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Resource Types: Books

Penningroth reveals how African Americans have thought about, talked about, and used the law from the era of slavery to the 1970s.

The Making of Lawyers’ Careers (forthcoming 2023) is the capstone book project for ABF’s After the JD Project, a compilation of 20 years of research into the legal profession.

This volume offers the first comprehensive account of the intricate ways in which Buddhist and constitutional ideas merged, interacted, and co-evolved.

Stanley S. Surrey was the most prominent mid-twentieth-century American tax law academic. Ajay K. Mehrotra presents his unpublished professional memoirs.

This book details the reckoning resulting from the historic and recurring presence of racialized politics, policing, and crime in Chicago.

This volume, featuring Shari Seidman Diamond, discusses the importance of survey evidence in trademark and false advertising litigation.

This volume by Tom Ginsburg surveys the state of democracy-enhancing international law and provides ideas for a way forward admist rising authoritarianism.

This book by Justin Richland examines how Native Americans engage with the U.S. legal system while maintaining their own jurisdictional authority and culture.

This book, edited with Shari Diamond, offers a comprehensive and comparative picture of how nations use lay people in legal decision-making.

Engel and Lyle explore how state powers and media have turned the concept of “dignity” in the LGBTQ+ rights movement into a tool to disempower the community.

  • Books

Disrupting Dignity: Rethinking Power and Progress in LGBTQ Lives

Stephen M. Engel and Timothy S. Lyle
June 2021

From New York University Press:

In 2015, when the Supreme Court declared that gay and lesbian couples were entitled to the “equal dignity” of marriage recognition, the concept of dignity became a cornerstone for gay rights victories. In Disrupting Dignity, Stephen M. Engel and Timothy S. Lyle explore the darker side of dignity, tracing its invocation across public health politics, popular culture, and law from the early years of the HIV/AIDS crisis to our current moment.

With a compassionate eye, Engel and Lyle detail how politicians, policymakers, media leaders, and even some within LGBTQ+ communities have used the concept of dignity to shame and disempower members of those communities. They convincingly show how dignity—and the subsequent chase to be defined by its terms—became a tool of the state and the marketplace thereby limiting its more radical potential.

Ultimately, Engel and Lyle challenge our understanding of dignity as an unquestioned good. They expose the constraining work it accomplishes and the exclusionary ideas about respectability that it promotes. To restore a lost past and point to a more inclusive future, they assert the worthiness of queer lives beyond dignity’s limits.