Marc Spindelman

Professor of Law

Professor Marc Spindelman is a graduate of the University of Michigan Law School. Following law school, Professor Spindelman clerked for Judge (now Chief Judge) Alice M. Batchelder on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and was an associate at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft in New York City.

After leaving Wall Street, he was a Reginald F. Lewis Fellow for Law Teaching at Harvard Law School, taught as a Visiting Instructor at the University of Michigan Law School, and spent two years as a Greenwall Fellow in Bioethics and Health Policy at Georgetown University and Johns Hopkins University. While a Greenwall Fellow, Professor Spindelman was also an Adjunct Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center, a Faculty Associate at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, and a Research Fellow at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.

Since joining the faculty at the Moritz College of Law, Professor Spindelman has also been a Visiting Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center (Spring ’05), and at the University of Michigan Law School (AY ’07-’08).

His recent scholarship (see below) focuses on certain problems of inequality, chiefly in the context of sex and death. He regularly teaches courses on Family Law, Bioethics and Public Health Ethics, Health Law, and Sexual Violence.

Recent Articles

Marc Spindelman, Death, Dying, and Domination, 106 Michigan Law Review 1641 (2008) (invited contribution to Law Review Symposium on the Tenth Anniversary of Washington v. Glucksberg and Vacco v. Quill).

Marc Spindelman, Foreword: Some Early Views on District of Columbia v. Heller, 69 Ohio State Law Journal 603 (2008).

Marc Spindelman, State v. Carswell: The Whipsaws of Backlash, 24 Washington University Journal of Law and Policy 165 (2007) (invited).

Marc Spindelman, Some Thoughts on Same-Sex Prostitution, 8 Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law 1013 (2007).

Marc Spindelman, Ohio Court Redefines the Future for Gays, Lesbians, The Plain Dealer, August 16, 2007, at B9.

Marc Spindelman, The Honeymoon's Over, Legal Times, June 12, 2006, at 66.

Marc Spindelman, Andrea Dworkin, in New Makers of Modern Culture 430 (Justin Wintle ed., 2007).

Marc Spindelman, Homosexuality's Horizon, 54 Emory Law Journal 1361 (2005) (invited). (In this article, I challenge the (emerging) conventional wisdom about the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's decision in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health: that Justice Margaret Marshall's opinion for the court in the case — holding that the Massachusetts Constitution protects a constitutional right to marry that same-sex couples, just like cross-sex couples, are now free to enjoy — is, and only is, a stunning victory for lesbian and gay rights. Without doubting the decision may be just such a victory for some lesbians and gay men in some ways, I argue that the realities of Goodridge, including the litigation strategy that helped produce it, are far more varied and variegated than that simple story allows. In particular, from a sex equality perspective, I venture that Goodridge may well be expected to impose various costs on victims and survivors of sexual injury, both same-sexed and cross-sexed, including lesbians and gay men — costs that so-called "pro-gay" accounts of the decision have, so far, to their own detriment, been unable or unwilling to register.).

Marc Spindelman, Foreword to 2004 Symposium: Equality, Privacy and Lesbian and Gay Rights After Lawrence v. Texas, 65 Ohio State Law Journal 1057 (2004) (Foreword, as Faculty Advisor, to Lawrence v. Texas Symposium).

Marc Spindelman, Sketches of Yale Kamisar, 2 Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law 1 (2004) (Foreword, written as Guest Editor, for Tribute to Yale Kamisar).

Marc Spindelman, Yale, 102 Michigan Law Review 1747 (2004) (invited) (This essay is a tribute to Yale Kamisar on the occasion of his retirement from full-time law teaching at The University of Michigan Law School).

Marc Spindelman, Surviving Lawrence v. Texas, 102 Michigan Law Review 1615 (2004) (invited) (This article exposes the perils that the Supreme Court's decision in Lawrence v. Texas may pose for victims of sexual abuse, same-sex and cross-sex).

