Showing papers on "Majority opinion published in 2020"

All the Best Polls Agree with Me: Bias in Evaluations of Political Polling

Abstract: Do Americans consider polling results an objective source of information? Experts tend to evaluate the credibility of polls based on the survey methods used, vendor track record, and data transparency, but it is unclear if the public does the same. In two different experimental studies—one focusing on candidate evaluations in the 2016 U.S. election and one on a policy issue—we find a significant factor in respondent assessments of polling credibility to be the poll results themselves. Respondents viewed polls as more credible when majority opinion matched their opinion. Moreover, we find evidence of attitude polarization after viewing polling results, suggesting motivated reasoning in the evaluations of political polls. These findings indicate that evaluations of polls are biased by motivated reasoning and suggest that such biases could constrain the possible impact of polls on political decision making.

Does Public Opinion Affect Political Speech

Abstract: Does public opinion affect political speech? Of particular interest is whether public opinion affects (i) what topics politicians address and (ii) what positions they endorse. We present evidence from Germany where the government was recently forced to declassify its public opinion research, allowing us to link the content of the research to subsequent speeches. Our causal identification strategy exploits the exogenous timing of the research's dissemination to cabinet members within a window of a few days. We find that exposure to public opinion research leads politicians to markedly change their speech. First, we show that linguistic similarity between political speech and public opinion research increases significantly after reports are passed on to the cabinet, suggesting that politicians change the topics they address. Second, we demonstrate that exposure to public opinion research alters politicians' substantive positions in the direction of majority opinion.

Voter and Majority Dynamics with Biased and Stubborn Agents

Abstract: We study binary opinion dynamics in a fully connected network of interacting agents. The agents are assumed to interact according to one of the following rules: (1) Voter rule: An updating agent simply copies the opinion of another randomly sampled agent; (2) Majority rule: An updating agent samples multiple agents and adopts the majority opinion in the selected group. We focus on the scenario where the agents are biased towards one of the opinions called the preferred opinion. Using suitably constructed branching processes, we show that under both rules the mean time to reach consensus is $$\varTheta (\log N)$$ , where N is the number of agents in the network. Furthermore, under the majority rule model, we show that consensus can be achieved on the preferred opinion with high probability even if it is initially the opinion of the minority. We also study the majority rule model when stubborn agents with fixed opinions are present. We find that the stationary distribution of opinions in the network in the large system limit using mean field techniques.

Phase Transition of a Non-Linear Opinion Dynamics with Noisy Interactions

Abstract: In several real Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), it has been observed that only weaker forms of metastable consensus are achieved, in which a large majority of agents agree on some opinion while other opinions continue to be supported by a (small) minority of agents. In this work, we take a step towards the investigation of metastable consensus for complex (non-linear) opinion dynamics by considering the famous Undecided-State dynamics in the binary setting, which is known to reach consensus exponentially faster than the Voter dynamics. We propose a simple form of uniform noise in which each message can change to another one with probability p and we prove that the persistence of a metastable consensus undergoes a phase transition for \(p=\frac{1}{6}\). In detail, below this threshold, we prove the system reaches with high probability a metastable regime where a large majority of agents keeps supporting the same opinion for polynomial time. Moreover, this opinion turns out to be the initial majority opinion, whenever the initial bias is slightly larger than its standard deviation. On the contrary, above the threshold, we show that the information about the initial majority opinion is “lost” within logarithmic time even when the initial bias is maximum. Interestingly, using a simple coupling argument, we show the equivalence between our noisy model above and the model where a subset of agents behave in a stubborn way.

Threshold Behavior of Democratic Opinion Dynamics

Abstract: Consider a community where initially, each individual is positive or negative regarding a reform proposal. In each round, individuals gather randomly in fixed rooms of different sizes, and all individuals in a room agree on the majority opinion in the room (with ties broken in favor of the negative opinion). The Galam model—introduced in statistical physics, specifically sociophysics—approximates this basic random process. We approach the model from a more mathematical perspective and study the threshold behavior and the consensus time of the model.

