How equal is equality? Discussions about same-sex marriage in Portugal

In Portugal, public and political discussions about same-sex marriage have been going on since the 1990s. In 2010, same-sex marriage was legalized under intense dispute since it excludes same-sex couples from adoption and reproductive rights. During parliamentary debates, political parties and civil organizations linked to the Catholic Church resorted to conflicting ideas of ‘equality’ and ‘difference’ to advance their claims. In this article, we analyse the contents of petitions, bills and parliamentary proceedings concerning the legal recognition of same-sex unions, highlighting the presence of conflicting notions of equality linked to pervasive beliefs about the inadequacy of homo-erotic desire and practices

Telling stories about European Union Health Law: The emergence of a new field of law

The ideational narrative power of law has now solidified, and continues to solidify, ‘European Union health law’, into an entity with a distinctive legal identity. EU health law was previously seen as either non-existent, or so broad as to be meaningless, or as existing only in relations between EU law and health (the ‘and’ approach), or as consisting of a body of barely or loosely connected policy domains (the ‘patchwork’ approach). The process of bringing EU health law into being is a process of narration. The ways in which EU health law is narrated (and continues to be narrated) involve three main groups of actors: the legislature, courts and the academy