Marc Spindelman, Sodomy Politics in Lawrence v. Texas, Jurist, June 12, 2003 (This essay examines the gay rights litigation strategy as it unfolded at the Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas, and questions its sexual politics from a sex equality perspective).

Marc Spindelman, Sex Equality Panic, 13 Columbia Journal of Gender and Law 1 (2004) (From a sex equality perspective, this article investigates and critiques a dominant theoretical trend within “queer theory.” It maintains that queer analysis and its corresponding sexuality project have, in important ways, been aligned with perpetrators of cross-sex and same-sex sexual violence, and identifies the queer critique of sexual harassment law and its sex equality underpinnings as one moment of convergence between the two. After considering what appears to be the queer position on sexual violence and highlighting some of its dangers, the essay ends with a call for queer theory to provide an account of itself to victims of sexual violence. This article is a substantially revised and comprehensively annotated version of “Discriminating Pleasures” found below.).

Marc Spindelman, A Dissent from the Many Dissents from Attorney General Ashcroft's Interpretation of the Controlled Substances Act, 19 Issues in Law & Medicine 3 (2003) (This article examines the states’ rights arguments that have been deployed in the Oregon v. Ashcroft – litigation now pending at the U.S. Supreme Court under the name Gonzalez v. Oregon – that challenges Attorney General John Ashcroft’s interpretation of the federal Controlled Substances Act. The article criticizes the states' rights arguments in the case as reflecting bad politics – politics of complicity – that self-styled liberals should resist and reject.).

Marc Spindelman, Discriminating Pleasures, in Directions in Sexual Harassment Law 201 (Catharine A. MacKinnon and Reva Siegel eds., 2003) (invited).

Marc Spindelman, Protecting Suicide and Hurting Women (off-site), Legal Times, May 27, 2002, at 51. On the same topic, see also WBUR-Boston’s National Public Radio-affiliated show The Connection” (off-site), WYPR-Baltimore’s Marc Steiner Show” (.mp3).

Marc Spindelman, Legislating Privilege, 30 Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 24 (2002) (invited) (This commentary challenges the dominant vision of autonomy within arguments favoring legalized assisted suicide. It maintains that those arguments are morally deficient without an account of existing social inequalities. Overlooking such inequalities, it concludes, functions as a defense of social privilege, both within and beyond the assisted suicide debate.).

Marc Spindelman, Reorienting Bowers v. Hardwick, 79 North Carolina Law Review 359 (2001) (The article challenges conventional understandings of the Supreme Court's decision in Bowers v. Hardwick, suggesting, among other things, it can be read as having decided not to decide the substantive merits of the case.).

Marc Spindelman, Some Initial Thoughts on Sexuality and Gay Men with AIDS in Relation to Physician-Assisted Suicide, 2 Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law 91 (2001) (This essay considers various ways that sex (including sexual) inequality is implicated in the assisted suicide debate. It maintains that existing analytics within that debate, especially liberal notions of “autonomy” and “neutrality,” have not adequately accounted for equality-based concerns with the practice’s legalization.).

News

Professor Spindelman is regularly consulted by the press, chiefly domestic but also international, on a range of subjects about which he writes, including constitutional law, the law and ethics of death and dying, and lesbian and gay rights.

His views have appeared, among other places, in the Washington Post, USA Today, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, Philadelphia Inquirer, National Law Journal, Chicago Sun-Times, Detroit Free Press, Connecticut Post, Dallas Morning News, Houston Chronicle, National Law Journal, Globe and Mail (Toronto, Canada), Guardian Unlimited (UK, online), Taipei Times (online), Revista Veja (Brazil), and in stories that have gone out over the Associated Press and Agence France Presse wires. Closer to home, he’s been quoted in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Cincinnati Enquirer, Cincinnati Post, Columbus Dispatch, and The (OSU) Lantern.

He has appeared on ABC Nightly News, CNN, WBUR-Boston’s National Public Radio-affiliated show “The Connection” (off-site), WYPR-Baltimore’s “Marc Steiner Show” (.mp3), and other media outlets.