Knick and the Elephant in the Courtroom: Who Cares Least About Property Rights?

Abstract: One of the first cases to be argued in the Supreme Court’s 2018-19 term, and one of the last decided, Knick v. Township of Scott overruled a 1985 decision, Williamson County Regional Planning Commission v. Hamilton Bank of Johnson City, that required most regulatory takings claims against state and local governments to be filed in state court. Under the new procedural guidelines set forth in Chief Justice Roberts’ majority opinion in Knick, property owners claiming a violation of their rights under the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause can file suit for compensation directly in federal court. Although analysts and practitioners differed sharply on the wisdom and doctrinal justification for this change, all agreed that allowing takings plaintiffs access to federal court would result in a marked increase in the number of successful takings claims, resulting in significant new financial liability for overly zealous land use regulators. This Article examines that assumption and finds little support for it in the historical record. Even before Williamson County was handed down, many federal judges were adamant that they had no interest in adjudicating disputes arising from local land use policies. When such cases were nevertheless filed in federal court, they were routinely shunted to state court under the guise of abstention, even at the cost of ignoring the stated criteria of the various abstention doctrines. Finally, when federal takings claims have managed to avoid both Williamson County and abstention, they have seldom prevailed on the merits, and the few that have received awards of damages in the district courts have frequently been overturned on appeal. Whether property owners will find federal courts more hospitable to takings claims now than they were before Knick remains to be seen, but such an outcome can hardly be taken for granted.

The First Amendment v. reproductive rights: Crisis pregnancy centers, commercial speech, and marketplaces of misinformation

Abstract: This essay responds to the holding in National Institute of Family and Life Advocates (NIFLA) v. Becerra (2018), arguing that the signal contribution of the majority opinion is its attempt to move ...

Conformity Behavior in Group Playlist Creation

Abstract: A strong research record has evidenced that individuals tend to conform with a group's majority opinion. In contrast to existing literature that investigates conformity to a majority opinion against an objectively correct answer, the originality of our study lies in that we investigate conformity in a subjective context. The emphasis of our analysis lies on the "switching direction" in favor or against an item. In an online experiment, groups of five had to create a music playlist. A song was added to the playlist with an unanimous positive decision only. After seeing the other group members' ratings, participants had the opportunity to revise their own response. Results suggest different behavior for originally favored compared to disliked songs. For favored songs, one negative judgement by another group member was sufficient to induce participants to downvote the song. For disliked songs, in contrast, a majority of positive judgements was needed to induce participants to switch their vote.

Majority Opinion Diffusion in Social Networks: An Adversarial Approach

Abstract: We introduce and study a novel majority-based opinion diffusion model. Consider a graph $G$, which represents a social network. Assume that initially a subset of nodes, called seed nodes or early adopters, are colored either black or white, which correspond to positive or negative opinion regarding a consumer product or a technological innovation. Then, in each round an uncolored node, which is adjacent to at least one colored node, chooses the most frequent color among its neighbors. Consider a marketing campaign which advertises a product of poor quality and its ultimate goal is that more than half of the population believe in the quality of the product at the end of the opinion diffusion process. We focus on three types of attackers which can select the seed nodes in a deterministic or random fashion and manipulate almost half of them to adopt a positive opinion toward the product (that is, to choose black color). We say that an attacker succeeds if a majority of nodes are black at the end of the process. Our main purpose is to characterize classes of graphs where an attacker cannot succeed. In particular, we prove that if the maximum degree of the underlying graph is not too large or if it has strong expansion properties, then it is fairly resilient to such attacks. Furthermore, we prove tight bounds on the stabilization time of the process (that is, the number of rounds it needs to end) in both settings of choosing the seed nodes deterministically and randomly. We also provide several hardness results for some optimization problems regarding stabilization time and choice of seed nodes.

