Artículos de revistas sobre el tema "American Bar Association. Section of Family Law"

The recent three-hour program on “Professional Responsibility and the Religious Traditions” at the annual meeting of the American Association of Law Schools (“AALS”), sponsored by the Section on Professional Responsibility and co-sponsored by the Section on Law and Religion, represents a milepost in the history of the religious lawyering movement and offers a valuable opportunity to reflect on that history. In 1998, only eight years ago, one of us defined the religious lawyering movement as “an emerging force” in legal ethics. In that short time, the movement has expanded dramatically and has received greater attention within the academy and the bar. It has developed the first institutional vehicles for disseminating and promoting conversations about religious lawyering, both among lawyers of the same faith and among lawyers of different faith traditions. Now the religious lawyering movement is increasingly confronting more complex and more difficult religious, legal and ethical issues; and is extending the religious lawyering conversation internationally.

This article is the result of a panel discussion between representatives from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, at the New York State Bar Association (NYSBA)'s International Section 2011 Seasonal Meeting. The panel was given a case study and asked to analyse the general tax issues arising from a highway infrastructure project entered into by a fictitious US company ('Highways, Inc.') in one of the involved Latin American jurisdictions (Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, or Mexico). Under the hypothesis, Highways, Inc. was to choose the appropriate investment vehicle (special purpose vehicle (SPV)), corporate structure, and capital structure. The SPV's tax obligations and tax incentives in the investment country were also analysed by the panel. The objective was to come up with potential barriers and incentives to invest in the four envisaged investment jurisdictions.

Antitrust enforcement is entering a period of transition in the United States. The election of Barack Obama as President and his executive branch, regulatory, and judicial appointments will have important consequences for antitrust law and enforcement, although most observers believe that these changes will be relatively modest both substantively and in comparison to the matters of banking reform and economic stimulus. As part of that process of change, there has been no shortage of advice offered to first the Transition Team and now the Administration about how to handle competition policy going forward. Two of the more substantial efforts in this regard have come from well-established antitrust groups with very different perspectives and memberships. Both the Antitrust Section of the American Bar Association and the American Antitrust Institute have offered sophisticated lengthy public advice to the new Administration on how best to proceed in the competition law field. The reports are very different in nature and reflect the different nature of the institutions that prepared them. This essay takes a brief look at the transition reports offered by each organization and the vision they would offer for the new Administration.

Abstract The purpose of regulating any profession is to assure competent practitioners, particularly where its absence can cause irreparable harm. Regulatory “licensing” ideally achieves such assurance, while at the same time avoiding unnecessary supply constriction. The latter can mean much higher prices and an inadequate number of practitioners. Regrettably, the universal delegation to attorneys of the power to regulate themselves has led to a lose/lose system lacking protection from incompetent practice while also diminishing needed supply. The problem is manifest in four regulatory flaws: First, state bars—in combination with the American Bar Association—require four years of largely irrelevant higher education for law school entry. Most of this coursework commonly has nothing to do with law. Second, and related, these seven-years of mandatory higher education (that only the United States requires for attorney licensure) impose extraordinary costs. Those costs now reach from $190,000 to $380,000 in tuition and room and board per student—driven by shocking tuition levels lacking competitive check. Third, attorney training focuses almost entirely on a few traditional subjects, with little attention paid to the development of useful skills in most of the 24 disparate areas of actual practice (e.g., administrative, bankruptcy, corporate, criminal, family, taxation, et al.). And schools often pay scant attention to legislation, administrative proceedings, or the distinct areas of law that will be relevant to a student’s future practice. Fourth, state bars rely on supply-constricting bar examinations of questionable connection to competence assurance. In the largest state of California, the bar examination fails about 2/3 of its examinees. This system has fostered an opportunistic cottage industry of increasingly expensive preparatory courses that further raise the cost of becoming an attorney—even after 7 years of higher education. Meanwhile, the bars regulating attorneys in the respective states: a) Do not treat negligent acts as a normal basis for discipline (outside of extreme incapacity); b) Do not require malpractice insurance—effectively denying consumer remedies for negligence; c) Do not allow clients injured by malpractice to recover from “client security funds”; d) Do not require post-licensure “legal education” in the area of an attorney’s practice; e) Do not test attorneys in the area of practice relied upon by consumers—ever; and f) Respond to cost-effective, technology-centric solutions to legal problems not by regulation to assure consumer benefit, but by attempts to categorically foreclose them in favor of total reliance on often unavailable/expensive counsel. No area of state regulation has more openly violated federal antitrust law than has the legal profession. The United States Supreme Court held in 2015 that any state body controlled by “active market participants” in a profession regulated is not a sovereign entity for antitrust purposes without “active state supervision.” Yet four years later, attorneys continue to regulate themselves without such supervision, overlooking the threat of criminal felony and civil treble damage liability.

More than sixty years have elapsed since Justice Holmes first enunciated in Lucas v. Earl the principle that income from personal services "must be taxed to him who earns it" and that assignments of such income "however skilfully devised" will not be respected for tax purposes. The Supreme Court has described this principle-now known as the assignment of income doctrine-as the "first principle of income taxation." Yet despite its venerable lineage and importance, the doctrine remains today beset by confusion and uncertainty. This was vividly demonstrated in Schneer v. Commissioner where the Tax Court agonized over the application of the doctrine to a simple, indeed pedestrian, set of facts. The twenty-page majority opinion brought forth a concurrence, based on an entirely different theory, and two vigorous dissents, one of which attacked the court's decision as "unprincipled." The decision has given rise to considerable comment, some of it heated. One commentator described the decision as not only wrong but "exquisitely wrong, so misguided at every turn, that it becomes a wayward sort of achievement," while another described the first commentator's analysis as "wrong, although not exquisitely wrong."' All commentators, however, have recognized the case's significance. The Tax Lawyer, the official publication of the American Bar Association Section of Taxation, designated the case as one of the important tax decisions of 1992, while a publication of the Section on Taxation of the Association of American Law Schools recommended its use in the classroom as the "practically perfect case" for teaching the assignment of income doctrine. The Schneer case therefore presents an opportune occasion to reexamine the assignment of income doctrine as applied to personal service income.

This paper was originally written for the Second Invitational Conference on Professionalism in Tax Practice, which was scheduled to be held in Washington in January 1996 under the sponsorship of the American Bar Association Section of Taxation, the American College of Tax Counsel, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, the National Association of Enrolled Agents, the National Association of Tax Practitioners, the National Society of Public Accountants, and the Tax Executives Institute. The Conference was postponed because of the Blizzard of 1996.Copyright © 1996 by Michael B. Lang.Our income tax system requires that taxpayers report their income annually and assess the correct amount of tax on this income. This selfassessment system, however, depends on taxpayers ferreting out the provisions of the tax law that apply to them and properly applying those provisions to their factual situations. The immensity and complexity of the tax law and the difficulty of applying even apparently clear legal provisions to complex sets of facts (the most difficult lesson in law school for the typical law student) make this process impossible for many taxpayers. As a result, they turn to tax professionals for assistance in preparing tax returns.These professionals generally fall into one or more of four groups: (1) lawyers licensed to practice law in at least one state or the District of Columbia (licensed lawyers); (2) certified public accountants (CPAs); (3) those admitted to practice before the IRS under the provisions of Circular 230; and (4) "income tax return preparers," as defined in section 7701 (a)(36 (return preparers). Professionals in each category are subject to their own set of practice standards. Many professionals in the tax field are members of more than one group and thus subject to multiple sets of standards. For example, licensed lawyers or CPAs may be subject to their respective state regulatory authorities, Circular 230 (because they are admitted to practice before the IRS), and the statutory provisions affecting return preparers.Once the taxpayer seeks the help of a professional, several difficulties inevitably mar the return preparation process. First, although the professional should be more skilled at finding the tax law relevant to the taxpayer's situation, the professional's knowledge of the facts underlying the taxpayer's tax situation depends entirely on the information known to and conveyed by the taxpayer. The way in which the professional inquires about the facts may influence how the facts are reported by the taxpayer. Hence, the taxpayer's response is a function of the professional's inquiry. Furthermore, the taxpayer may deliberately slant the facts in the hope of reducing her tax, or simply fail to report all of the relevant facts because of misunderstanding, misperception, forgetfulness, or the like. These considerations raise the prospect that a return prepared by even the most assiduous professional may be less accurate than what a well-informed, well-intentioned taxpayer might have prepared independently.

