This essay reviews Howard Gillman, Mark Graber, and Keith Whittington, American Constitutionalism: Volume I: Structures of Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), and Howard Gillman, Mark Graber, and Keith Whittington, American Constitutionalism: Volume II: Rights and Liberties (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). It defends developmental approaches in the study of US constitutional law. It explains how law has been studied in political science, illustrating how political development became part of the story. It outlines how American political development approaches work when applied to law, noting how studying law transforms these approaches. It notes the insights produced through the blending of American political development and constitutional law, explaining how these insights provide more leverage for understanding the role of courts as democratic institutions. The essay closes by discussing the promising directions these approaches suggest, defending their value beyond political science.

This article reviews the results of a discipline-wide survey concerning lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and the transgendered in the discipline. We find that both research and teaching on LGBT topics have made some headway into the discipline, and that political scientists largely accept that LGBT issues can be fundamentally political and are worth studying and teaching for that reason. Nonetheless, troubling questions about discrimination both against those who conduct research concerning LBGT issues and LGBT individuals themselves remain.

It has become commonplace among historically inclined legal scholars to look to the history of the United States’ elimination of bans on mixed-race sexual relationships for guidance about the recent controversy over same-sex marriage. This article argues that, while the analogy is helpful, it is not perfect because of the particular historical circumstances of the battle over antimiscegenation laws. Because regulations against interracial marriage were at the heart of defining and perpetuating the political and institutional system of white supremacy, they served a different purpose than the bans on same-sex marriage. The analogy can be pursued, however, to promote a critical consideration of the history of marriage as a heteronormative institution, generating a broader agenda for empowering change. Such a use of history takes the experience of the struggle against the antimiscegenation regime as a cautionary tale rather than a guidepost.

The Committee on the Status of Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, and the Transgendered [LGBT] in the Profession has authorized this review of 17 recent editions of top-selling textbooks marketed for use in courses providing an introduction to U.S. politics.

Mary Lyndon Shanley's Making Babies, Making Families bravely wades into the difficult ethical questions of accommodating new reproductive technologies and diverse family arrangements within the framework of existing and possible liberal legal principles. The book grapples with definitions of parenthood and parental rights in the contexts of adoption, unwed fatherhood, gamete transfer, surrogate motherhood, and multiple parenting within the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community. Shanley mines these situations in order to derive some workable ethical and legal guidelines for the state's exercise of its regulatory capacities with respect to families. In doing so, she reveals the tensions and possibilities inherent in the state's role in defining families at a moment when many perceive traditional family structures as collapsing, for better or for worse.

For over one hundred years—from the post–Civil War era to the post–Civil Rights era—the state of Alabama maintained a legal and social commitment to keeping blacks and whites from engaging in long-term sexual relationships with each other. Recent studies addressing the laws that barred miscegenation have shown that investigating governmental reactions to intimate interracial connections reveals much about the interplay between legal and social definitions of race as well as about the development of whiteness as a proxy for superior social, political, and legal status.

During the Progressive Era, the U. S. state and federal courts considered constitutional challenges to protective labor legislation. While courts often struck down generalized protective legislation, they frequently upheld such legislation for women. I explore the reasoning in the cases decided between 1897 and 1923, showing that the courts developed understandings of liberty for women that differed from those for men. In opposition to traditional separate spheres reasoning, I show that the courts viewed men's exercise of liberty as depending on their private capacities to be free, while women's labor was subject to public control due to state interest in their reproductive capacities. I suggest that constitutional theorists who are studying substantive due process should place more emphasis on courts'conceptions of the subjects of due process guarantees rather than considering solely the challenged statutes' restriction of liberty. I develop a dynamic and complex understanding of liberty to capture this aspect of the relationship between constitutional theory and gender.