Conclusion: Does Love Have Standing?
Peter Goodrich2007, The Laws of Love
Conclusion: Does Love Have Standing? The modern history of the laws of love has been that of a sorry misplacement. The laws have been discounted, marginalized, mislaid, confined to peripheral spaces. They have formed at most a very minor jurisdiction. Their paradoxical competence has been that of a forgotten erudition, their momentary and generally esoteric manifestations have been in the curious form of very obscure, highly serious and worthily scholarly recollections of a paradoxically dour gay science and an extremely technical art of speaking justly in civil matters. Where we encounter the laws of love today, it is as an anthropological relic or as an amusing curiosity. As if love were simply a curiosity, a marginal aspect of social life. As if the hidden intimacies of the public sphere were no more than bizarre distractions from what is really taking place, the main event, politics or institutional action as usual. And as if working life were free of love and hate, libido and lust. No fun in that, neither erotics nor pleasure. So take another example. Yet one more marginal text. A genuinely minor contribution. A little symptom in the form of a lawyer's spoof of the laws of love that appeared toward the end of the last century, just a few years back, in the halcyon days of late 1994. First, however, a little context. This was the era of political correctness on U.S. campuses. Sexual orientations proliferated, and the fin de siècle excesses of the sex wars hit both the legislatures and the courts with novel claims, both rights and wrongs that needed new determinations. Legislatures throughout the common law world were busy criminalizing sex and penalizing erotic enjoyment. Even as staid a figure as Lord Ordinary of Appeal, Justice Ward acknowledged the incoming tide. Asked to decide whether a same sex couple could be "spouses" for the purposes of the Rent Act he bravely dissented and concluded that they could: a gay couple could have "family qualities." To this he adds: "I have not reached this decision lightly.
