Kate Redburn

Print
Book review
Volume 89.6
The Visibility Trap
Kate Redburn
Academic Fellow at Columbia Law School; J.D.-Ph.D. Candidate (American Legal History), Yale University.

My thanks to Margot Canaday, José Argueta Funes, Regina Kunzel, Sarah Leonard, Anna Lvovsky, Joanne Meyerowitz, Doug NeJaime, Ira Temple, John Witt, and the Spring 2022 Columbia Academic Fellows Workshop for invaluable discussion and comments. Thank you also to Caroline Veniero and the other editors at the University of Chicago Law Review for their careful edits and terrific suggestions.

This dynamic echoes a central theme in Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life before Stonewall, an important new work of legal history by Professor Anna Lvovsky. Vice Patrol is a study of antihomosexual policing in U.S. cities between the fall of Prohibition and the Stonewall Rebellion. It expands historical understanding by following antihomosexual enforcement through the rungs of the legal system—from municipal police tactics to appellate review at the Supreme Court. Beyond these contributions to the history of sexuality, however, the book reveals how public discourse filters into and through the judiciary.