The concept of marriage as a union of a man and a woman was fundamentally challenged by the introduction of registered partnership in Denmark in 1989. Odd Couples is the first comprehensive history of registered partnership and gay marriage in Scandinavia. It traces the origins of laws which initially were extremely controversial—inside and outside the gay community—but have now gained broad popular and political support, as well as the positive effects and risks involved in state recognition of lesbian and gay couples.  Through a comparison of how these laws have been received and practiced in all of the Scandinavian countries, including Greenland and the Faroe Islands, the author presents a nuanced study of a fascinating political process that began in the 1960s and continues to change the way we understand family, sexuality and nation.

William Offutt, Jr., places legal processes at the center of this regions social history. The new societies established there in the late 1600s did not rely on religious conformity, culture, or a simple majority to develop successfully, Offutt maintains. Rather, they succeeded because of the implementation of reforms that gave the expanding population faith in the legitimacy of legal processes implemented by a Quaker elite. Offutt's painstaking investigation of the records of more than 2,000 civil and 1,100 criminal cases in four county courts over a thirty-year period shows that Quakers--the "Good Men"--were disproportionately represented as justices, officers, and jurors in this system of "Good Laws"  they had established, and that they fared better than did the rest of the population in dealing with it.
 

Forty years in, the War on Drugs has done almost nothing to prevent drugs from being sold or used, but it has nonetheless created a little-known surveillance state in America’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods. Arrest quotas and high-tech surveillance techniques criminalize entire blocks, and transform the very associations that should stabilize young lives—family, relationships, jobs—into liabilities, as the police use such relationships to track down suspects, demand information, and threaten consequences.

Alice Goffman spent six years living in one such neighborhood in Philadelphia, and her close observations and often harrowing stories reveal the pernicious effects of this pervasive policing. Goffman introduces us to an unforgettable cast of young African American men who are caught up in this web of warrants and surveillance—some of them small-time drug dealers, others just ordinary guys dealing with limited choices. All find the web of presumed criminality, built as it is on the very associations and friendships that make up a life, nearly impossible to escape. We watch as the pleasures of summer-evening stoop-sitting are shattered by the arrival of a carful of cops looking to serve a warrant; we watch—and can’t help but be shocked—as teenagers teach their younger siblings and cousins how to run from the police (and, crucially, to keep away from friends and family so they can stay hidden); and we see, over and over, the relentless toll that the presumption of criminality takes on families—and futures.

While not denying the problems of the drug trade, and the violence that often accompanies it, through her gripping accounts of daily life in the forgotten neighborhoods of America's cities, Goffman makes it impossible for us to ignore the very real human costs of our failed response—the blighting of entire neighborhoods, and the needless sacrifice of whole generations.
 

Celebrations of the “transgender tipping point” in the second decade of the twenty-first century occurred at the same time of heightened debates and anxieties about immigration in the United States. On Transits and Transitions explores what the increased visibility of trans people in the public sphere means for trans migrants and provides a counter-narrative to the dominant discourse that the inclusion of transgender issues in law and policy represents the progression of legal equality for trans communities. Focusing on the intersection of immigration and trans rights, Josephson presents a careful and innovative examination of the processes by which the category of transgender is produced through and incorporated into the key areas of asylum law, marriage and immigration law, and immigration detention policies. Using mobility as a critical lens, On Transits and Transitions captures the insecurity and precarity created by U.S. immigration control and related processes of racialization to show how im/mobility conditions citizenship and national belonging for trans migrants in the United States.

Over the past 30 years, the gay rights movement has moved from the margins to the center of American politics, sparking debate from bedroom to boardroom to battlefield. Out of the Closets and into the Courts analyzes the most recent gay rights cases, and explores the complex relationship between litigation and social change. Ellen Andersen describes what happens when these cases—many overseen by the Lambda Legal Defense Fund, the nation's oldest and largest gay rights defense firm—enter the courtroom, and explains why they have met with mixed success.

Out of the Closets and into the Courts explores both the promise and the limits of using legal mobilization to effect social change. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, Ellen Andersen draws on the accumulated knowledge of political science, law, and sociology to explain the origins and outcomes of gay rights litigation. The resulting book is essential reading for anyone interested in gay rights, legal change, and social movements.