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.”