Call for Papers: “Queer Constitutional History” in the Journal of American Constitutional History. Guest edited by Professors Felicia Kornbluh and Marie-Amélie George
We invite scholars in history, law, and related fields to submit articles for a symposium issue of the Journal of American Constitutional History on “U.S. Queer Constitutional History,” to be edited by Professors Felicia Kornbluh and Marie-Amélie George, in consultation with journal editor David Schwartz. We plan to publish the symposium issue in 2025 to coincide with 10th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges. At the time the Court issued the Obergefell decision, the opinion appeared to settle specific questions about the legal and constitutional status of marriages between people of the same sex and broader questions about the constitutionality of formal discrimination against gays and lesbians. Since then, the Supreme Court has issued decisions challenging established sexual-liberty jurisprudence, including Justice Thomas’ concurrence in Dobbs v. Jackson (2022), which promised a reconsideration of the whole “substantive due process” tradition.
We invite essays on the queer constitutional history that gave rise to the Obergefell decision—including events outside of the realms of marriage, family law, or U.S. constitutional law—as well as the place of marriage equality within the Court’s broader sexual liberty jurisprudence. We welcome contributions on the evolution of marriage equality, queer parenting, and sexual privacy rights under the U.S. Constitution, as well as related topics. For example, submissions might examine how and why these rights became recognized, their doctrinal underpinnings, the gaps that exist in Constitutional jurisprudence, and the relationship between queer Constitutional rights and the Court’s decisions in related fields.
We hope to publish a broad array of perspectives on these topics, to help inform scholarship on queer legal history and U.S. Constitutional history, as well as studies of legal institutions more generally. For that reason, this symposium issue takes an expansive approach to all of its terms: “U.S.” extends beyond the mainland to include American territories and the country’s diplomatic and international relations; we take “Queer” to mean research on gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, nonbinary, or asexual people, or otherwise relating to nonnormative and stigmatized gendered and sexualized phenomena; “Constitutional” refers to questions that have been considered in U.S. constitutional courts, as well as related questions that have preceded or transcended them, and matters of state-level and not national constitutional adjudication; and “History” means the study of the past, but not necessarily the deep or distant past, and in this case cannot help but look over its shoulder to connections with contemporary issues.
Abstracts are due February 1, 2025. Please submit them by email to Felicia Kornbluh (Felicia.Kornbluh@uvm.edu) and Marie-Amélie George (georgemp@wfu.edu). Authors of selected articles will be notified by March 1, 2025. Drafts, which should range from 5,000 to 10,000 words, will be due July 1, 2025 for submission to peer reviewers. Final versions of the articles will be due September 1, 2025. The guest editors may propose a half-day conference to immediately proceed the American Society for Legal History’s annual meeting in 2025. Contributors to this symposium issue would be invited, but not required, to participate.