Voter and Majority Dynamics with Biased and Stubborn Agents

Abstract: We study binary opinion dynamics in a fully connected network of interacting agents. The agents are assumed to interact according to one of the following rules: (1) Voter rule: An updating agent simply copies the opinion of another randomly sampled agent; (2) Majority rule: An updating agent samples multiple agents and adopts the majority opinion in the selected group. We focus on the scenario where the agents are biased towards one of the opinions called the {\em preferred opinion}. Using suitably constructed branching processes, we show that under both rules the mean time to reach consensus is $\Theta(\log N)$, where $N$ is the number of agents in the network. Furthermore, under the majority rule model, we show that consensus can be achieved on the preferred opinion with high probability even if it is initially the opinion of the minority. We also study the majority rule model when stubborn agents with fixed opinions are present. We find that the stationary distribution of opinions in the network in the large system limit using mean field techniques.

Separate Opinion Writing Under Mandatory Appellate Jurisdiction: Three‐Judge District Court Panels and the Voting Rights Act

Abstract: Most of the empirical work on separate opinion writing by lower federal court judges examines the U.S. Courts of Appeals. Given the Supreme Court's discretionary jurisdiction, it is argued that dissenting opinions operate as a cue signaling that a case is worthy of review. Concurrences, on the other hand, allow judges to join dispositional majorities while still expressing differences in legal reasoning from the majority. Likely in an effort to minimize dissent, the behavior of circuit court judges is found to be less influenced by ideology when potential dissenters serve with them. Despite the specter of Supreme Court review, these works generally find that the motivation to write separately is based largely in ideologically differences among panelists and less so on preferences of the Supreme Court. What, however, does separate opinion writing look like when the Court's jurisdiction is mandatory, as it is over three‐judge district court panels? Among other uses required by law, these district court panels are used to adjudicate cases arising under the Voting Rights Act of 1965. These panels also differ from the traditional judicial structure by placing district court judges, who traditionally decide cases individually, in a multimember setting with another district court judge and a circuit court judge. Examining separate opinion writing on these panels, we find that ideological distance from the majority opinion writer is still an important factor. This, however, is conditioned by the preferences of the Supreme Court, which exert a much stronger influence over behavior than they do in the traditional appellate court setting.

Status characteristics and their intersectionality: majority opinion assignment in state supreme courts

Abstract: We test whether justices’ traits – race, gender, age, previous judicial experience, education, and tenure – are associated with opinion assignment patterns as suggested by status characteristics th...

Has Federal Indian Law Finally Arrived at 'The Far End of the Trail of Tears'?

Abstract: This essay examines the United States Supreme Court’s July 9, 2020 decision in McGirt v. Oklahoma, which held that the historic boundaries of the Creek reservation remain intact, and argues that the decision likely signals a sea change in the course of federal Indian law of the magnitude of Obergefell v. Hodges in the LGBT rights arena. The essay shows how the opinion lays a very strong foundation for a much-needed return to traditional federal Indian law principles, respectful treatment of tribal governments as a third sovereign in the American system, and an understanding of fairness from the perspective of tribes and Native individuals. The possible effects of Justice Barrett's replacement of Justice Ginsburg on the Court's future federal Indian law jurisprudence are also explored. The essay concludes with the hope that Justice Gorsuch’s majority opinion will foster predictability in the wildly unstable area of disestablishment and diminishment jurisprudence, as well as in other facets of federal Indian law.

The Pacta Sunt Servanda Principle or the Limits of Interpretation: the Gabčíkovo-Nagymaros Case Revisited

