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Welcome!
The Standing Committee on Lesbian and Gay Issues welcomes you to the homepage for its ongoing project Sexual Orientation and the Law: A Research Bibliography of Legal Literature Discussing Gay, Lesbian, Transgender, and Bisexual Persons, Their Rights and Their Families.
History
A special division of the American Association of Law Libraries' Social Responsibilities Special Interest Section, the Standing Committee was called into existence in 1985 to raise the profile of the profession's LGBT members, as well as to encourage libraries "to acquire legal materials on the role of lesbian and gay people in society."
The first step toward convincing librarians to make any materials available is to show them what exists to be collected at all. With this thought the Standing Committee undertook in 1987 to organize and publicize articles and documents addressing core issues concerning the intersection of law, sexual orientation, and—albeit belatedly—gender identity. These efforts achieved a significant milestone in 1994 with the publication in Law Library Journal of the then-current version.
2006 Publication:
2006 saw the revisioning of this ongoing task with the publication by Hein of SEXUAL ORIENTATION AND THE LAW: A RESEARCH BIBLIOGRAPHY as AALL Publication #74 (ISBN 083770166X; 9780837701660). This almost-500 page volume covering literature through 2005 includes several features that the Standing Committee hopes will be useful to librarians and their patrons. These include: a fuller account of the bibliography project from its origins in 1987; a scholarly introduction by Brad Sears, Executive Director of the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy, that places this literature into intellectual, historical and legal perspective; a reprint of the original 1994 bibliography; and 877 new citations that have been annotated by members of the Standing Committee. Annotated citations are indexed by author and principal cited cases.
Web Updates:
The published volume was intended by its editors to be neither complete nor static. For the covered period citations are far from exhaustive, and in any event new materials appear at a prodigious rate. The editors chose to create this website to make available to the public the latest updates to the published volume. New citations will be selected, annotated and posted on a semi-annual basis. While the titles included will predominantly be those that have been published in the preceding six months, pieces that were overlooked in earlier searches will be offered as well. Such retrospective inclusion will be especially helpful for those topics that received only cursory attention in earlier versions, such as gender identity and foreign and comparative law. Future supplements may also see the expanded inclusion of media in new and nontraditional formats other than published articles and books.
Taken together, the published volume and this internet resource offer the interested reader the most comprehensive description to be found anywhere of this topic’s literature. We welcome your comments and suggestions for improvement.