Photo ID 129550055 © Katarzyna Bialasiewicz | Dreamstime.com ABSTRACT It has been 26 years since medical aid in dying (“MAiD”) was first legalized in Oregon, and today, about 20 percent of people in the US live in jurisdictions that permit MAiD. The New York State legislature is currently considering a bill that would permit Medical Aid in Dying for terminally ill patients in certain defined circumstances. Those states now benefit from decades of experience, evidence, and reporting from MAiD jurisdictions. This demonstrates that legislation can simultaneously grant terminally ill citizens the civil right to access MAiD while also aggressively protecting all patients from coercion, manipulation, and harm. Given the copious evidence gathered in the past decades, concerns about abuse can no longer be credited as grounds for opposing the passage of legislation that is demonstrably both effective and safe. INTRODUCTION It has been 26 years since medical aid in dying (“MAiD”) was first legalized in Oregon,[1] and today, about 20 percent of people in the US live in jurisdictions that permit MAiD.[2] Other jurisdictions, including New York, are actively considering adopting MAiD laws. Those states now benefit from decades of experience, evidence, and reporting from MAiD jurisdictions, demonstrating that legislation can permit MAiD while also aggressively protecting all patients from coercion, manipulation, and harm. The data should allay the concerns of those who oppose MAiD due to the risk of abuse, coercion, and a hypothetical slippery slope. We, as a society, as clinicians, and as ethicists, must remain vigilant and prevent abuse of MAiD, given the potential risks in the community and in congregate care settings and the risk of patient exploitation by family members. However, given the copious evidence, concerns about abuse do not justify opposition to legislation that is effective and safe. I. New York’s MAiD Bill The New York State legislature is currently considering a bill that would permit MAiD for terminally ill patients in defined circumstances.[3] The bill applies only to adults with a terminal illness or condition that is “incurable and irreversible” and “will, within reasonable medical judgment, produce death within six months.” The bill contains numerous protective requirements: MAiD requests can only be made by the patient themself; requests cannot be made by healthcare agents, surrogates, or anyone else; MAiD requests must be made both orally and in writing to the patient’s attending physician; No person is eligible for MAiD solely because of age or disability; The patient’s attending physician must determine the patient has a qualifying terminal illness, has decision-making capacity, and has made a voluntary, informed decision to request MAiD, in the absence of coercion; These determinations must be confirmed by a second consulting physician in writing; If the attending physician has any concern that the patient may not have decision-making capacity, the patient must be referred to a mental health professional; The attending physician has additional duties to the patient, including ensuring the decision is informed, by discussing the patient’s condition and prognosis; discussing the MAiD process, and treatment alternatives like palliative and hospice care; offering referrals to other appropriate treatment, like palliative and hospice care; and educating the patient that their request can be rescinded at any time and offering them an opportunity to do so; The written request must be witnessed by at least two adults who cannot be (i) related to the patient, (ii) entitled to any portion of the patient’s estate, (iii) employed by a healthcare facility where the patient is receiving treatment or residing, (iv) or the attending physician, consulting physician, or mental health professional determining decision-making capacity; and MAiD medication must be self-administered by the patient, and it must be voluntarily ingested.[4] ARGUMENTS FOR AND AGAINST MAiD II. No Evidence of Abuse of Existing MAiD Laws MAiD supporters and critics alike have a concern about the abuse of MAiD. For this reason, MAiD laws throughout the US incorporate strict eligibility criteria and protective procedural requirements. For instance, patients are eligible only if they are terminally ill with six months or less to live, more than one physician must be involved, and requests must be witnessed (by individuals unrelated to the patient who will not profit from the patient’s estate). MAiD requests have been closely examined in the 27 years since Oregon became the first state to legalize the practice. The results show that these compassionate and protective measures have worked. There have been no documented or substantiated incidents of MAiD abuse since Oregon became the first to implement a MAiD law in 1997.[5] In 2019, the executive director of Disability Rights Oregon (DRO), an organization mandated by federal law to investigate complaints of abuse or neglect of people with disabilities, reported that DRO has never received a complaint that a person with disabilities was coerced into obtaining a prescription for MAiD drugs.[6] A recent study of aggregated data from all nine of the US jurisdictions with publicly available MAiD records from 1998 to 2002 found that 95.6 percent of those who died by MAiD were non-Hispanic white individuals, and 53.1 percent were male.[7] 72.2 percent of these individuals had at least some college education, 74 percent had a cancer diagnosis, and the median age of MAiD death was 74 years old. Only 11 percent of patients were uninsured. MAiD users tend to be white, older, educated, diagnosed with cancer, and insured. Fears that MAiD would overwhelmingly be used by (or on) the poor, the uninsured, the uneducated, or racial and ethnic minorities have not materialized. This data has actually raised a converse concern: that MAiD may, inequitably, not be readily available to less privileged populations or those with a diagnosis other than cancer.[8] Opponents of MAiD may argue that the recent relaxation of certain legal restrictions in some jurisdictions is evidence that the slippery slope to unrestricted euthanasia has begun. This is a mischaracterization. Certain restrictions have been adjusted. For instance, Oregon and Vermont removed the residency restriction that previously excluded non-residents from eligibility.[9] Both states changed the residency requirement due to lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of requiring residence.[10] New Jersey’s law will likely change soon, as well.[11] Initial MAiD laws were drafted to be highly restrictive out of concern about unintended and unforeseeable consequences. Given the gravity of the subject, decades ago, it was better to err on the side of caution, even if that meant excluding from eligibility people who ought to, ethically or legally, be included. Now, with nearly 30 years of experience and data, we can better determine which requirements are necessary to appropriately protect patients, clinicians, and society. Restrictions proven to be unnecessary can now be modified. The core purposes of MAiD laws and the rights and protections they provide are not changing. Rather, a few aspects of the regulations are being adjusted so they are not more restrictive than necessary to achieve their purpose. The ever-growing body of evidence that MAiD laws can adequately protect against abuse and the mythic slippery slope has assured many that their fears will not materialize.[12] For example, NYU bioethicist Arthur Caplan was once a vigorous opponent of MAiD. He worried that MAiD laws would lead to the abuse of the poor, uninsured, and disabled in service of cost-saving or the convenience of others. [13] But, after closely following the empirical evidence from MAiD early-adopters, Oregon and Washington, Caplan changed his mind. In 2018, he argued in favor of the NY MAiD bill before the New York State Assembly Standing Committee on Health.[14] Discussing his review of evidence from these states, Caplan stated: I found no cause for my concerns, none with respect to the slippery slope. There isn’t solid evidence of coercion or duplicity being exercised with respect to people who choose assistance in dying in either state. The police, government officials, families of those who have chosen to use the legislation and the general citizenry find no causes or basis for changing the laws due to abuse or misapplication . . . These slippery slope arguments are just not true . . . there is no current factual support for this slippery slope argument that vulnerable individuals are at risk for being coerced into using the law.[15] Decades of evidence has shown that legislation can simultaneously grant terminally ill patients access to MAiD while also protecting against coercion and abuse. In the face of this evidence, continuing to deny access to MAiD because of hypothetical abuse is unjust and unethical. III. Views of Opponents are Neither Grounded in Fact nor Consistent with Current End-of-Life Practices a. Risk of coercion One common argument heard today from some disability advocates who oppose MAiD goes something like this: Everybody who would qualify for and use MAiD is (or will become) a disabled person, so MAiD only kills people with disabilities. The most common reasons people choose to end their lives via MAiD are disability issues, like loss of autonomy, less ability to engage in activities, and loss of dignity. They argue that, instead of making it easier for disabled people to die, we should make sure that proper services and support exist so that disabled people do not choose to die. Such disability-rights-based arguments tend to assert that to avoid abuse, we must prohibit MAiD altogether. They argue that legalizing MAiD will inexorably lead to abuse and coercion, and disabled people will be pressured into suicide. Some even argue that MAiD laws are the first step to euthanasia, noting the path in other jurisdictions.[16] As an initial matter, people with disabilities deserve adequate support and services, and these are not always available to them. People with disabilities have faced tremendous discrimination in the healthcare system and have been historically prevented from accessing proper care and asserting their autonomy. Ensuring that all can access adequate end-of-life care, like palliative or hospice care, is an ongoing battle that ought not be abandoned. But fighting for adequate end-of-life care and legalizing MAiD are not mutually exclusive. In Oregon, 90 percent of those who access MAiD are enrolled in hospice and states with MAiD laws tend to have better access to palliative care than states without.[17] MAiD proponents seek only to add another choice for the dying, not to diminish any other options. This is reflected in the text of New York’s pending bill, which explicitly requires patient education and referrals to appropriate end-of-life services, like palliative care and hospice.[18] No one has openly argued that society should hold terminally ill patients hostage in order to obtain broader support and funding for palliative care, but that is the practical effect. Beyond the need for supportive services and proper access to the full range of end-of-life care options, the disability argument fails. First, the assertion that MAiD laws will be abused and disabled people will be coerced into suicide is not grounded in fact. To the contrary, real-life evidence gathered in over two decades of legal MAiD has shown no documented or substantiated incidents of abuse, as discussed above.