Abstract: The Gabcikovo-Nagymaros case is particularly well-known for its clarification and specification of many questions of treaty law. Both Hungary and Slovakia presented numerous arguments that the 1977 Treaty concerning the construction and operation of the Gabcikovo-Nagymaros System of Locks had terminated or been suspended, or had rightfully been departed from. The International Court of Justice (ICJ, the Court), applying the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT) on the basis of it largely codifying customary international law, responded by emphasizing the stability of treaty relations in light of the pacta sunt servanda principle in all respects. Despite the clarity seemingly surrounding the pacta sunt servanda principle and its role in international law, questions continue to emerge regarding the relationship between this ‘pillar’ of treaty law and the limits of treaty interpretation. Where does rightful interpretation in application of the pacta sunt servanda principle end? Where does an undue revision of the treaty — not within the confines of the pacta sunt servanda principle — start? These questions were at the heart of the Court’s discussion of the pacta sunt servanda principle when drawing the line between interpretation and approximate application of the 1977 Treaty. The Court’s majority opinion in the Gabcikovo-Nagymaros case and a number of opinions and declarations appended to the Judgment therefore prove particularly valuable to clarify these questions. Hence, on the basis thereof, the two techniques of treaty interpretation stretching the limits of the pacta sunt servanda principle are discussed in the following: firstly, the principle of approximate application, rejected by the Court; and secondly, the technique of evolutionary interpretation, as applied by the Court itself. On the basis thereof, it is concluded that the upholding of the principle of pacta sunt servanda in the case at hand indeed reaffirmed the stability of treaty relations. At the same time, however, it did not and does not necessarily respond to the political reality on the ground.

Gender Diversity, Women’s Leadership, and Consensus in State Supreme Courts

Abstract: In this article, we argue that the leadership of women as chief justice or the majority opinion author, as well as an increased presence of women on the panel, should increase the likelihood of una...

Summarisation with Majority Opinion

Abstract: This paper introduces a method called SUmmarisation with Majority Opinion (SUMO) that integrates and extends two prior approaches for abstractively and extractively summarising UK House of Lords cases. We show how combining two previously distinct lines of work allows us to better address the challenges resulting from this court’s unusual tradition of publishing the opinions of multiple judges with no formal statement of the reasoning (if any) agreed by a majority. We do this by applying natural language processing and machine learning, Conditional Random Fields (CRFs), to a data set we created by fusing together expert-annotated sentence labels from the HOLJ corpus of rhetorical role summary relevance with the ASMO corpus of agreement statement and majority opinion. By using CRFs and a bespoke summary generator on our enriched data set, we show a significant quantitative F1-score improvement in rhetorical role and relevance classification of 10-15% over the state-of-the-art SUM system; and we show a significant qualitative improvement in the quality of our summaries, which closely resemble goldstandard multi-judge abstracts according to a proof-of-principle user study.

Opinion Dynamics under Voter and Majority Rule Models with Biased and Stubborn Agents.

Abstract: We study binary opinion dynamics in a fully connected network of interacting agents. The agents are assumed to interact according to one of the following rules: (1) Voter rule: An updating agent simply copies the opinion of another randomly sampled agent; (2) Majority rule: An updating agent samples multiple agents and adopts the majority opinion in the selected group. We focus on the scenario where the agents are biased towards one of the opinions called the {\em preferred opinion}. Using suitably constructed branching processes, we show that under both rules the mean time to reach consensus is $\Theta(\log N)$, where $N$ is the number of agents in the network. Furthermore, under the majority rule model, we show that consensus can be achieved on the preferred opinion with high probability even if it is initially the opinion of the minority. We also study the majority rule model when stubborn agents with fixed opinions are present. We find that the stationary distribution of opinions in the network in the large system limit using mean field techniques.

Defense Against the Dark Arts: Justice Jackson, Justice Kennedy and the No-Compelled-Speech Doctrine

