Skeptics on the Fringe:Helen Dale-EqualMarriage:A Skeptical Lawyer's View Of Gay
Details
Speaker
Helen Dale is a lawyer qualified in two jurisdictions (Australia and England), and is currently working in Scotland. She studied her Australian law at the University of Queensland, her English law at Brasenose College, Oxford, and graduated LLB with distinction from the University of Edinburgh in June 2012.
She won the Law Society of Scotland’s annual essay prize in 2012 for her paper ‘A Plea in Law for Equal Marriage’, published in the Journal of the Law Society of Scotland: http://bit.ly/MYLfrZ She also wrote a policy brief on the two marriage equality cases before the SCOTUS for the Reason Foundation in the US, available here: http://reason.org/files/an_argument_for_equal_marriage.pdf
Helen blogs at: http://skepticlawyer.com.au/
Talk
Most arguments in favour of marriage equality treat marriage as a human right, while most arguments against it treat gay marriage as measurably harmful. This argument is of interest to legal academics, but rapidly becomes dull for everyone else.
In this talk, Helen Dale – a practitioner, not an academic – looks at what the available evidence tells us about gay marriage: is it harmful? Did it exist in the past? Has the definition of marriage changed over time? If so, how and why?
Skeptics on the Fringe:Helen Dale-EqualMarriage:A Skeptical Lawyer's View Of Gay