AALS sections provide opportunities for law school faculty and staff to connect on issues of shared interest. Each section is focused on a different academic discipline, affinity group, or administrative area. For a full list of sections and information on how to join, visit www.aals.org/sections.
As part of the ongoing “Spotlight on Sections” series, AALS sat down with the leadership of the Section on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Issues and the Section on Law and Mental Disability. Views expressed by interviewees are not necessarily representative of AALS or their home institutions.
By Zaena Ballon
The AALS Section on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Issues promotes the communication of ideas, interests, and activities among members of the section. It makes recommendations on matters concerning the interests of LGBT persons involved in legal education and on matters of interest in the teaching and improvement of the law relating to sexual orientation and gender identity issues.
Chair: Joshua Jones, California Western School of Law
Why did you join the Section on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Issues?
Joshua Jones: I wanted to be acquainted with attorneys who are sensitive to LGBTQIA+ issues because I often write about those issues. I am a gay man, and so when I was practicing law, I often represented nontraditional families. A large part of my practice was family law, so I filled a much-needed gap in representation. I found that gay and lesbian couples tend to avoid legal representation because they were intimidated by the idea of the legal industry–seeing it as very conservative and buttoned up. Not only was I making a business of it by having a niche within family law, but I was also providing community service.
Why did you decide to join the section’s leadership?
JJ: As a newer professor several years ago, I knew that I wanted to establish myself as a leader in the academy. I put myself out there and went to the section’s business meeting, and they needed somebody. I think younger professors may hold back because mentors tend to scare them away from too much service and have them focus on getting through tenure, but I do not agree with that. If you are not putting yourself out there with service, you are not establishing a reputation. Second, I entered the academy a little later than many of my peers. I did not have that workload fear coming out of a solo practice.
What is the section’s leadership structure?
JJ: The section has a chair and a chair-elect. We also have an executive committee with a limited number of members, but we are revising our bylaws to add a secretary, a treasurer, and additional seats on the executive committee.
What do your members research and teach?
JJ: Everything! The section is very intersectional. My specialty in addition to family law is education law, which has an AALS section that I am a member of as well. Our members represent a huge variety of practice areas and subject matters. One new member who will present for our works-in-progress program in January teaches constitutional law. We have several members who teach family law and criminal law, and a lot of legal writing professors. Some of that is a product of status issues within the academy between doctrinal professors and legal writing professors. Marginalized people tended to get shuffled into legal writing. We, in the past, have called it the “pink ghetto” because new mothers who wanted to teach were often relegated to legal writing. It is the Ruth Bader Ginsburg story.
How does your section support scholarship from your members?
JJ: We have our works-in-progress session at the AALS Annual Meeting. This year, we selected four participants. The mentors guide the discussion about those papers. In the future, the section hopes to have works-in-progress webinars for a wider range of members to participate. We tend to focus on newer scholars for the works-in-progress sessions, but we would like to create one for senior faculty as well. We recently held a Q&A webinar for prospective law faculty in advance of faculty hiring season.
Each year, the section has a webinar for prospective law professors before the faculty hiring process and welcomes new hires at the AALS Workshop for New Law School Teachers. Can you tell me a little more about this tradition?
JJ: Every year, the section is invited to participate in the AALS Workshop for New Law School Teachers. The attendance has grown partly because of AALS’s commitment to new law professors and the hiring process.
The availability of information about how to become a law professor has increased the outreach to prospective law professors. We have a strong group of panelists for the section’s webinar, with people who have not just experience in the hiring process, but also regional experience. All the panelists had very different paths into the academy. Some of us went straight from school and some of us practiced for a long time and then transitioned into the academy. I think that no matter what type of pedigree your education is – and even if you do not think that you would ever qualify – people should still attend the session because I think it’s eye-opening to see the variety of walks of life that end up in the academy. It is not always a T-14 graduate who worked in big law or clerked for a federal court who ends up getting hired as a law professor. That is a huge misperception that keeps a lot of quality teachers from giving it a go.
What are some important conversations happening right now in legal education regarding sexual orientation and gender identity issues?
JJ: I would have to say academic freedom. We are worried about states like Florida, that keep trying to enact legislation to limit what we can say in the classroom. From censorship to critical race theory and how we discuss LGBT issues in the classroom. These laws are not just in Florida; they are happening all over the country.
It’s also about other things that impact school—for example some states now have mandatory outings of students who come to school and say “I want to be known by this other gender-conforming name.” That is serious. When we out students in that way, not only are we asking the school to get deeply involved in family issues, but we are also creating a potential danger. We know that statistically LGBT youth have a high homelessness rate because they are kicked out of their homes. Transgender students are especially at risk, and transgender students of color are even more at risk. Once you are kicked out of your home, become homeless, and cannot find resources, it snowballs into a horrific adulthood. The idea of a public outing is horrible to us.
Aside from education and academic freedom issues, we are also worried about reproductive rights. LGBT couples often rely on IVF, surrogacy, and adoption. Not too long ago, Florida was the last state to end its ban on gay adoption. These risks about how we create families as nontraditional households are very concerning. The risk to everyone’s civil liberties impacts the most marginalized populations. No matter your intersectionality of diversity, we have some serious issues happening.
State legislatures seem to be the new battleground for LGBTQ issues over the last few years with many states passing laws banning gender-affirming care for transgender youth, censoring school curricula, and targeting drag performances, among other issues. What is behind the push to pass so many anti-LGBTQ laws? What does the movement to challenge these laws look like?