[19] The slippery slope has simply not materialized. Advocates for people with disabilities who are opposed to MAiD have not clearly articulated exactly who is vulnerable to being coerced into obtaining a MAiD prescription or even how such coercion could logistically occur. Most people with disabilities are not vulnerable to MAiD abuse, as they do not have a qualifying terminal illness or lack decisional capacity due to a developmental disability and are therefore not eligible. MAiD opponents appear to be claiming that all those who qualify for MAiD are vulnerable and seek protection from MAiD laws. But this would include many of the people that, over the past decades, have aggressively and publicly advocated for access to MAiD – terminally ill people, like Brittany Maynard,[20] many of whom lobbied hard for the passage of MAiD laws while knowing that they themselves would die before the laws passed. Opponents of MAiD from a segment of the disability rights community are telling individuals who they claim, without permission, as members of the MAiD opposition community, that they must all endure unimaginable suffering without a MAiD option because they must be protected from theoretical coercive harm. People with disabilities should be allowed to make their own choices. No one, not even the most well-meaning advocate, should be allowed to obstruct a patient’s end-of-life choices – those choices belong to the patient alone. b. Argument That the Demand for MAID is a Result of Poor Disability Services Second, the argument that terminally ill patients would decline MAiD if only they had better disability services or support is disingenuous to the extent that it ignores the fact that people choosing MAiD are actively dying. No provision of supportive services can change this. And it is perfectly reasonable for someone who knows that they will die in less than six months to want some control over the manner of their death and to avoid the deterioration, indignity, and suffering that could come with it. The argument construes a MAiD death as a choice to die rather than live with a disability. But individuals choosing MAiD are not choosing death – death is coming and coming quickly. MAiD simply offers some control over this reality, giving patients an option that is safe, certain, and painless. Certainly, supportive hospice services should be available for these individuals. But there is no evidence demonstrating that any amount of service would eliminate the need and desire for the MAiD option. c. Inconsistent Positions on MAID and Other Ending Life Care Options: Palliative Sedation and VSED MAiD opponents who are concerned about abuse and coercion often hold inconsistent views on other currently available ending life care options.[21] For example, some argue that palliative sedation[22] renders MAiD unnecessary and does not present the same ethical problems.[23] However, whereas MAiD can only be chosen by the patient themself (and the patient must have decision-making capacity), the same is not true for palliative sedation. Palliative sedation, a valuable modality of end-of-life care, does not have to be initiated by the patient. If the patient is deemed not to have decision-making capacity to make that decision, their healthcare proxy can decide to initiate the process and continue it until the patient dies. Individuals other than patients often choose to begin palliative sedation and continue it to its inevitable conclusion. And because palliative sedation does not require enabling legislation, none of the protective safeguards incorporated in MAiD legislation are available to protect those who receive palliative sedation. Some may try to differentiate between palliative sedation and MAiD by saying that once started, palliative sedation can always be discontinued – it need not end in the patient’s death. This is true, but the very process of palliative sedation will inevitably make the patient insensible or unconscious or otherwise unable to exercise a choice to stop sedation. With MAiD, the patient must self-administer and ingest the medication on their own, with death following quickly. The patient can choose to forgo MAID up until the very moment of self-administration. Considering MAiD’s procedural safeguards, including that only the patient may choose and administer MAiD, MAiD patients are offered more protection from potential abuse than patients who receive palliative sedation. While some have vocally opposed MAiD for decades, there has not been similar opposition to the option of voluntarily stopping eating and drinking (VSED). With VSED, adults with decision-making capacity make a voluntary decision to refuse nutrition and hydration to die more quickly. People choosing VSED are, essentially, making the same choice that people choosing MAiD do. But VSED is a less predictable process that takes much longer to complete. Unfortunately, the process also carries a risk of unpleasant side-effects, though proper care can help mitigate them. Additionally, the practice of VSED is not constrained by statutorily defined protective measures, as is the case with MAiD – one does not even need to have a terminal illness to choose VSED.[24] It is logically inconsistent for those who oppose MAiD because of the perceived potential of abuse to hold different views about VSED.[25] If malevolent actors can unethically pressure or coerce patients into MAiD, they can also coerce them to stop eating and drinking. As with palliative sedation, it could be argued that an important difference is that VSED can be stopped, unlike MAiD. This argument fails clinically and ethically. As with palliative sedation, the VSED process eventually results in the patient losing consciousness and decision-making capacity. The patient generally becomes unarousable for a period that could last for days or even weeks. For this reason, it is crucial for VSED patients to express their choice in writing (or preferably in video recording)[26] to ensure that they will not be given nutrition or hydration when they are no longer able to enforce their refusal (or if they begin asking for nutrition or hydration). Therefore, there is a period in which the patient cannot decide to end the process, just as with palliative sedation. To the extent that someone is so concerned with potential abuse of MAiD that they seek to ban it but have not expressed similar concerns with VSED, these positions are inconsistent. At a NYS Bar Association-sponsored conference on MAiD in 2019, David Hoffman asked a MAiD opponent whether, “as someone who is looking out for the interests of a segment of the disability population,” she supports palliative sedation and VSED.”[27] Kathryn Carroll, who represented the Center for Disability Rights (“CDR”), confirmed that CDR did not oppose palliative sedation and did not offer a position on VSED. She noted the subtle difference in intention: I don’t believe the Center for Disability Rights has taken issue with palliative sedation. And my understanding is that there is a key difference between palliative sedation and assisted suicide, particularly in that palliative sedation, the point is not to bring about the death of the person, but to relieve the pain that they are experiencing. And so the death is more of a side effect rather than the intended outcome.[28] During the questioning, she provided no explanation as to why the potential for abuse would be different among palliative sedation, VSED, and MAiD.[29] The other MAiD opponent on the panel, Dennis Vacco, of Vacco v. Quill[30] fame, interjected but could not explain any ethically significant difference between VSED and MAiD. Instead, he focused solely on palliative sedation, stating that the relevant difference is that palliative sedation can be stopped: . . . treating the pain including what you referred to as terminal sedation, is not moral and legally and ethnically the same as physician-assisted suicide . . . The fact of the matter is – the difference is you can terminate that treatment, and it’s the permanent aspect of physician-assisted suicide that goes back to what I said 20 minutes ago. You can’t put the bright line anyplace else other than where it is.[31] But, as discussed above, that difference is of little import, given that palliative sedation results in patients without the ability or capacity to make the choice to stop treatment. Vacco then reverted to his concerns about the potential for coercion and the elusive slippery slope, referencing his primary argument that the only way to ensure there is no abuse of a MAiD law is not to have one at all: The bright line that is created by the law in the state of New York, which makes physician-assisted suicide a manslaughter in the second-degree, or assisting suicide by anybody, manslaughter in the second degree . . . is unfortunately the only place that line can be. That line should not move further toward accommodation. And we see here in the context of . . . all of the so-called protections in the statute. With every protection that is not prohibition, with every protection, you raise the possibility of abuse. You raise the possibility with every protection.[32] Neither Vacco nor Carroll addressed the fact that many common practices today can be the result of coerced decisions. These practices have none of the safeguards contained in MAiD legislation. As another panelist, David Leven, stated: consider that people who want to have life-sustaining treatment withdrawn, whether it’s a ventilator or feeding tube, they can also be coerced by family members. That can happen even more often, of course, because that process takes place more and more often, and there are none of the safeguards that we’re talking about here . . . there are risks involved in any process which might result in a hastened death. But there seems to be very little risk involved with medical aid in dying based on the experience in 40 years and the nine states which now permit medical aid in dying.[33] There is an inescapable inconsistency within the disability argument: one cannot logically be so concerned about the abuse of legalized access to MAiD to justify opposing all MAiD legislation while simultaneously supporting options like palliative sedation or VSED as abuse-free alternatives. d. Argument Against Speaking for a Community with Diverse Views Finally, while some disability advocates opposing MAiD will claim terminally ill patients as part of their community, they have no right or authorization to speak for the extremely heterogeneous group of terminally ill patients or the disability community[34] as a whole. The disability community is not homogenous; while some members oppose MAiD, others support it.[35] Recent polling indicates that MAiD may have broad support across the disability community.