The 2016 Iris Marion Young Distinguished Faculty Lecture presents Martha Nussbaum, Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, University of Chicago Law School.

India decriminalized sodomy in 2009 in a resonant Delhi High Court case known as Naz Foundation, which held the laws to be similar to caste discrimination based on bodily disgust. In 2013, however, the Supreme Court reinstated the sodomy laws. My lecture first sets out the underlying theory of disgust and stigma that I have used previously to analyze U. S. constitutional cases, and which is similar to the theory used in Naz Foundation. I then examine the social background for both the progressive Naz Foundation opinion and the resistance to it. Finally, I look closely at the legal reasoning in the two cases.

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