JJ: This is exactly what I am writing about right now. I am presenting a work-in-progress at the Education Law Association conference in November about majoritarian nationalism and the use of populist rhetoric to fearmonger ideology into the legislature and school boards. That is dangerous because that is exactly what the Nazi party did in the 1920s. They infiltrated the schools through the teacher’s unions, and then they created a nationalistic agenda for the curriculum, and they were able to indoctrinate an entire generation of students so that when the time came in the 1930s, there was little resistance to Hitler. We are not as unstable as the Weimar Republic, but we have some true risks. Democracy is fragile and everybody needs to be aware of that.
There are some things we can do. We must re-instill civics education in every single grade level and as a high school graduation requirement. Acknowledge that American education, compulsory American education, the whole purpose of it is to train productive citizens who will preserve the democratic republic. If we are not training in civics, then we are not doing what we are supposed to be doing with public education.
We need to find a way to limit third-party political groups from being deeply involved when they do not even have children in the district. I think about the organizations that are set up on college and high school campuses to promote very conservative ideologies, which are not supportive of the LGBT community. Their rhetoric is intelligent and hard to read between the lines and see the true message. They have masked it very well. In my mind, they are manipulating students to get on board while claiming that the “radical left” is indoctrinating students. These organizations may not have a headquarters or a point person in the area, but via these outsiders, they are able to infiltrate the local school board and student body to spread that message further.
Some of these groups are listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as hate groups, yet they are being welcomed into school board elections and moving people around the country to target school districts or colleges. We have got to put an end to that. If you do not have a kid in the school district and do not live in the district, you should not have any word on what is going on in the school district.
When I taught education law last term, some of my students suggested that we require any candidate for school board to have some education credential, and I can get on board with that. A restructuring of how somebody becomes a school board member, getting back to civics education, and helping parents understand their role with the school board are possible solutions to this broad problem.
States have also moved to restrict transgender athletes from competing in the sports consistent with their gender identity. How are these conversations playing out nationally and in law school classroom discussions?
JJ: I used this scenario as a hypothetical for my legal writing class. All the educational, civil rights, and family law classes are discussing it. In the legal writing community, we are committed to creating hypotheticals for our writing projects that embrace some point of diversity. This summer, that hypothetical was based on the issue of transgender pronouns in the classroom and teachers who refuse to recognize them. I have heard of several other professors who have created prompts about transgender issues happening nationally.
At the 2024 AALS Annual Meeting, the section hosted a program about the erasure of LGBTQ civil rights. What sort of themes did the session address?
JJ: There were several discussions about transgender issues. The conservative strategy is going after low-hanging fruit that the public will vote against. Transgender people are seen as easy to attack. Once they accomplish that goal, they will target other people in the LGBTQIA+ community and pull us all down again. The idea of this cascading effect was the predominant theme of the program.
We are also very worried about the Students for Fair Admissions case that ended affirmative action in admissions and its impact on LGBT people. There have been some webinars among deans to figure this out and how we can still possibly have a holistic review process for admissions without giving preference to one category of diversity over another. Having a more holistic point of view in the admissions process is sort of a double-edged sword because, on the one hand, I think schools that are dedicated to having a diverse student body will use a holistic admissions process in the way that it should be used. While other schools that are obsessed with competition and getting the most people into big law or the academy to teach, may not have a holistic admissions process. I am not confident that every school will be motivated to have a truly holistic admissions process.
What does the section have planned for the 2025 AALS Annual Meeting?
JJ: The section is co-sponsoring a couple of sessions, one with the Section on Criminal Law and one with the Section on Disability Law. One of those sessions is about being courageous in the way that you identify yourself as a marginalized person. How do you be authentic and still do your job in the classroom, in the face of an attack on academic freedom? The other program is about reproductive rights. They invited us to co-sponsor, and we felt strongly about doing that because people do not pay a lot of attention to how reproductive rights issues impact the LGBT community.
Our section will host a works-in-progress session for newer scholars, and we are hoping to have a field trip to the GLBT Historical Society in the Castro District in San Francisco. I hope that it might turn into some sort of project where we can contribute some legal analysis or a jurisprudence review of LGBT cases. There are interesting ways that we could work long-term with that organization.
What is your vision for the section this year and in the years to come? What new initiatives, project-based or ongoing, would you like to see as part of the section?
JJ: This is a restructuring year because we are reworking our bylaws to add more executive committee members, which will help us add actual committees to the section. We want to have a more structured and organized system similar to the Section on Legal Writing, Reasoning, and Research. We have a lot of members who are not very engaged simply because we do not have the structure to pull them in.
Our other visional prong is more outreach to third-party constituencies. We were considering doing a student scholarship contest or having our members volunteer to be judges in the student contests for the National LGBT Bar Association. We are looking for ways that we can reach out to other organizations and contribute.
What are the best ways for interested faculty to get involved with this section?
JJ: Email me or Grant Christensen, the chair-elect. Even after this year, I will still be deeply involved in this group. For potential law professors coming into the field, anybody is welcome to reach out to me. I would love to talk to people because I had a very nontraditional path into the academy, and I like mentoring. Everybody in this section is very warm and welcoming. It is like walking into a family reunion when we get together. Everybody is eager to help each other.
Is there anything else that you would like to add?
JJ: I had a professor friend who is also part of the LGBT community say to me that he has never joined the section because his scholarship does not concern sexual orientation or gender identity issues. Our section welcomes those who identify within those categories, as well as allies. You do not have to be writing about SOGII issues to be part of the SOGII Section.
A lot of my comments sound politically-leaning, but there is room at this table, even for a conservative Republican LGBT person who wants to be part of this group. Our discussions do not have any political angle, but obviously, we are motivated to protect LGBTQ+ rights. We want a diverse set of opinions that will help improve our teaching. If we are not reaching across the aisle to hear those thoughts, we are not expanding our viewpoint to reach all our students.