[36] e. MAiD Opponents Hold the Rights of the Terminally Ill Subordinate to Their Personal Morality and Unsubstantiated Theoretical Concerns The argument that does not get much attention, the one that is the simplest and perhaps even the most compelling, is that all killing is wrong, and the government ought not to be in the business of enabling it. That is certainly a compelling religious and moral argument against individuals engaging in any form of acts that result in ending a human life. But such an ethical or theological position does not dictate that individuals who hold different views on personal morality should be precluded by the state from accessing the most safe, certain, and painless means of addressing an invariably terminal illness. Arguments like the one described above by Vacco (that the only way to completely avoid potential MAiD abuse is to prohibit MAiD) are essentially claiming that the safest thing to do is to subordinate the suffering of the terminally ill to avoid the more subtle task of balancing the interests of two different groups of New York state citizens. But surely, that is the role of the legislature every day. And we should expect no less from the legislature on this issue. The best way to ensure no one dies in car accidents is to prohibit driving. But instead of doing so, we implement safety regulations (like speed limits) to balance the right to travel with the right of everyone else not to be killed in the process. Evidence demonstrates that MAiD legislation can also strike a balance between the rights of the terminally ill and the need to prevent harm. It is not justifiable to support a blanket prohibition of MAiD. CONCLUSION Opponents of MAiD have had decades to cite problematic case studies or formulate a compelling moral argument against it that is grounded in data rather than an assertion of their personal morality. Plainly, no one on either side of the MAiD legislative discussion wants to see anyone subjected to involuntary euthanasia or coerced into MAiD as a better alternative to palliative care when such a plan of care is a viable alternative to “ending life care.” However, enough time has passed, and the risk of coercion has been given sufficient study and debate that we can now conclude, as a society, that the rights of the terminally ill and the rights of persons committed to living their best and longest life with a disability are wholly compatible. It is time for the legislature to strike the appropriate balance and give the terminally ill a well-regulated, responsible pathway to obtaining medication that can relieve their suffering in a manner that is safe, certain, and painless. - [1] Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act, Oregon Health Authority, https://www.oregon.gov/oha/ph/providerpartnerresources/evaluationresearch/deathwithdignityact/pages/index.aspx [2] Elissa Kozlov et al., Aggregating 23 Years of Data on Medical Aid in Dying in the United States, 70 Journal of the American Geriatrics Society 3040 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1111/jgs.17925 [3] Medical Aid in Dying Act, A.995-A, N.Y. St. Assemb. (2023), available at https://legislation.nysenate.gov/pdf/bills/2023/A995A; see also, Medical Aid in Dying Act, S.2445-A, N.Y. St. Senate (2023), available at https://legislation.nysenate.gov/pdf/bills/2023/S2445A. [4] Id. [5] Ronald A. Lindsay, Oregon’s Experience: Evaluating the Record, 9 The American Journal of Bioethics 19 (2009), https://doi.org/10.1080/15265160802654137; Christopher A. Riddle, Medical Aid in Dying: The Case of Disability, in New Directions in the Ethics of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia 234 (Michael Cholbi & Jukka Varelius eds., 2nd ed. 2023), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25315-7; Health Law Section: Duties, Rights & the Law at the End of Life (2019), NY ST. BAR ASSOC. (Nov. 8, 2019), https://nysba.org/products/health-law-section-duties-rights-the-law-at-the-end-of-life-2019/; Medical Aid in Dying: Hearing on A.2383-A Before the New York State Assembly Standing Committee on Health (2018) (testimony of Arthur Caplan), transcript available at https://nystateassembly.granicus.com/DocumentViewer.php?file=nystateassembly_bc5bd4afc9fd8b9021781bc9e35e15ae.pdf&view=1; Fact: Medical Aid in Dying Laws Work to Protect Patients. (n.d.). Compassion & Choices. Retrieved September 5, 2023, from https://compassionandchoices.org/resource/fact-medical-aid-in-dying-laws-work-to-protect-patients; Frequently Asked Questions. (2021, December 7). Death With Dignity. https://deathwithdignity.org/resources/faqs/. [6] Bob Joondeph, Letter from Disability Rights Oregon (DRO), Compassion & Choices (Feb. 14, 2019), https://www.compassionandchoices.org/docs/default-source/default-document-library/disability-rights-oregon-dwd-letter-2-14-19.pdf. [7] Elissa Kozlov et al., Aggregating 23 Years of Data on Medical Aid in Dying in the United States, 70 Journal of the American Geriatrics Society 3040 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1111/jgs.17925 [8] Id. [9] Medical Aid in Dying: Act 39: Patient Choice and Control at the End of Life, Vermont Ethics Network, https://vtethicsnetwork.org/palliative-and-end-of-life-care/medical-aid-in-dying-act-39 (last visited Sept. 21, 2023). [10] Gideonse v. Brown, No. 3:21-cv-01568-AC (D. Or.); Bluestein v. Scott, No. 2:22-cv-00160 (D. Vt.). [11] Govatos v. Murphy, No. 2:23-cv-12601(D.N.J.). [12] Medical associations, historically opponents of MAiD, have begun adopting neutral positions, reflecting changing attitudes of the medical community. E.g., California Medical Association removes opposition to physician aid in dying bill, California Medical Association (May 20, 2015), https://www.cmadocs.org/newsroom/news/view/ArticleId/27210/California-Medical-Association-removes-opposition-to-physician-aid-in-dying-bill; Board directs CMS to develop and distribute “End-of-Life Act” education to members, Colorado Medical Society (November 22, 2016), https://www.cms.org/articles/board-directs-cms-to-develop-and-distribute-end-of-life-act-education-to-me; Vermont Medical Society Policy on End-of-life-Care, Vermont Medical Society (2017), https://vtmd.org/client_media/files/vms_resolutions/2017End-of-Life-Care.pdf (last accessed Sept. 21, 2023); but see Physician-Assisted Suicide, AMA Code of Ethics, https://code-medical-ethics.ama-assn.org/ethics-opinions/physician-assisted-suicide. (5.7 provides opinion opposing MAiD; opinion 1.1.7 provides opinion on conscientious objection.); The American Medical Association could vote to change its stance on medical aid in dying, Death with Dignity (Nov. 10, 2023), https://deathwithdignity.org/news/2023/11/ama-could-vote-to-change-stance-on-maid/ (Update notes that the AMA did not change its stance from opposed to neutral at its November 2023 interim meeting in Baltimore, but referred the resolutions for further study). [13] Medical Aid in Dying: Hearing on A.2383-A Before the New York State Assembly Standing Committee on Health (2018) (testimony of Arthur Caplan), transcript available at https://nystateassembly.granicus.com/DocumentViewer.php?file=nystateassembly_bc5bd4afc9fd8b9021781bc9e35e15ae.pdf&view=1. [14] Id. [15] Id. [16] Id. (noting the laws in Netherlands, Belgium and Canada.); see also National Council on Disability, The danger of assisted suicide laws: Part of the Bioethics and Disability series (2019). https://ncd.gov/sites/default/files/NCD_Assisted_Suicide_Report_508.pdf. [17] Sean Riley & Ben Sarbey, The unexamined benefits of the expansive legalization of medical assistance-in-dying, 19 J. Bioethical Inquiry 4, 663 (2022) (citing Oregon Health Authority Center for Health Statistics, Oregon Death with Dignity Act: 2018 Data Summary (2019), https://www.oregon.gov/oha/PH/PROVIDERPARTNERRESOURCES/EVALUATIONRESEARCH/DEATHWITHDIGNITYACT/Documents/year21.pdf and R. Sean Morrison, et al., America’s care of serious illness: A state-by-state report card on access to palliative care in our nation’s hospitals, 14 J. Palliat. Med. 10, 1094–1096 (2011)). [18] Medical Aid in Dying Act, A.995-A, N.Y. St. Assembly. (2023), available at https://legislation.nysenate.gov/pdf/bills/2023/A995A [19] See also, Ben Colburn, Disability‐based Arguments against Assisted Dying Laws, 36 Bioethics 680 (2022) (cataloging research in multiple countries and concluding that “there is no evidence that assisted dying laws have a disproportionate effect on people with disabilities”). https://doi.org/10.1111/bioe.13036 [20] Eyder Peralta, As Planned, Right-To-Die Advocate Brittany Maynard Ends Her Life, NPR (Apr. 3, 2014), https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/11/03/361094919/as-planned-right-to-die-advocate-brittany-maynard-ends-her-life (Activist Brittany Maynard moved to Oregon after she was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor, because her home state did not permit MAiD at the time). [21] Ending life care is defined as the final stage of the end-of-life care continuum, where the patient chooses to end their life as a means to end their suffering or unacceptable quality of life. [22] Palliative sedation is defined as “the use of medications to induce decreased or absent awareness in order to relieve otherwise intractable suffering at the end of life,” and it carries a risk of hastening death. Molly L. Olsen, Keith M. Swetz & Paul S. Mueller, Ethical Decision Making With End-of-Life Care: Palliative Sedation and Withholding or Withdrawing Life-Sustaining Treatments, 85 Mayo Clin Proc 949 (2010). https://doi.org/10.4065/mcp.2010.0201 [23] E.g. Disability Rights Toolkit for Advocacy Against Legalization of Assisted Suicide, Not Dead Yet, https://notdeadyet.org/disability-rights-toolkit-for-advocacy-against-legalization-of-assisted-suicide (last visited Dec. 8, 2023) (describing palliative sedation as “a legal solution to any remaining painful and uncomfortable deaths; one that does not raise the very serious hazards of legalizing assisted suicide”); Testimony of CDR’s Kathryn Carroll, Esq. Opposing NY Assisted Suicide Bill A2383A, Not Dead Yet (Apr. 23, 2018), https://notdeadyet.org/testimony-of-cdrs-kathryn-carroll-esq-opposing-ny-assisted-suicide-bill-a2383a. [24] Voluntarily Stopping Eating and Drinking: A Compassionate, Widely-Available Option for Hastening Death, (Timothy E. Quill et al. eds., 2021). https://doi.org/10.1093/med/9780190080730.001.0001 [25] This is not to say that MAiD and VSED are ethically identical. Different writers have articulated various reasons why MAiD and VSED are meaningfully different and meaningfully similar. Here we distinguish the potential for abuse, as this is the argument that persists among MAiD opponents, For a broader discussion on the ethics of VSED and how it compares to MAiD, see Voluntarily Stopping Eating and Drinking: A Compassionate, Widely-Available Option for Hastening Death, (Timothy E. Quill et al. eds., 2021). https://doi.org/10.1093/med/9780190080730.001.0001 [26] Id.; see also David N. Hoffman and Judy Schwarz, Can Patients Choose to Stop Eating–Even If They Have Dementia–and Can Health Care Facilities Get Paid for Taking Care of Them? Ethics and Reimbursement at the End of Life (Am. Health L. Ass’n Conf. on Long Term Care and the Law 2020). [27] Health Law Section: Duties, Rights & the Law at the End of Life (2019), NY St. Bar Assoc. (Nov. 8, 2019), https://nysba.org/products/health-law-section-duties-rights-the-law-at-the-end-of-life-2019/. [28] Id. [29] CDR still does not appear to have articulated a position on VSED. CDR is a major and vocal opponent of MAiD legislation in NY with considerable resources (they state their projected 2010 budget was approximately $29,000,000). About Us, Center for Disability Rights, https://cdrnys.org/about/. [30] Vacco v. Quill, 521 U.S. 793 (1997) (holding that there is no equal protection violation when N.Y. law criminalized assisted-suicide but permitted removal of life-support systems). [31] Health Law Section: Duties, Rights & the Law at the End of Life (2019), supra note 5. [32] Id. [33] Id. [34] Ben Colburn, Disability‐based Arguments against Assisted Dying Laws, 36 Bioethics 680 (2022) (providing evidence that “that people with disabilities, and disability rights organizations, have diverse views on the question of whether assisted dying should be legal”). https://doi.org/10.1111/bioe.13036 [35] Us for Autonomy, https://www.usforautonomy.org (last visited Sep 10, 2023); see also, Kathryn L. Tucker, Building Bridges Between the Civil Rights Movements of People with Disabilities and Those with Terminal Illness, 78 U. of Pitt. L. Rev. 329 (2017) (collecting and describing amici participation by disability advocates supporting end-of-life liberty). https://doi.org/10.5195/lawreview.2017.473 [36] E.g., USA/National Public Opinion Survey, Susquehanna Polling & Research, Inc. (Feb. 2023),https://d31hzlhk6di2h5.cloudfront.net/20230307/2e/9e/21/14/d37db7887f3f349202ae6f31/Raben_Crosstabulation_Report_2023.FINAL%20(1).pdf ).

