Queer Rights, Queer Futures: An Affective Experiment in Legal Form

This paper is an affective experiment in queering legal form and how we, as queer legal scholars, might re-imagine and recreate legal rights when casting judgment. It threads creative memoir with pop culture and critical analysis to reimagine the nature of a traditional legal essay. This piece flows in three parts. Drawing on an archive of experiences teaching, researching, thinking, and writing queer legal scholarship, I start the paper with a fictionalized recreation-what Saidiya Hartman calls "critical fabulation" to distill the emotions that materialize when navigating socio-legal issues that shape jurisprudential, pedagogic, and scholarly ideas about marriage equality and cultural norms about queer love. The next section combines critical theoretical engagements with law and form to reflect on the pedagogic, scholarly, and judicial possibilities of queer judgment making as a "reparative praxis." I argue that this queer engagement with legal form holds space for romance, risk, intimacy, love, and hope as we teach, research, and adjudicate rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other minoritized (LGBTQ+) people. I conclude that queer judgment is a romantic expression of queer legal form, one that offers us critical, normative, and creative space to represent how we conceptualize, critique, teach, and practice law.