Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

The Right to Be Parents: LGBT Families and the Transformation of Parenthood
ISBN: 9780814739310
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / NYU Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter

The Right to be
Parents is the first book to provide a detailed history of how LGBT parents
have turned to the courts to protect and defend their relationships with their
children. Carlos A. Ball chronicles the stories of LGBT parents who, in seeking
to gain legal recognition of and protection for their relationships with their
children, have fundamentally changed how American law defines and regulates
parenthood. To this day, some courts are still not able to look beyond sexual
orientation and gender identity in cases involving LGBT parents and their
children. Yet on the whole, Ball's stories are of progress and transformation:
as a result of these pioneering LGBT parent litigants, the law is increasingly
recognizing the wide diversity in American familial structures.

Carlos A. Ball is Distinguished Professor of Law and Judge Frederick Lacey Scholar at the Rutgers University School of Law. An expert in family and constitutional law, he has written several books on LGBT rights, including Same-Sex Marriage and Children, and The Morality of Gay Rights.