Abstract: According to Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, “The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought." If this is so, and I believe it is, then the greatest threat to freedom, the darkest of the dark arts of government, occurs when the law compels persons to speak and thus commandeers their intellectual autonomy. And only a vibrant First Amendment is an adequate defense against this darkest of the dark arts. The purpose of this Article is to trace the Supreme Court's First Amendment jurisprudence protecting speaker autonomy and the "right not to speak" from its origins in the flag salute cases to the present. In particular, I will focus on two magnificent judicial opinions defending this fundamental free speech right, the majority opinion of Justice Jackson in West Virginia State Bd. Of Educ. v. Barnette, and the concurring opinion of Justice Kennedy in Nat 'I Inst. Of Family & Life Advocates v. Becerra (NIFLA). These two eloquent and powerful opinions are true landmarks of liberty, strong shields against authoritarian government and its tyrannical attempts to coerce ideological orthodoxy by compelling individuals to say things they wish not to say. In Justice Kennedy's case, his concurring opinion in NIFLA was issued near the end of his final Term on the Supreme Court, and thus it represents an exclamation point on his wonderful legacy of protecting freedom of thought and freedom of speech. Although these opinions are separated by seventy-five years, they share a common understanding of the importance of the First Amendment for the protection of intellectual autonomy from authoritarian officials and compelled ideological conformity.

Unleashed and Unbound: Living Textualism in Bostock v. Clayton County

Abstract: In Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia the Supreme Court held that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits—and has always prohibited—discrimination by employers on the basis of homosexuality or of what the Court called transgender status. How so? The statute forbids employers to intentionally discriminate against any individual “because of such individual’s . . . sex.” The Court asserted that discrimination because of homosexuality or transgenderism violates the unambiguous text of the statute. This result in this case decision would not have been much of surprise in the period during which Justice Anthony Kennedy held the controlling vote on issues dealing with sex, and especially with homosexuality. But the 6-3 majority opinion in Bostock was written by Justice Neil Gorsuch and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts. The majority opinion has virtually no policy analysis or political rhetoric, and it lacks the kind of inflated pseudo-philosophic pontification that Kennedy favored. Instead, the Bostock opinion presents itself as nothing more than a straightforward application of the legally binding text of the statute. Justice Gorsuch even goes out of his way to cast himself as the legitimate intellectual successor to the man whom he literally succeeded: the high priest of statutory textualism, Justice Antonin Scalia. Leaving others to speculate about judicial motives, I propose that Bostock is an extension of a theory commonly called “living originalism.” During the last decade, this approach to constitutional interpretation has been gaining steam in the legal academy. Bostock has now effectively extended that approach beyond the academy, beyond the field of constitutional interpretation, and even beyond the limits recognized by its academic adherents. Bostock is a demonstrably outlandish judicial performance. Outlandish though it is, Bostock might be used by the Court to correct one of its most egregiously mistaken lines of case law. Although Title VII unambiguously forbids employers to discriminate on the basis of race or sex, the Court has upheld quotas and preferences explicitly based on the race or sex of people in favored groups. In 1991, Congress amended Title VII by adding a new provision whose text unambiguously overruled the decisions that upheld these preferences. Even without using the peculiar new form of textualism deployed in Bostock, the Supreme Court should have recognized that the 1991 amendment deprived these precedents of any binding force they may once have had. The Court has not done so, but Bostock now imperatively requires the Court to declare that Title VII forbids, and has always forbidden, these illegal employment practices.

