I'm just wrapping up a paper called "Dignity and Degradation: Transnational Lessons from the Constitutional Protection of Sex." In its ancient origins, the term dignity encompassed two starkly different meanings: first, dignity was a universal human trait, something we all had because we were created in God's image or because as humans we have the unique capacity to reason. Second, dignity was something that belonged exclusively to the aristocracy, distinguishing among classes of people. At first this seems like a contradiction, but my research suggests that universal dignity was never entirely universal. It always hinged on some trait, such as human rationality, and so always excluded someone or something, such as nonhuman animals. Universal dignity depends on hierarchical dignity. At the time of the Enlightenment, as ideas about the rights of man spread in the West, dignity allegedly became secularized and shed its hierarchical meaning. Remnants of hierarchical dignity showed up in Nazi populism, however, according to which all members of the German Volk community were regarded as persons of honor (a concept deeply tied to dignity), but of course it was crucial to the Nazi formulation that some types of persons be excluded from the Volk community to enable the sense of honor among those who were included. Conventional history has it that universal dignity was eclipsed by the Nazis and fascists during World War II, and that in the aftermath of the Allied victory, dignity in its universal valence surged in human rights documents and post-war constitutions as a rebuttal to the ideology of the Axis powers, but this is not the whole story. My paper examines the use of post-war dignity in contemporary constitutional cases dealing with sex (sodomy, prostitution, etc.) in the US, Germany and South Africa, argues that hierarchical dignity can still be discerned even where courts are ostensibly promoting universal dignity, and advocates closer attention to the hierarchies produced when universal human dignity is invoked.

Last year I published "The Future of Sodomy" [32 Fordham Urban Law Journal 197 (2005)], an analysis of Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 Supreme Court case striking down a state sodomy prohibition, and reviewed Jonathan Goldberg Hiller's The Limits to Union: Same-Sex Marriage and the Politics of Civil Rights for Gay and Lesbian Quarterly. I also wrote an essay for a new journal of the legal left called Unbound. The essay, "Rage and Critique: One Jewish Girl's Story" (pdf), chronicles my experiences working with a German colleague on a scholarly project related to reparations for the Nazi labor program and teaching a course to German law students on the same topic.

As a practitioner I worked on policy matters, and briefly on contracts, but have not done much litigation. In my last year working for the state's child support agency I participated in rolling out changes to federal welfare law by concretizing them in state procedure. That was pretty interesting. One thing I learned was that the federal rhetoric of "states' rights" and "bloc grants" was a bit of a sham. I remember spending a good deal of energy trying to figure out how to achieve state objectives despite federal obstacles. This bothered me enough that it helped me to formulate the questions I addressed in my first work of scholarship, "Federalism and Family," which interrogates the pretense that family matters are regulated predominantly at the state level.

I'm going to have to go with Fateless, by Imre Kertész. It's about a Hungarian teenager who was deported to a German concentration camp. In theory it's a novel but it seems likely to be autobiographical. What's powerful about the book is that the protagonist/narrator has no idea what is happening because he was born into a world before the Holocaust, but as the reader, you know where he is and what he's up against. He never has an "aha!" moment. He just gradually adapts to his environment. I found the account painful but not debilitating, because I could see the main character as an agent, maneuvering to adapt and survive.

In the (unambiguously) non-fiction category, I'd recommend On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored by the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips. If you want to learn something about psychoanalysis but can't bear the jargon, this one is simultaneously full of sophisticated insights and reader-friendly.

I find my son, José, 2, pretty darn compelling—even more than my dog, and I never thought anything would compel me as much as my dog. José enjoys grooving to the Hip Hop Hoodíos, a Latino-Jewish hip-hop band whose lyrics are hilarious, multilingual, and only occasionally obscene.