Date & Time
Feb 11 2019
4:30 PM - 6:00 PM
Speaker(s)
Elizabeth Sepper, LAPA Fellow; Washington University School of Law
Audience
Open to the Public
LAPA Seminars are in a new location this semester: 300 Wallace Hall.
We hope to see you there.
LAPA’s seminar format encourages attendees to familiarize themselves with the paper in advance.
Copies of the seminar paper are typically available about 10 days before the event, during regular business hours, at the LAPA Offices on the 3rd floor of Wallace Hall.
From Professor Sepper: This Article recounts the history of sex in public accommodations. Fifty years ago, restaurants and bars displayed “men-only” signs. Women held secondary-status in civic organizations, like Rotary and Jaycees, and were excluded altogether from many professional bodies, like press clubs. Sports—from the Little League to the golf club—kept girls and women from achieving athletic excellence. Insurance companies and financial institutions subsumed married women’s identities within their husbands. Over the course of the 1970s, the feminist movement protested, litigated, and secured legislation against discrimination in commerce and leisure. Sex equality in public came to signify the dismantling of separate spheres, freedom from sexual norms, and transformation of institutions. This history holds insights for today’s legal and political debates over sex in public, from same-sex wedding cakes to the bathroom wars.
Elizabeth Sepper is a nationally recognized scholar of public accommodations, religious liberty, and health law. Her recent work focuses on legal theoretical and policy debates related to the antidiscrimination obligations of public accommodations—that is, businesses, social service providers, and membership organizations that are open to the public—under federal, state, and local laws. At LAPA, she is the LAPA\Crane Fellowship in Law and Public Affairs, and is working on her book project, Sex in Public: Public Accommodation Law from the Civil War to the Bathroom Wars, tracing how sex shaped the aims and application of antidiscrimination law throughout U.S. history.
More information: Contact Judi Rivkin, jrivkin@princeton.edu
Sponsored by the Program in Law and Public Affairs