Administration (“FDA”) has broad discretion under the Food, Drugs, and Cosmetics Act (“FDCA”) to regulate drugs, it generally considers only traditional side-effects. Neither the agency, courts, nor scholars have offered a systematic account of how to regulate collateral effects that do not involve direct physiological harm to the drug’s recipient. This Article more clearly defines these harms and explains why and how the FDA should take them into account. It starts by offering three characteristics that distinguish these harms from those the FDA traditionally considers. First, unlike traditional harms, these harms are often the indirect rather than direct result of drug consumption. Second, they often affect third parties rather than the person that ingests the drug. Third, they might often raise non-health considerations, such as economic or moral concerns. Both ethically and legally, the FDA should take into account such indirect, third-party, and non-health harms to some degree at least. Bioethical considerations, administrative accountability and practice, as well as pragmatic policy interests, all counsel considering these harms. But how should the FDA do so? As the Article explains, the FDCA offers a variety of choices for FDA intervention, ranging in intensity from flat approval refusals to mandating labeling or prescription guidelines. In most cases, various considerations suggest that more limited forms of intervention are usually appropriate to address these harms

Revoking Rights

In important areas of law, such as the vested rights doctrine, and in several important cases--including those involving the continued validity of same-sex marriages and the Affordable Care Act--courts have scrutinized the revocation of rights once granted more closely than the failure to provide the rights in the first place. This project claims that in so doing, courts seek to preserve important constitutional interests. On the one hand, based on our understanding of rights possession, rights revocation implicates autonomy interests of the rights holder to a greater degree than a failure to afford rights at the outset. On the other hand, the institution revoking rights is more likely to exhibit impermissible behavior when taking away rather than failing to provide the right. This is the first of two articles, and tackles the first of the project\u27s claims. It examines the autonomy interests of the rights holder that are implicated in rights revocation. It relies on philosophical understandings of ownership, backed by empirical research, to argue that our identities and indeed, our ability to think of ourselves as separate beings apart from the collective, are partially based on what we possess at a given point in time. The rights we possess both allow us to do things that aid in our flourishing and allow us to conceive of ourselves as individuals. Important legal concepts, such as the vested rights doctrine, among others, rely on this understanding of rights. However, the notion of rights, possession, and revocation are all constructed and subject to contestation. Courts and other institutional actors often face adversaries making (conflicting) rights claims. They must determine when a change in rights allocation is a rights revocation or a restoration of the status quo ante. In taking sides, courts and legislatures adopt rights revocation/restoration frames, claiming that the winners have rights that are being restored, and that losers never had rights to begin with, or that their rights existed temporarily subject to correction. In so doing, institutional actors also shore up their own legitimacy, often at the cost of each other. This dynamic provides an insight, not just into the work that rights do in constructing individuals, but also in developing institutional legitimacy. It shows how institutions themselves exploit rights claims in order to--consciously or not--further their own agendas

Note, Created in Its Image: The Race Analogy, Gay Identity, and Gay Litigation in the 1950s-1970s

Existing accounts of early gay rights litigation largely focus on how the suppression and liberation of gay identity affected early activism. This Note helps complicate these dynamics, arguing that gay identity was not just suppressed and then liberated, but substantially transformed by activist efforts during this period, and that this transformation fundamentally affected the nature of gay activism. Gay organizers in the 1950s and 1960s moved from avoiding identity-based claims to analogizing gays to African-Americans. By transforming themselves in the image of a successful black civil rights minority, activists attempted to win over skeptical courts in a period when equal protection doctrine was still quite fluid. Furthermore, through this attempted identity transformation, activists replaced stigmatizing medico-religious models of homosexuality with self-affirming civil rights-based models. This identity transformation through analogy cemented gay rank-and-file perception of the social treatment they faced as unjust, and helped determine what remedies gays would seek. For example, defensive gay litigation of the 1950s soon gave way to the affirmative impact-type litigation of the civil rights movement. Similarly, in the image of the 1960s racial justice movement, 1970s gays began to pursue legal acceptance of gay marriage rather than first seeking intermediate relationship recognition. Thus, analogies and identity claims can be useful tools for perceiving and remedying oppression. They should, however, be tools that unite, not divide groups: gays and blacks, especially, should recognize their (contingent) commonalities, created as gays remade themselves in the image of blacks

Drugs\u27 Other Side Effects

Drugs often induce unintended, adverse physiological reactions in those that take them—what we commonly refer to as “side-effects.” However, drugs can produce other, broader, unintended, even non-physiological harms. For example, some argue that taking Truvada, a drug that prevents HIV transmission, increases promiscuity and decreases condom use. Expensive Hepatitis C treatments threaten to bankrupt state Medicaid programs. BiDil, which purported to treat heart conditions for self-identified African-Americans, has been criticized for reifying racial categories. Although the Food & Drug Administration (“FDA”) has broad discretion under the Food, Drugs, and Cosmetics Act (“FDCA”) to regulate drugs, it generally considers only traditional side-effects. Neither the agency, courts, nor scholars have offered a systematic account of how to regulate collateral effects that do not involve direct physiological harm to the drug’s recipient. This Article more clearly defines these harms and explains why and how the FDA should take them into account. It starts by offering three characteristics that distinguish these harms from those the FDA traditionally considers. First, unlike traditional harms, these harms are often the indirect rather than direct result of drug consumption. Second, they often affect third parties rather than the person that ingests the drug. Third, they might often raise non-health considerations, such as economic or moral concerns. Both ethically and legally, the FDA should take into account such indirect, third-party, and non-health harms to some degree at least. Bioethical considerations, administrative accountability and practice, as well as pragmatic policy interests, all counsel considering these harms. But how should the FDA do so? As the Article explains, the FDCA offers a variety of choices for FDA intervention, ranging in intensity from flat approval refusals to mandating labeling or prescription guidelines. In most cases, various considerations suggest that more limited forms of intervention are usually appropriate to address these harms

Revoking Rights

In important areas of law, such as the vested rights doctrine, and in several important cases--including those involving the continued validity of same-sex marriages and the Affordable Care Act--courts have scrutinized the revocation of rights once granted more closely than the failure to provide the rights in the first place. This project claims that in so doing, courts seek to preserve important constitutional interests. On the one hand, based on our understanding of rights possession, rights revocation implicates autonomy interests of the rights holder to a greater degree than a failure to afford rights at the outset. On the other hand, the institution revoking rights is more likely to exhibit impermissible behavior when taking away rather than failing to provide the right. This is the first of two articles, and tackles the first of the project\u27s claims. It examines the autonomy interests of the rights holder that are implicated in rights revocation. It relies on philosophical understandings of ownership, backed by empirical research, to argue that our identities and indeed, our ability to think of ourselves as separate beings apart from the collective, are partially based on what we possess at a given point in time. The rights we possess both allow us to do things that aid in our flourishing and allow us to conceive of ourselves as individuals. Important legal concepts, such as the vested rights doctrine, among others, rely on this understanding of rights. However, the notion of rights, possession, and revocation are all constructed and subject to contestation. Courts and other institutional actors often face adversaries making (conflicting) rights claims. They must determine when a change in rights allocation is a rights revocation or a restoration of the status quo ante. In taking sides, courts and legislatures adopt rights revocation/restoration frames, claiming that the winners have rights that are being restored, and that losers never had rights to begin with, or that their rights existed temporarily subject to correction. In so doing, institutional actors also shore up their own legitimacy, often at the cost of each other. This dynamic provides an insight, not just into the work that rights do in constructing individuals, but also in developing institutional legitimacy. It shows how institutions themselves exploit rights claims in order to--consciously or not--further their own agendas