Obergefell and the Dignitary Harm of Identity-Based Military Service Exclusion

Abstract: Author(s): Merriam, Eric | Abstract: In Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court recognized the right of same-sex couples to be married.[1] In doing so, the Court remedied the demeaning exclusion of a historically disadvantaged minority group from a nationally cherished institution, noting the stigma and injury the exclusion caused. The sweeping language of the majority opinion in Obergefell and its focus on exclusionary harm suggested a new era of inclusion for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans.[2] This Article argues that the exclusion of transgender persons from military service constitutes the type of harm Obergefell and the Equal Protection Clause prohibit.This Article first provides background on the pre-Obergefell landscape for constitutional challenges to military service exclusion. Second, the Article assesses Obergefell’s jurisprudential expansions of substantive due process and equal protection doctrines through its recognition of the exclusionary harm done to gay people by excluding them from the institution of marriage. The Article uses the Court’s exclusionary harm analysis to assess the exclusion of a historically disadvantaged minority group from another nationally cherished institution: the Trump Administration’s ban on transgender persons serving in the military. Third, the Article argues that Obergefell advanced a new equal protection doctrine: the government may not demean a group by excluding it from an important positive right resulting in dignitary harm. The Article concludes that the transgender military ban constitutes the type of dignitary harm that Obergefell and the Equal Protection Clause prohibit. [1]. Obergefell v. Hodges, 135 S. Ct. 2584, 2608 (2015). [2]. While the opinion did not explicitly address transgender rights, the Court wrote, “[t]he Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, [including the right] to define and express their identity.” Id. at 2593. Some commentators observed this extended protections to transgender people. See, e.g., Scott Skinner-Thompson, How Obergefell Could Help Transgender Rights, Slate (June 26, 2015), https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/06/obergefell-and-trans-rights-the-supreme-courts-endorsement-of-identity-expression-could-help-trans-activism.html [https://perma.cc/ZF3W-PVWP]; J. Courtney Sullivan, What Marriage Equality Means for Transgender Rights, N.Y. Times (July 16, 2015), https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/16/opinion/what-marriage-equality-means-for-transgender-rights.html [https://perma.cc/23M3-T2NV].

Correlation of Segregation and Social Networks' Majority Opinion in the Social Impact Model

Abstract: Everyone may influence others to change or persist in their current opinions via face-to-face or online communications Predicting a society's majority opinion about a specific topic is an interesting challenge with many applications, eg, predicting social movements, political votings, economical marketing Among the various opinion formation models, the social impact model of opinion formation is very suitable for online social networks and online communities In this model, three main factors affect a society's overall opinion: (1) the initial population of opinion groups, (2) the noise of the individuals to be persuaded or persist on their opinions, and (3) the topology of the network of interactions among individuals In this research, to analyze the effect of segregation on the dynamics of opinion in the model, we assumed a noise-free model Furthermore, the network of individuals is a scale-free network, and the initial population size of both opinion groups are the same with randomly assigned opinions Using an agent-based modeling approach, we studied how the segregation of opinion groups may affect the dynamics of opinion formation The results reveal that there is a strong correlation between segregation and the trend of society's opinion It could be concluded from the results that if starting from the same population size in both opinion groups, it is expected that the more segregated opinion group dominates the less one and determines the majority opinion of the society

Social Conformity Under Evolving Private Preferences

Abstract: We propose a model of how social norms change in response to the evolution of privately held preferences. Our aim is to rationalize the tendency for individuals who hold minority preferences to take actions favored by the majority. We do this using a game involving a tension between a desire to act according to one's underlying preferences and a desire to conform to the majority opinion. In an experimental setting, we find that even after a majority of the population shares what was previously an unpopular minority opinion, members of the new majority are slow to change their behavior. The timing and speed with which behavior transitions to match new, majority-held opinions depends on the size of the reward for conformity. When the rewards for conformity are low, the transition is gradual, with considerable periods of costly public disagreement. When the rewards for conformity are high, transitions are slow to start but conclude rapidly once they begin.

Following the Norms or Following the Crowd

Abstract: We investigated the role of information about social norms in shaping people's policy preferences concerning the current hate speech situation in Japan. More specifically, using a web-survey experiment, we tested whether two types of information, bandwagon message and anti-discrimination message, would influence the respondents' attitudes towards government regulation against hate speech. Our analysis shows that the bandwagon message slightly changed some individuals’ responses to hate speech regulation and made them conform to the majority opinion. To be more precise, those who are predisposed to give socially desirable answers were more influenced by the bandwagon information. The anti-discrimination message also slightly changed the individuals’ responses but in the opposite direction.

