AIDS, Law, and the Rhetoric of Sexuality

Models of judicial decisionmaking have traditionally relied on legal, political, and contextual variables, emphasizing judges' background, litigants' rights claims, and the relative social status of the parties involved. A recent scholarly expansion has brought cultural variables into the equation, indicating that judicial scholarship might usefully include narrative and rhetoric as measures of legal consciousness. This project examines AIDS-related litigation from the U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals between 1983 and 1995, emphasizing the social construction of sexuality. It uses content-based coding and stepwise probit analysis to evaluate the importance of controlling for language that depicts AIDS as a “gay disease” and its association with death and plague metaphors.