In his book, Review of “Dangerous Affirmations: The Threat of ‘Gay Christianity’” M. D. Perkins analyzes the movement of what he terms “gay Christianity.” In his forward to the book, Stephen Black notes that revisionists’ expressions of “gay Christianity” include: -A person who identifies as “gay” is simply part of God’s plan for a diverse church. - Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT)-identified persons are free to serve in any capacity within the church without restriction. - Sexual orientation is innate and immutable. - To truly “love our neighbours,” Christians must fight for LGBT causes, including allowing LGBT persons to serve openly within the church, marry, and adopt children. According to Black, these expressions reject and revise traditional biblical sexual ethics. While admitting nuances, Perkins broadly summarizes “gay Christian” theology into separate categories: gay Christian theology, affirming theology, queer theology, and gay celibate theology (side B theology). These categories ultimately contrast what Perkins refers to as a “legitimate biblical interpretation” (p.29) (See “Legitimate biblical interpretation” section below). According to Perkins, other than a “legitimate biblical interpretation," any of these would be a “threat” to the church. In addition to being an elder at the Lawndale Presbyterian Church (PCA), Perkins identifies as a research fellow for the American Family Association (AFA), the book's publisher. The AFA is an American conservative protestant non-profit organization that focuses on traditional pro-family agenda and media activism. The AFA is not without scrutiny and disdain by some LGBT advocacy groups, notably the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which has accused AFA of being an anti-gay hate group. In a sense, this book puts iron into an existing cultural war.

I presented an outline of this paper to a meeting of the Tax Structure and Simplification Committee of the Tax Section of the American Bar Association in August, 1993, and a draft of the paper to a University of Virginia law school workshop.Copyright © 1995 by George K. Yin. All rights reserved.This article concerns a tax policy issue of keen current interest: the possible replacement of the income tax with a broad-based tax on consumption. The leadership of the new 104th Congress has promised early scrutiny of consumption tax proposals.The weak link of most consumption tax plans relates to how they would distribute the tax burden across income classes. Critics charge that consumption taxes are regressive or at least not as progressive as the existing income tax. Many theorists believe, however, that one form of broad-based consumption tax, a cash-flow or consumed income tax, is immune to such criticism because it is an individualized consumption tax and could be implemented in a manner very similar to the income tax. Supporters of the cash-flow tax assert that it is flexible enough to attain any desired degree of progressivity.In this article, I examine that proposition. Focusing on the impact of the cash-flow tax on low-income taxpayers, I conclude that it would be surprisingly difficult to fashion a cash-flow tax as redistributive at the lower end of the income scale as the current income tax system while still preserving the asserted advantages of the cash-flow tax. Although it may still be advisable to move towards a cash-flow tax system, it is important for policymakers to recognize the inherent limitations of such a system for achieving progressivity at the lower end of the income spectrum.

In this paper, I will be looking at how the news media may be both helpful (‘good’) and a hindrance (‘bad’) to lesbian and gay parents. While I acknowledge the incommensurable differences between the experiences of lesbian parents and gay parents, I do believe that representations of both lesbian and gay parents in the media tend to focus on any similarities that exist between (and within) the two groups, rather than looking at the important differences. I would suggest that this is the result of the hetero-normative assumptions that inform the news media, which take heterosexual parents to be the norm from which all other parents differ. Such normative assumptions thus suggest that it is important to look at how particular moral frameworks are employed in both pro- and anti-gay news media reports of lesbian and gay parents, the implication being that the former may not necessarily be better than the latter. As lesbian and gay parents, we may thus do ourselves a disservice by uncritically accepting that ‘positive’ media accounts are useful in our fight for rights. ‘Good Parents’ and the ‘Rhetoric of Pseudoscience’ One of the most central aspects of representations of lesbian and gay parents in the news media is the use of ‘scientific proof’ to legitimate lesbian and gay parenting. Some examples include: Significant, reliable social scientific evidence indicates that lesbian and gay parents are as fit, effective and successful as heterosexual parents (Judith Stacey reported in http://www.lethimstay.com/wrong_socscience_expert.html). Because many beliefs about lesbian and gay parents and their children are open to empirical test, psychological research can evaluate their accuracy (American Psychological Association [APA], 1995, http://www.apa.org/pi/parent.html). Scientific findings debunk the myth that gay men cannot be nurturing parents (http://www.familypride.org/issues/myths.htm). A comprehensive international review of 25 years of research into lesbian and gay parenting… shows convincingly that the children of lesbian and gay parents do not demonstrate any important differences from those of heterosexual parents (Gay & Lesbian Rights Lobby, 2002, http://www.glrl.org.au/issues/parenting.htm). One particular strategy of legitimation evident in these extracts demonstrates what Kitzinger has termed the ‘rhetoric of pseudoscience’ – disproving your opponents claims to truth by demonstrating their ‘bad science’ (see also Riggs, “Politics”). Thus, in the examples above, ‘significant, reliable social scientific evidence’ is contrasted with ‘debunk[ed]… myth[s]’. Another example of this is provided in Stacey’s claim that: Paul Cameron is the primary disreputable and discredited figure in this [anti-lesbian and gay parenting] literature. He was expelled from the APA… for unethical scholarly practices, such as selective, misleading representations of research and making claims that could not be substantiated (http://www.lethimstay.com/wrong_socscience_expert.html). Here, Stacey uses the authority of ‘good’ social scientific research in order to disprove the claims of ‘bad’ ‘disreputable and discredited figure[s]’. In so doing, while she seeks to support lesbian and gay parents in our fight for rights, she also perpetuates the notion that scientific knowledge is the appropriate arbiter of what counts as ‘good parenting’. This is reinforced in the statement of the APA, which suggests that ‘many beliefs about lesbian and gay parents and their children are open to empirical test’. While this is intended to demonstrate the importance of using psychological research to ‘evaluate [the] accuracy’ of such beliefs, it also demonstrates the risks that we run when using science to determine what will count as ‘truth’ (Clarke; Riggs, “Politics”, “On Whose Terms”). Thus, while psychological knowledge in the extracts above is deployed in support of lesbian and gay parents, we only need to look back 30-odd years to see a vastly different story. It is as recently as that that same-sex attraction was classified as a pathology in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-II). Thus, as Joshua Gamson (76) suggests, that which is considered ‘“normal” is often a synonym for “power”’. In this regard, the power that is evoked through the use of scientific discourse in news media may also be used against lesbian and gay parents. For example, Bill Maier, a clinical psychologist and vice president of the (right-wing and, anti-gay) Focus on the Family Institute is reported as saying that: Every responsible psychologist in the APA should be ashamed; the organization is obviously more concerned with appeasing its powerful gay lobby than it is with retaining any semblance of moral and ethical duty (Baptist Press News, http://www.bpnews.net/bpnews.asp?ID=18784). Here morality and ethics are constructed as being a priori oriented towards the values of the heterosexual majority. Even if lesbian and gay rights activists are to counter this with ‘proof’ of the normality of lesbians and gay men, this does little to destabilise the hegemony of scientific knowledge and its ability to define what counts as moral and ethical. Indeed, Maier draws attention to a very important point – while organisations such as the APA may seek to use psychological knowledge to refute anti-gay claims, they do so without challenging the ideological assumptions that underpin it. As a result, the APA (and those who use psychological knowledge in pro-accounts more generally) are left open to accusations of bias and wilful ignorance of a system of law that is based upon the values of white, heterosexual, middle-class men (Bernstein). ‘Taking Sides’: Is There Any Difference? This leads me to ask the following question: Do we as lesbians and gay men actually want to be ‘good parents’? How might our location within this position only serve to erase the unique experiences of parenting and families that we share? Eldridge suggests that what appear as debates over social issues may more accurately be described as ‘one-sided debates’, wherein the ‘opposing parties’ are actually arguing very similar points. This is particularly evident in debates over lesbian and gay parenting, as both those for and those against lesbian and gay parents often uncritically accept the notions of ‘science’ that inhere to the debates. For example, in the previous section we saw Stacey claim that anti-gay researchers have questionable ethics, just as Maier suggested that the support for lesbian and gay issues given by the APA represents a crisis in its ‘ethical and moral duty’. While pro-accounts of lesbian and gay parents may be useful in the short term to generate ‘positive’ representations of lesbian and gay parents in the media (which in some cases may be an important aspect of legal challenges in regards to lesbian and gay adoption rights), they do little to challenge the networks of power within which they are located, focused as they are upon stereotypical representations of ‘good’ lesbian and gay parents who are typically white, able-bodied, and financially secure. As a result, these representations further marginalise those lesbians and gay men who do not fit within this category (for example, due to economic or cultural difference from the white, middle-class majority), in addition to those lesbians and gay men who choose not to parent. These points demonstrate how the fight for ‘positive representation’ within the media can lead to the further marginalisation of groups of lesbian and gay men who already have little access to such representation (Gamson). Within this paper, I have demonstrated some of the ways in which ‘good’ representations of lesbian and gay parents may also be ‘bad’—they may render us complicit with discourses of science that have often been used against us, and they also encourage us to conform to a heterosexual model of relationality. In this way, lesbian and gay parents are expected to be ‘as fit, effective and successful as heterosexual parents’ (Stacey). As a result, lesbian and gay