Speaker to explore gay equality at UGA School of Law’s 106th Sibley Lecture

Abstract

Writer/Contact: Cindy H. Rice, 706/542-5172, cindyh@uga.edu

Athens, Ga. – "Noah's Curse and Paul's Admonition: Civil Rights, Religious Liberty, Gay Equality" is the title of the University of Georgia School of Law’s 106th Sibley Lecture to be delivered by Yale Law School Garver Professor of Jurisprudence William Eskridge Jr. His presentation will take place March 18 at 3:30 p.m. in classroom A of the School of Law. Admission to the event is free, and all are welcome to attend.

Should equal rights for gay people give way to liberties for religious people? According to Eskridge, a similar question was posed a generation ago – Should equal rights for people of color give way to the liberties of religious people? His lecture will explore this controversial parallel and its implications.

Since joining the Yale faculty in 1998, Eskridge has taught Constitutional Law, Legislation, Theories of Statutory Interpretation, and Sexuality, Gender and the Law. With more than 20 years in the legal academy, he has also taught at Georgetown University, New York University and Harvard University. Before beginning his teaching career, Eskridge clerked for Judge Edward Weinfeld of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and practiced law at Shea & Gardner.

He has published a field-establishing casebook, three monographs and dozens of law review articles articulating a legal and political framework for proper state treatment of sexual and gender minorities. The historical materials in his book Gaylaw: Challenging the Apartheid of the Closet formed the basis for an amicus brief he drafted for the Cato Institute and for much of the U.S. Supreme Court’s analysis in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which invalidated consensual sodomy laws.

Eskridge earned his B.A. summa cum laude from Davidson College and his masters degree from Harvard University. He then earned his J.D. from Yale, where he was the note and topics editor of The Yale Law Journal.

The Sibley Lecture Series, established in 1964 by the Charles Loridans Foundation of Atlanta in tribute to the late John A. Sibley, is designed to attract outstanding legal scholars of national prominence to Georgia Law. Sibley was a 1911 graduate of the law school.

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