How Political and Legal Structures Shape “Expertise” in French and American Gay Marriage Debates

• In Event: 464 - Regular Session. Law and Society II - Law, Expertise and the Interplay of Professions

Abstract

How and why do legal and political actors use divergent kinds of knowledge as “expertise” when debating relationship and parenting rights for same-sex couples in France and the United States? To answer this question, I use archival, ethnographic, and interview data to systematically compare the information used as “expertise” and the people treated as “experts” in the media, courts, and legislatures since 1990. This paper draws on theories of knowledge production, social movements, and framing to explain how political and legal structures constrain or enable the arguments and information that sway decision-makers. Specifically, it discusses how differences in jurisdictional structures, policy regimes, healthcare, secularism, and legal systems make certain kinds of information more usable in each national context. The configurations of these structures can help explain why appeals to, for example, psychoanalysis and anthropology are common in France but virtually absent in the U.S. while economy and legal expertise dominate in the latter but not the former.

Author

• Michael Stambolis-Ruhstorfer, University of California-Los Angeles