parents are encouraged to accept a form of subjectivity that recognises scientific arguments as legitimate, and which thus encourages lesbians and gay men to open their lives to scientific scrutiny, measurement, and objectification. Moreover, it encourages lesbian and gay parents ‘not [to] demonstrate any important differences from… heterosexual parents’ (Gay & Lesbian Rights Lobby) under threat of being declared, by default, unfit parents. The converse effect of news media reports of lesbian and gay parents can also be true: ‘bad’ representations may inadvertently draw attention to the problems that inhere to using science to ‘prove the case’. Thus, as the extract from Maier suggests, naively believing that science is the answer ignores the moral assumptions that shape news media and which further marginalise the often critical moral frameworks of lesbian and gay parents. Obviously, I am not advocating here for more statements like those of Maier. Rather, I am suggesting that as lesbian and gay parents we need to be wary of accepting normative framework when mounting our resistances. In other words, if ‘bad’ is often ‘good’, and ‘good’ is often ‘bad’ in scientific media accounts of lesbian and gay parents, then it would seem important that we develop alternate ways of accounting for our experiences, at the same time as we critique such accounts in order to demonstrate their moral assumptions. Acknowledgements I would first like to acknowledge the sovereignty of the Kaurna people, upon whose land I live in Adelaide, South Australia. Thanks as always go to Greg for support and proof reading, and to our foster child, Gary, for helping this all make sense. References Bernstein, Mary. “Gender, Queer Family Policies, and the Limits of the Law.” Queer Families, Queer Politics: Challenging Culture and the State. Ed. Mary Bernstein and Renate Reimann. New York: Columbia UP, 2001. Clarke, Victoria. “‘Stereotype, Attack and Stigmatize Those Who Disagree’: Employing Scientific Rhetoric in Debates about Lesbian and Gay Parenting.” Feminism & Psychology 10 (2000): 152-9. Eldridge, John. “News, Truth and Power.” Getting the Message: News, Truth and Power. Ed. John Eldridge. London: Routledge, 1993. Gamson, Joshua. “Talking Freaks: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Families on Daytime Talk TV.” Queer Families, Queer Politics: Challenging Culture and the State. Ed. Mary Bernstein and Renate Reimann. New York: Columbia UP, 2001. Kitzinger, Celia. “The Rhetoric of Pseudoscience.” Deconstructing Social Psychology. Eds. Ian Parker and John Shotter. London: Routledge, 1990. Riggs, Damien W. “The Politics of Scientific Knowledge: Constructions of Sexuality and Ethics in the Conversion Therapy Literature.” Lesbian & Gay Psychology Review 5 (2004): 6-14. Riggs, Damien W. “On Whose Terms?: Psychology and the Legitimisation of Lesbian and Gay Parents.” GLIP News 3 (2004): 3-6. http://www.psychology.org.au/units/interest_groups/gay_lesbian/publications.asp>. Riggs, Damien W. “The Psychologisation of Foster Care: Implications for Lesbian and Gay Parents.” PsyPag Quarterly 51 (2004): 34-43. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Riggs, Damien. "Who Wants to Be a 'Good Parent'?: Scientific Representations of Lesbian and Gay Parents in the News Media." M/C Journal 8.1 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0502/05-riggs.php>. APA Style Riggs, D. (Feb. 2005) "Who Wants to Be a 'Good Parent'?: Scientific Representations of Lesbian and Gay Parents in the News Media," M/C Journal, 8(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0502/05-riggs.php>.

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash ABSTRACT COVID-19 highlighted a disproportionate impact upon marginalized communities that needs to be addressed. Specifically, a focus on equity rather than equality would better address and prevent the disparities seen in COVID-19. A distributive justice framework can provide this great benefit but will succeed only if the medical community engages in outreach, anti-racism measures, and listens to communities in need. INTRODUCTION COVID-19 disproportionately impacted communities of color and lower socioeconomic status, sparking political discussion about existing inequities in the US.[1] Some states amended their guidelines for allocating resources, including vaccines, to provide care for marginalized communities experiencing these inequities, but there has been no clear consensus on which guidelines states should amend or how they should be ethically grounded. In part, this is because traditional justice theories do not acknowledge the deep-seated institutional and interpersonal discrimination embedded in our medical system. Therefore, a revamped distributive justice approach that accounts for these shortcomings is needed to guide healthcare decision-making now and into the post-COVID era. BACKGROUND Three terms – health disparity, health inequities, and health equity – help frame the issue. A health disparity is defined as any difference between populations in terms of disease incidence or adverse health events, such as morbidity or mortality. In contrast, health inequities are health disparities due to avoidable systematic structures rooted in racial, social, and economic injustice.[2] For example, current data demonstrate that Black, Latino, Indigenous Americans, and those living in poverty suffer higher morbidity and mortality rates from COVID-19.[3] Finally, health equity is the opportunity for anyone to attain his or her full health potential without interference from systematic structures and factors that generate health inequities, including race, socioeconomic status, gender, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or geography.[4] ANALYSIS Health inequities for people of color with COVID-19 have led to critiques of states that do not account for race in their resource allocation guidelines.[5] For example, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health revised its COVID-19 guidelines regarding resource allocation to patients with the best chance of short-term survival.[6] Critics have argued that this change addresses neither preexisting structural inequities nor provider bias that may have led to comorbidities and increased vulnerability to COVID-19. By failing to address race specifically, they argue the policy will perpetuate poorer outcomes in already marginalized groups. As the inequities in COVID-19 outcomes continue to be uncovered and the data continue to prove that marginalized communities suffered disproportionately, we, as healthcare providers, must reconsider our role in addressing the injustices. Our actions must be ethically grounded in the concept of justice. l. Primary Theories of Justice The principle of justice in medical ethics relates to how we ought to treat people and allocate resources. Multiple theories have emerged to explain how justice should be implemented, with three of the most prominent being egalitarianism, utilitarianism, and distributive. This paper argues that distributive justice is the best framework for remedying past actions and enacting systemic changes that may persistently prevent injustices. An egalitarian approach to justice states all individuals are equal and, therefore, should have identical access to resources. In the allocation of resources, an egalitarian approach would support a strict distribution of equal value regardless of one’s attributes or characteristics. Putting this theory into practice would place a premium on guidelines based upon first-come, first-served basis or random selection.[7] However, the egalitarian approach taken in the UK continues to worsen health inequities due to institutional and structural discrimination.[8] A utilitarian approach to justice emphasizes maximizing overall benefits and achieving the greatest good for the greatest number of people. When resources are limited, the utilitarian principle historically guides decision-making. In contrast to the egalitarian focus on equal distribution, utilitarianism focuses on managing distributions to maximize numerical outcomes. During the COVID-19 pandemic, guidelines for allocating resources had utilitarian goals like saving the most lives, which may prioritize the youthful and those deemed productive in society, followed by the elderly and the very ill. It is important to reconsider using utilitarian approaches as the default in the post-COVID healthcare community. These approaches fail to address past inequity, sacrificing the marginalized in their emphasis on the greatest amount of good rather than the type of good. Finally, a distributive approach to justice mandates resources should be allocated in a manner that does not infringe individual liberties to those with the greatest need. Proposed by John Rawls in a Theory of Justice, this approach requires accounting for societal inequality, a factor absent from egalitarianism and utilitarianism.[9] Naomi Zack elaborates how distributive justice can be applied to healthcare, outlining why racism is a social determinant of health that must be acknowledged and addressed.[10] Until there are parallel health opportunities and better alignment of outcomes among different social and racial groups, the underlying systemic social and economic variables that are driving the disparities must be fixed. As a society and as healthcare providers, we should be striving to address the factors that perpetuate health inequities. While genetics and other variables influence health, the data show proportionately more exposure, more cases, and more deaths in the Black American and Hispanic populations. Preexisting conditions and general health disparities are signs of health inequity that increased vulnerability. Distributive justice as a theoretical and applied framework can be applied to preventable conditions that increase vulnerability and can justify systemic changes to prevent further bias in the medical community. During a pandemic, egalitarian and utilitarian approaches to justice are prioritized by policymakers and health systems. Yet, as COVID-19 has demonstrated, they further perpetuate the death and morbidity of populations that face discrimination. These outcomes are due to policies and guidelines that overall benefit white communities over communities of color. Historically, US policy that looks to distribute resources equally (focusing on equal access instead of outcomes), in a color-blind manner, has further perpetuated poor outcomes for marginalized communities.[11] ll. Historical and Ongoing Disparities Across socio-demographic groups, the medical system exacerbates historical and current inequities. Members of marginalized races,[12] women,[13] LGBTQ people,[14] and poor people[15] experience trauma caused by discrimination, marginalization, and failure to access high-quality public and private goods. Through the unequal treatment of marginalized communities, these historic traumas continue. In the US, people of color do not receive equal and fair medical treatment. A meta-analysis found that Hispanics and Black Americans were significantly undertreated for pain compared to their white counterparts over the last 20 years.[16] This is partly due to provider bias. Through interviewing medical trainees, a study by the National Academy of Science found that half of medical students and residents harbored racist beliefs such as “Black people’s nerve endings are less sensitive than white people’s” or “Black people’s skin is thicker than white people’s skin.”[17] More than 3,000 Indigenous American women were coerced, threatened, and deliberately misinformed to ensure cooperation in forced sterilization.