Jackson Springer, a 3L at Columbia Law School, has published his note, Contracts and Homophile Legal Strategy, in the Columbia Law Review.
The Note draws upon the archives of ONE Magazine, “the United States’ first widely distributed queer publication.”Law was central to the homophile movement, the main movement for queer rights between World War II and Stonewall. But examinations of this movement’s engagement with law have exclusively focused on public law. Private law has received virtually no attention. This Note corrects that oversight. It unearths instances in which groups advocating for queer rights invoked contract law during the 1950s and 1960s. These moments reveal contract law’s important—and previously overlooked—role in homophile legal strategy.
One Magazine (USC)
Homophile groups’ use of contract law changed over the two decades of the movement. During the 1950s, those in the homophile movement used contract law to avoid legal disputes—a sort of “preventative law” that shielded queer people from the outside world’s scrutiny. But after the movement’s militarization in the early 1960s, queer organizations began making affirmative claims based in contract law. These claims served two purposes. On one hand, they were a tool queer people used to protect their public law rights when those rights were under attack. But organizations also saw the assertion of contract law rights as a goal itself—a key part of queer people’s growing rights consciousness.
This Note thus gives contract law its rightful due in the history of homophile legal strategy. Its findings demonstrate that private law should play a larger role in both our study of social movements’ legal strategy and our vision of a future in which marginalized groups have full equality under the law.
--Dan Ernst
