“For the Contrary View”: Reconsidering the Early Anti-Zoning Decisions”

When the 1926 Euclid v. Ambler decision found municipal zoning valid under the U.S. Constitution, previous state cases opposing the practice were overruled and subsequently almost forgotten. This investigation analyzes those early State Supreme Court cases to determine systematically the basis of these rejections. After constructing a contextual background of the legal arguments that could have been used by the judges, I assess cases to determine which were used, and find a dominance of concern regarding land use segregation justified by municipalities through an “aesthetics” defense. I conclude by considering links between these cases and current controversies.

The Early 2000s

Chapter 9 tells the story of Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 Supreme Court decision that finally struck down the remaining state laws that criminalized sodomy. In 2004 Massachusetts became the first state in the U.S. to have marriage equality, following the state supreme court decision in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health. Opponents of gay rights fought furiously to overturn marriage equality in Massachusetts, but once straight people saw that marriage equality cost them nothing, the opposition faded away. Gay rights groups in Massachusetts prevailed despite having many institutional disadvantages. In California in 2008, Proposition 8 was passed by voters to reintroduce a same-sex marriage ban.

“For a Few Months of Peace”

This article explores the interrelated struggles for housing and HIV/AIDS care during the first decades of the epidemic in New York City. It follows municipal and activist responses to a growing homeless population alongside the work of tenants’ rights advocates to explore the complex dynamics of care, displacement, and austerity that gave shape to the struggles of people living with HIV/AIDS. This article places the 1989 New York State Supreme Court case Braschi v. Stahl, concerning lease succession rights for same-sex partners, as a central text alongside Callahan v. Carey and Mixon v. Grinker litigation to illustrate the possibilities and limitations within coalitions formed between antipoverty activists and LGBTQ rights groups.

Analyzing decision records from committees

In the absence of a complete voting record, decision records are an important data source to analyze committee decision-making in various institutions. Despite the ubiquity of decision records, we know surprisingly little about how to analyze them. This paper highlights the costs in terms of bias, inefficiency, or inestimable effects when using decision instead of voting records and introduces a Bayesian structural model for the analysis of decision-record data. I construct an exact likelihood function that can be tailored to many institutional contexts, discuss identification, and present a Gibbs sampler on the data-augmented posterior density. I illustrate the application of the model using data from US state supreme court abortion decisions and UN Security Council deployment decisions.