[18] Hispanic people have less support in seeking medical care, in receiving culturally appropriate care, and they suffer from the medical community’s lack of resources to address language barriers.[19] In the US, patients of different sexes do not receive the same quality of healthcare. Despite having greater health needs, middle-aged and older women are more likely to have fewer hospital stays and fewer physician visits compared to men of similar demographics and health risk profiles.[20] In the field of critical care, women are less likely to be admitted to the ICU, less likely to receive interventions such as mechanical ventilation, and more likely to die compared to their male ICU counterparts.[21] In the US, patients of different socioeconomic statuses do not receive the same quality of healthcare. Low-income patients are more likely to have higher rates of infant mortality, chronic disease, and a shorter life span.[22] This is partly due to the insurance-based discrimination in the medical community.[23] One in three deaths of those experiencing homelessness could have been prevented by timely and effective medical care. An individual experiencing homelessness has a life expectancy that is decades shorter than that of the average American.[24] lll. Action Needed: Policy Reform While steps need to be taken to provide equitable care in the current pandemic, including the allocation of vaccines, they may not address the historical failures of health policy, hospital policy, and clinical care to eliminate bias and ensure equal treatment of patients. According to an applied distributive justice framework, inequities must be corrected. Rather than focusing primarily on fair resource allocation, medicine must be actively anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-transphobic, and anti-discriminatory. Evidence has shown that the health inequities caused by COVID-19 are smaller in regions that have addressed racial wealth gaps through forms of reparations.[25] Distributive justice calls for making up for the past using tools of allocation as well as tools to remedy persistent problems. For example, Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, MA, began “Healing ARC,” a pilot initiative that involves acknowledgement, redress, and closure on an institutional level.[26] Acknowledgement entails informing patients about disparities at the hospital, claiming responsibility, and incorporating community ideas for redress. Redress involves a preferential admission option for Black and Hispanic patients to specialty services, especially cardiovascular services, rather than general medicine. Closure requires that community and patient stakeholders work together to ensure that a new system is in place that will continue to prioritize equity. Of note, redress could take the form of cash transfers, discounted or free care, taxes on nonprofit hospitals that exclude patients of color,[27] or race-explicit protocol changes (such as those being instituted by Brigham and Women’s Hospital that admit patients historically denied access to certain forms of medical care). In New York, for instance, the New York State Bar Association drafted the COVID-19 resolutions to ensure that emergency regulations and guidelines do not discriminate against communities of color, and even mandate that diverse patient populations be included in clinical trials.[28] Also, physicians must listen to individuals from marginalized communities to identify needs and ensure that community members take part in decision-making. The solution is not to simply build new health centers in communities of color, as this may lead to tiers of care. Rather, local communities should have a chance to impact existing hospital policy and should also use their political participation to further their healthcare interests. Distributive justice does not seek to disenfranchise groups that hold power in the system. It aims to transform the system so that those in power do not continue to obtain unfair benefits at the expense of others. The framework accounts for unjust historical oppression and current injustices in our system to provide equitable outcomes to all who access the system. In this vein, we can begin to address the flagrant disparities between communities that have always – and continue to – exist in healthcare today.[29] CONCLUSION As equality focuses on access, it currently fails to do justice. Instead of outcomes, it is time to focus on equity. A focus on equity rather than equality would better address and prevent the disparities seen in COVID-19. A distributive justice framework can gain traction in clinical decision-making guidelines and system-level reallocation of resources but will succeed only if the medical community engages in outreach, anti-racism measures, and listens to communities in need. There should be an emphasis on implementing a distributive justice framework that treats all patients equitably, accounts for historical harm, and focuses on transparency in allocation and public health decision-making. [1] APM Research Lab Staff. 2020. “The Color of Coronavirus: COVID-19 Deaths by Race and Ethnicity in the U.S.” APM Research Lab. https://www.apmresearchlab.org/covid/deaths-by-race. [2] Bharmal, N., K. P. Derose, M. Felician, and M. M. Weden. 2015. “Understanding the Upstream Social Determinants of Health.” California: RAND Corporation 1-18. https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WR1096.html. [3] Yancy, C. W. 2020. “COVID-19 and African Americans.” JAMA. 323 (19): 1891-2. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2020.6548; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2020. “COVID-19 in Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/health-equity/racial-ethnic-disparities/index.html. [4] Braveman, P., E. Arkin, T. Orleans, D. Proctor, and A. Plough. 2017. “What is Health Equity?” Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. https://www.rwjf.org/en/library/research/2017/05/what-is-health-equity-.html. [5] Bedinger, M. 2020 Apr 22. “After Uproar, Mass. Revises Guidelines on Who Gets an ICU Bed or Ventilator Amid COVID-19 Surge.” Wbur. https://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2020/04/20/mass-guidelines-ventilator-covid-coronavirus; Wigglesworth, A. 2020 May 11. “Institutional Racism, Inequity Fuel High Minority Death Toll from Coronavirus, L.A. Officials Say.” Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-05-11/institutional-racism-inequity-high-minority-death-toll-coronavirus. [6] Executive Office of Health and Human Services Department of Public Health. 2020 Oct 20. “Crises Standards of Care Planning and Guidance for the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Commonwealth of Massachusetts. https://www.mass.gov/doc/crisis-standards-of-care-planning-guidance-for-the-covid-19-pandemic. [7] Emanuel, E. J., G. Persad, R. Upshur, et al. 2020. “Fair Allocation of Scarce Medical Resources in the Time of Covid-19. New England Journal of Medicine 382: 2049-55. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMsb2005114. [8] Salway, S., G. Mir, D. Turner, G. T. Ellison, L. Carter, and K. Gerrish. 2016. “Obstacles to "Race Equality" in the English National Health Service: Insights from the Healthcare Commissioning Arena.” Social Science and Medicine 152: 102-110. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2016.01.031. [9] Rawls, J. A Theory of Justice (Revised Edition) (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999). [10] Zack, N. Applicative Justice: A Pragmatic Empirical Approach to Racial Injustice (New York: The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2016). [11] Charatz-Litt, C. 1992. “A Chronicle of Racism: The Effects of the White Medical Community on Black Health.” Journal of the National Medical Association 84 (8): 717-25. http://hdl.handle.net/10822/857182. [12] Washington, H. A. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Doubleday, 2006). [13] d'Oliveira, A. F., S. G. Diniz, and L. B. Schraiber. 2002. “Violence Against Women in Health-care Institutions: An Emerging Problem.” Lancet. 359 (9318): 1681-5. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(02)08592-6. [14] Hafeez, H., M. Zeshan, M. A. Tahir, N. Jahan, and S. Naveed. 2017. “Health Care Disparities Among Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Youth: A Literature Review. Cureus 9 (4): e1184. https://doi.org/10.7759/cureus.1184; Drescher, J., A. Schwartz, F. Casoy, et al. 2016. “The Growing Regulation of Conversion Therapy.” Journal of Medical Regulation 102 (2): 7-12. https://doi.org/10.30770/2572-1852-102.2.7; Stroumsa, D. 2014. “The State of Transgender Health Care: Policy, Law, and Medical Frameworks.” American Journal of Public Health. 104 (3): e31-8. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2013.301789. [15] Stepanikova, I., and G. R. Oates. 2017. “Perceived Discrimination and Privilege in Health Care: The Role of Socioeconomic Status and Race.” American Journal of Preventative Medicine. 52 (1s1): S86-s94. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2016.09.024; Swartz, K. “Health Care for the Poor: For Whom, What Care, and Whose Responsibility?” In Cancian, M., and S. Danziger (Eds.). Changing Poverty, Changing Policies (New York: Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2009), 69-74. [16] Meghani, S. H., E. Byun, and R. M. Gallagher. 2012. “Time to Take Stock: A Meta-analysis and Systematic Review of Analgesic Treatment Disparities for Pain in the United States.” Pain Medicine 13 (2): 150-74. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1526-4637.2011.01310.x; Williams, D. R., and T. D. Rucker. 2000. “Understanding and Addressing Racial Disparities in Health Care.” Health Care Financing Review 21 (4): 75-90. https://scholar.harvard.edu/davidrwilliams/dwilliam/publications/understanding-and-addressing-racial-disparities-health. [17] Hoffman, K. M., S. Trawalter, J. R. Axt, and M. N. Oliver. 2016. “Racial Bias in Pain assessment and treatment recommendations, and false beliefs about biological Differences Between Blacks and Whites.” PNAS 113 (16): 4296-4301. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1516047113. [18] Pacheco, C. M., S. M. Daley, T. Brown, M. Filipp, K. A. Greiner, and C. M. Daley. 2013. “Moving Forward: Breaking the Cycle of Mistrust Between American Indians and Researchers.” American Journal of Public Health. 103 (12): 2152-9. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2013.301480. [19] Velasco-Mondragon, E., A. Jimenez, A. G. Palladino-Davis, D. Davis, and J. A. Escamilla-Cejudo. 2016. “Hispanic Health in the USA: A Scoping Review of the Literature.” Public Health Reviews 37:31. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40985-016-0043-2. [20] Cameron, K. A., J. Song, L. M. Manheim, and D. D. Dunlop. 2010. “Gender Disparities in Health and Healthcare Use Among Older Adults.” Journal of Women’s Health (Larchmt) 19 (9): 1643-50. https://doi.org/10.1089/jwh.2009.1701. [21] Bierman, A. S. 2007. “Sex Matters: Gender Disparities in Quality and Outcomes of Care. Canadian Medical Association Journal 177 (12): 1520-1. https://doi.org/10.1503/cmaj.071541; Fowler, R. A., S. Sabur, P. Li, et al. 2007. “Sex-and Age-based Differences in the Delivery and Outcomes of Critical Care. Canadian Medical Association Journal 177 (12): 1513-9. https://doi.org/10.1503/cmaj.071112. [22] McLaughlin, D. K., and C. S. Stokes. 