Discrimination due to gender and sexual orientation tends nowadays to be prohibited under international human rights instruments, as well as under the national laws of many countries that express their commitment to defending human rights. Nonetheless, as the work of Amnesty International has shown, violence against women (whatever their sexual orientation), gay men, trans-gendered and transsexual persons remains an appallingly constant phenomenon, both in countries that have an official commitment to fighting these forms of discrimination and in those that do not.
These essays seek to...

Fundamentalist forms of religion today claim authority everywhere, including the debates over the politics and constitutional law of liberal democracies. This book examines this general question through its critical evaluation of a recent school of thought: that of the new natural lawyers. The new natural lawyers are the lawyers of the current Vatical hierarchy, polemically concerned to defend its retrograde views on matters of sexuality and gender in terms of arguments that, in fact, notably lack the philosophical rigor of the historical Thomism they claim to honor. The book critiques forms...

Accountability is regarded as a central feature of modern constitutionalism. At a general level, this prominence is perhaps unsurprising, given the long history of the idea. However, in many constitutional democracies, including the UK and the USA, it has acquired a particular resonance in contemporary circumstances with the declining power of social deference, the expanding reach of populist accountability mechanisms, and the increasing willingness of citizens to find mechanisms for challenging official decision-making. These essays, by public law scholars, seek to explore how ideas of and...