The Rise of Gay Rights and the Fall of the British Empire

David A. J. Richards is Edwin D. Webb Professor of Law at New York University School of Law, where he teaches constitutional law and criminal law. He also teaches a seminar, 'Resisting Injustice', with NYU University Professor Carol Gilligan, and the seminar 'Retributivism in Criminal Law Theory and Practice' with the psychiatrist James Gilligan. Richards is the author of seventeen books, including, most recently, The Deepening Darkness: Patriarchal Resistance and Democracy's Future (with Carol Gilligan, 2009) and Fundamentalism in American Religion and Law: Obama's Challenge to Patriarchy's Threat to Democracy (2010). Two of his books were named best academic books of their years, he was Shikes Lecturer in Civil Liberties at the Harvard Law School in 1998, and he has served as Vice President of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy.

• 1. Patriarchy and democracy; 2. Imperialism and patriarchy; 3. The rise of gay rights; 4. The fall of empire; 5. Gay rights in former British colonies: legacy of empire?; 6. Gay rights as universal human rights.

'In tracing an idea from the earliest times to the twenty-first century, Richards is pushing back against the scholarship on both imperialism and the history of sexuality that argues that causal connections over such a long period can be superficial … It is a strength of Richards' work that he weaves together insights from a range of disciplines, cultures, and historic periods in a way relevant to contemporary political struggles. This is an important argument that deserves widespread consideration.' Charles Upchurch, Law and History Review