Janus and the Future of Collective Bargaining: Rhetorically Predicting a First Amendment Right to Negotiation

Abstract: The importance of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees has been widely recognized for its effect on reducing the power and influence of public unions. A close reading of the majority opinion provides a clue that compulsory collective bargaining itself may be settling into the court’s crosshairs. Collective bargaining is an important tool, by which labor can reduce the often-inherent power imbalance it has with ownership and management. Yet as this Article outlines, the interests of individual workers can often be at odds with those other workers or even the union itself. When the law designates a union as the exclusive bargaining agent for a group of workers, it prohibits individual workers from advocating for their own interests. As the U.S. Supreme Court recognized in Janus, this results in a substantial reduction of the rights of workers, particularly those who do not feel the union represents their interests. This Article will explore the history of unions and collective bargaining, the variety of worker rights that are affected by compulsory collective bargaining, why the Supreme Court might choose to eliminate compulsory collective bargaining via the First Amendment, and what may ultimately replace it.

Commentary on Dandridge v. Williams

Abstract: This chapter of FEMINIST JUDGMENTS: REWRITTEN FAMILY LAW OPINIONS (Rachel Rebouche, ed. 2020) provides commentary on Susan Frelich Appleton’s rewritten majority opinion in Dandridge v. Williams, 397 U.S. 471 (1970). This commentary chapter complements the rewritten opinion, providing background material, analysis of the feminist judgment, and reflections on the implications of the feminist judgment for family law as well as poverty law and reproductive justice. The original opinion in Dandridge v. Williams upheld Maryland’s maximum family grant regulation (or “family cap”), which limited public assistance to poor families and effectively allocated fewer dollars to larger families. Susan Frelich Appleton’s revised judgment departs from the original opinion both rhetorically and substantively in distinctly feminist ways. Appleton uses an intersectional lens in analyzing the impact of the family cap. The feminist judgment addresses not only class, but also how systematic discrimination based on race, disability, gender, and age can intersect and operate together as interlocking systems of oppression, leading to indigence for the most vulnerable groups in society. The revised opinion also brings within judicial purview poor people’s fundamental rights of procreation and family togetherness that the original opinion undermines. Finally, the revised judgment departs most dramatically from the original opinion in its approach to the Equal Protection Clause and the welfare rights thesis—reasoning that the Constitution protects positive rights to the basic necessities of life. The feminist judgment illustrates how welfare reform is a feminist, family law, and reproductive justice issue.

The Landmark Bostock Decision: Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Bias in Employment Constitute Sex Discrimination under Federal Law

Abstract: On June 15, 2020, the Supreme Court of the United States (Supreme Court or SCOTUS) issued a widely anticipated decision holding that the federal statutory ban on sex discrimination in employment includes a prohibition of discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. A landmark case in every sense of the term, Bostock v. Clayton County (Bostock) is important for a number of reasons. Besides being a significant victory for civil rights advocates, LGBTQIA people, and their allies, the 6-3 decision was notable for its discussion of an ascendant theory of statutory interpretation, the majority’s well-reasoned analysis of the principles of causation, and the fact that a conservative judicial appointee of President Donald Trump authored the majority opinion. The decision also underscores the value of a carefully constructed LGBTQIA rights litigation strategy that was decades in the making. Perhaps most importantly, Bostock lays the groundwork for nationwide protection of sexual minorities from discrimination in housing, education, health care, and public accommodations, among other areas. Despite polls showing that a majority of Americans support civil rights for LGBTQIA people, reaction to the case, both for and against, has been strong. Strong partisan response is in part driven by the Trump administration’s agenda vis-a-vis the rights of sexual minorities. Indeed, one hallmark of Trumpism has been the continuous attack on civil rights advances for the LGBTQIA community, with a great deal of hostility aimed at transsexuals. Given the antipathy of the administration towards a vulnerable population, civil rights advocates see Bostock as a much needed course correction and cause for celebration. Cultural conservatives, on the other hand, argue that Bostock strikes a blow against religious freedom and constitutes usurpation by the Court of the federal legislative function. The fears of cultural conservatives, however, were likely assuaged somewhat by a pair of SCOTUS decisions, which were issued just three weeks after Bostock. While those cases may presage limitations on the reach of Bostock, and seem to prioritize religious freedom over other fundamental rights, this Dispatch cautions that the human right to be free of workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity must be safeguarded as the rule rather than the exception.