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AIDS, Law, and the Rhetoric of Sexuality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Joe Rollins
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Abstract

Models of judicial decisionmaking have traditionally relied on legal, political, and contextual variables, emphasizing judges' background, litigants' rights claims, and the relative social status of the parties involved. A recent scholarly expansion has brought cultural variables into the equation, indicating that judicial scholarship might usefully include narrative and rhetoric as measures of legal consciousness. This project examines AIDS-related litigation from the U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals between 1983 and 1995, emphasizing the social construction of sexuality. It uses content-based coding and stepwise probit analysis to evaluate the importance of controlling for language that depicts AIDS as a “gay disease” and its association with death and plague metaphors.

Type
Papers of General Interest
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , 2002 , pp. 161 - 191
Copyright
Copyright © 2002 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

This project was funded in part by the GLBA Scholarship Fund of Santa Barbara and was supported by the Political Science and Law and Society programs at UC Santa Barbara and the Political Science department at Queens College. I am grateful to Steve Pfeffer, Tyler Trull, and Frank McQuarry for research assistance, and to the following individuals for their patience and very useful comments: M. Kent Jennings, H. N. Hirsch, John Moore, Beth Schneider, Peter Hegarty, Alex Reichl, Mary Bushnell, Alyson Cole, Paisley Currah, and Elizabeth Borer. Joseph Sanders and the anonymous reviewers from the Law & Society Review have been especially gracious and helpful. And as with everything else in my life, I would have been lost without Parviez Hosseini.

References

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