Scott Barclay

Arizona State University | ASU · School of Social and Behavioral Sciences

BACKGROUND To slow down transmission and prevent deaths in the face of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (COVID-19) pandemic, the public needs to adhere to recommendations to limit exposure and the spread of the disease. There is emerging evidence that television viewership choices and partisanship are associated to adherence to C...

On June 26, 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Obergefell v. Hodges , that the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution forbids legal discrimination against same-sex marriage. The decision sent shock waves throughout the country, with both supporters and opponents regarding it as signal of dramatic shifts in public opinion and a revolution...

What are the effects of judicial action and policy implementation on attitude change? The previous literature indicates that attitudes may change, but there is some debate about its direction. According to some theories, legislation or litigation should strike a backlash, resulting in greater disapproval of the issue. Other perspectives contend tha...

In this article, we begin to respond to the deceptively simple question: How do cause lawyers decide when and where to litigate on behalf of their cause? We consider the choice of location and timing faced by cause lawyers when more than one jurisdiction evinces a suitable legal environment for pursuing litigation on their cause. To consider this c...

Gay Rights at the Ballot Box. By Stone Amy L. . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 272p. $67.50 cloth, $22.50 paper. American Marriage: A Political Institution. By Yamin Priscilla . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. 224 p. $59.95. - Volume 12 Issue 1 - Scott Barclay

The attention and prominence given to issues in media outlets may affect the importance citizens attribute to them, so the actors who influence mass media coverage decisions may have political power in society generally. This article seeks to measure the relative influence of journalists, social trends, events, government officials, editors, and ow...

Arising in the late 1960s and early 1970s—in conjunction with the development of sociology of law and the Law and Society Association—gap studies dominated much of sociolegal scholarship for a time, providing multiple examples of the ways in which law on the books is inconsistent with law in action. These gaps, in turn, spurred calls for legal refo...

Those interested in studying the relationship between law and social movements have a wide variety of theoretical and empirical research to draw on, from both social movement theory and legal studies. Yet these disparate studies of law and social movements rarely engage with each other. In this chapter, we review current developments in research on...

Democratic theorists assume that government policy responds to public opinion. But public opinion may be influenced by other political actors through the mass media instead. Scholars agree that the news media have become more attentive to and supportive of lesbian and gay rights over time, and they identify several factors as explanations for the c...

Gay Families and the Courts: The Quest for Equal Rights. By Mezey Susan Gluck. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009. 290p. $70.00 cloth, $27.95 paper. - Volume 8 Issue 3 - Scott Barclay

As public opinion has become more supportive of lesbian and gay rights some states have recognized same sex marriage. In this paper we seek to evaluate the relationship between mass media slant, public attitudes and state action. We measure newspaper opinion and state level public opinion on same sex marriage. And we employ statistical methods to d...

In 2006, President Bush publicly stated that, in relation to the same-sex marriage issue, “activist judges” were thwarting the preferred policy of the elected representatives and the expression of popular will embodied in popular initiatives and constitutional amendments. Notwithstanding the philosophical discussion of the constitutionally assigned...

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 stud...

Fighting for marriage and family rights; protection from discrimination in employment, education, and housing; criminal law reform; economic justice; and health care reform: the LGBT movement is engaged in some of the most important cultural and political battles of our times. Seeking to reshape many of our basic social institutions, the LBGT movem...

The traditional and most common conception of cause lawyers has viewed them as necessarily oppositional to the state, leftist, and, at best, transgressive. This conception is significant to our analysis because of its tendency to treat “the state” as a rather singular arena of power – an “it” – rather than a multi-dimensional entity made up of comp...

From 1990 through 2004, same sex marriage emerged as a major policy issue. In responding to this controversial policy issue, many state legislatures demonstrated unusual behavior. A substantial minority of state legislatures continued to introduce new legislative bills on this topic long after the legal position of the respective state would indica...

By their willingness to revise existing constitutional definitions, courts help political institutions pursue popular policies. The idea of court-assisted regime change resonated within political science because it appeared consistent with contemporary policy controversies. In cases such as desegregation and interracial marriage, the Supreme Court...

Public policy scholars and public Law scholars often study the same substantive issues and have similar theoretical interests Yet students of the public policy process rarely consider the courts as policymakers in the same manner as do their public law counterpart We seek to explain this difference in approaches between the two Subfield on the ques...

Using a regression model of pooled time series data from the 50 states in the United States in the period 1990 to 2001, we look at the political, demographic, and social movement factors that provide the impetus for the enactment of state laws that proscribe the celebration of marriages involving lesbian and gay couples. In doing so, we consider th...

In this article, I argue that litigants identify the appellate courts as offering a powerful and public arena where litigants’ claims are placed (at least temporarily) on an equal footing with the current state of the law. In this context, the initiation of appeals is treated as synonymous with receiving endorsements from the appellate courts that...

Among those at the forefront of the attempt to restrict the growing appellate caseload has been legal scholar and federal judge Richard Posner. Posner proposed a method, based upon economic assumptions, that he argues will liberate the appellate courts from the deluge of recent civil appeals. Because Posner's model has played such an important theo...