2002. “Income Inequality and Mortality in US Counties: Does Minority Racial Concentration Matter?” American Journal of Public Health 92 (1): 99-104. https://doi.org/.10.2105/ajph.92.1.99; Shea, S., J. Lima, A. Diez-Roux, N. W. Jorgensen, and R. L. McClelland. 2016. “Socioeconomic Status and Poor Health Outcome at 10 years of Follow-up in the Multi-ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis.” PLoS One 11 (11): e0165651. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0165651. [23] Han, X., K. T. Call, J. K. Pintor, G. Alarcon-Espinoza, and A. B. Simon. 2015. “Reports of Insurance-based Discrimination in Health care and its Association with Access to Care.” American Journal of Public Health 105 Suppl 3 (Suppl 3): S517-25. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2015.302668. [24] Aldridge, R. W., D. Menezes, D. Lewer, et al. 2019. “Causes of Death Among Homeless People: A Population-based Cross-sectional Study of Linked Hospitalization and Mortality Data in England.” Wellcome Open Research 4:49. https://doi.org/10.12688/wellcomeopenres.15151.1. [25] Richardson, E. T., M. M. Malik, W. A. Darity Jr., et al. 2021. “Reparations for Black American Descendants of Persons Enslaved in the U.S. and their Potential Impact on SARS-CoV-2 Transmission.” Social Science and Medicine 276: 113741. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.113741. [26] Wispelwey, B., and M. Morse. 2021. “An Antiracist Agenda for Medicine.” Boston Review. http://bostonreview.net/science-nature-race/bram-wispelwey-michelle-morse-antiracist-agenda-medicine. [27] Johnson, S. F., A. Ojo, and H. J. Warraich. 2021. “Academic Health Centers’ Antiracism Strategies Must Extend to their Business Practices.” Annals of Internal Medicine 174 (2): 254-5. https://doi.org/10.7326/M20-6203; Golub, M., N. Calman, C. Ruddock, et al. 2011. “A Community Mobilizes to End Medical Apartheid.” Progress in Community Health Partnerships: Research, Education, and Action 5 (3): 317-25. https://doi.org/10.1353/cpr.2011.0041. [28] New York State Bar Association. 2020. “New York State Bar Association House of Delegates: Revised COVID-19 Resolutions.” https://nysba.org/app/uploads/2020/10/Final-Health-Law-Section-COVID-19-Resolutions_10-8-20-1-1.pdf. [29] Egede, L. E. 2006. “Race, Ethnicity, Culture, and Disparities in Health Care.” Journal of General Internal Medicine 21 (6): 667-669. https://doi.org/10.1111%2Fj.1525-1497.2006.0512.x

Introduction Crime fiction is one of the world’s most popular genres. Indeed, it has been estimated that as many as one in every three new novels, published in English, is classified within the crime fiction category (Knight xi). These new entrants to the market are forced to jostle for space on bookstore and library shelves with reprints of classic crime novels; such works placed in, often fierce, competition against their contemporaries as well as many of their predecessors. Raymond Chandler, in his well-known essay The Simple Art of Murder, noted Ernest Hemingway’s observation that “the good writer competes only with the dead. The good detective story writer […] competes not only with all the unburied dead but with all the hosts of the living as well” (3). In fact, there are so many examples of crime fiction works that, as early as the 1920s, one of the original ‘Queens of Crime’, Dorothy L. Sayers, complained: It is impossible to keep track of all the detective-stories produced to-day [sic]. Book upon book, magazine upon magazine pour out from the Press, crammed with murders, thefts, arsons, frauds, conspiracies, problems, puzzles, mysteries, thrills, maniacs, crooks, poisoners, forgers, garrotters, police, spies, secret-service men, detectives, until it seems that half the world must be engaged in setting riddles for the other half to solve (95). Twenty years after Sayers wrote on the matter of the vast quantities of crime fiction available, W.H. Auden wrote one of the more famous essays on the genre: The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict. Auden is, perhaps, better known as a poet but his connection to the crime fiction genre is undisputed. As well as his poetic works that reference crime fiction and commentaries on crime fiction, one of Auden’s fellow poets, Cecil Day-Lewis, wrote a series of crime fiction novels under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake: the central protagonist of these novels, Nigel Strangeways, was modelled upon Auden (Scaggs 27). Interestingly, some writers whose names are now synonymous with the genre, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Raymond Chandler, established the link between poetry and crime fiction many years before the publication of The Guilty Vicarage. Edmund Wilson suggested that “reading detective stories is simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between crossword puzzles and smoking” (395). In the first line of The Guilty Vicarage, Auden supports Wilson’s claim and confesses that: “For me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol” (406). This indicates that the genre is at best a trivial pursuit, at worst a pursuit that is bad for your health and is, increasingly, socially unacceptable, while Auden’s ideas around taste—high and low—are made clear when he declares that “detective stories have nothing to do with works of art” (406). The debates that surround genre and taste are many and varied. The mid-1920s was a point in time which had witnessed crime fiction writers produce some of the finest examples of fiction to ever be published and when readers and publishers were watching, with anticipation, as a new generation of crime fiction writers were readying themselves to enter what would become known as the genre’s Golden Age. At this time, R. Austin Freeman wrote that: By the critic and the professedly literary person the detective story is apt to be dismissed contemptuously as outside the pale of literature, to be conceived of as a type of work produced by half-educated and wholly incompetent writers for consumption by office boys, factory girls, and other persons devoid of culture and literary taste (7). This article responds to Auden’s essay and explores how crime fiction appeals to many different tastes: tastes that are acquired, change over time, are embraced, or kept as guilty secrets. In addition, this article will challenge Auden’s very narrow definition of crime fiction and suggest how Auden’s religious imagery, deployed to explain why many people choose to read crime fiction, can be incorporated into a broader popular discourse on punishment. This latter argument demonstrates that a taste for crime fiction and a taste for justice are inextricably intertwined. Crime Fiction: A Type For Every Taste Cathy Cole has observed that “crime novels are housed in their own section in many bookshops, separated from literary novels much as you’d keep a child with measles away from the rest of the class” (116). Times have changed. So too, have our tastes. Crime fiction, once sequestered in corners, now demands vast tracts of prime real estate in bookstores allowing readers to “make their way to the appropriate shelves, and begin to browse […] sorting through a wide variety of very different types of novels” (Malmgren 115). This is a result of the sheer size of the genre, noted above, as well as the genre’s expanding scope. Indeed, those who worked to re-invent crime fiction in the 1800s could not have envisaged the “taxonomic exuberance” (Derrida 206) of the writers who have defined crime fiction sub-genres, as well as how readers would respond by not only wanting to read crime fiction but also wanting to read many different types of crime fiction tailored to their particular tastes. To understand the demand for this diversity, it is important to reflect upon some of the appeal factors of crime fiction for readers. Many rules have been promulgated for the writers of crime fiction to follow. Ronald Knox produced a set of 10 rules in 1928. These included Rule 3 “Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable”, and Rule 10 “Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them” (194–6). In the same year, S.S. Van Dine produced another list of 20 rules, which included Rule 3 “There must be no love interest: The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar”, and Rule 7 “There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better” (189–93). Some of these directives have been deliberately ignored or have become out-of-date over time while others continue to be followed in contemporary crime writing practice. In sharp contrast, there are no rules for reading this genre. Individuals are, generally, free to choose what, where, when, why, and how they read crime fiction. There are, however, different appeal factors for readers. The most common of these appeal factors, often described as doorways, are story, setting, character, and language. As the following passage explains: The story doorway beckons those who enjoy reading to find out what happens next. The setting doorway opens widest for readers who enjoy being immersed in an evocation of place or time. The doorway of character is for readers who enjoy looking at the world through others’ eyes. Readers who most appreciate skilful writing enter through the doorway of language (Wyatt online). These doorways draw readers to the crime fiction genre. There are stories that allow us to easily predict what will come next or make us hold our breath until the very last page, the books that we will cheerfully lend to a family member or a friend and those that we keep close to hand to re-read again and again. There are settings as diverse as country manors, exotic locations, and familiar city streets, places we have been and others that we might want to explore. There are characters such as the accidental sleuth, the hardboiled detective, and the refined police officer, amongst many others, the men and women—complete with idiosyncrasies and flaws—who we have grown to admire and trust. There is also the language that all writers, regardless of genre, depend upon to tell their tales. In crime fiction, even the most basic task of describing where the murder victim was found can range from words that convey the genteel—“The room of the tragedy” (Christie 62)—to the absurd: “There it was, jammed between a pallet load of best export boneless beef and half a tonne of spring lamb” (Maloney 1). These appeal factors indicate why readers might choose crime fiction over another genre, or choose one type of crime fiction over another. Yet such factors fail to explain what crime fiction is or adequately answer why the genre is devoured in such vast quantities. Firstly, crime fiction stories are those in which there is the committing of a crime, or at least the suspicion of a crime (Cole), and the story that unfolds revolves around the efforts of an amateur or professional detective to solve that crime (Scaggs). Secondly, crime fiction offers the reassurance of resolution, a guarantee that from “previous experience and from certain cultural conventions associated with this genre that ultimately the mystery will be fully explained” (Zunshine 122). For Auden, the definition of the crime novel was quite specific, and he argued that referring to the genre by “the vulgar definition, ‘a Whodunit’ is correct” (407). Auden went on to offer a basic formula stating that: “a murder occurs; many are suspected; all but one suspect, who is the murderer, are eliminated; the murderer is arrested or dies” (407). The idea of a formula is certainly a useful one, particularly when production demands—in terms of both quality and quantity—are so high, because the formula facilitates creators in the “rapid and efficient production of new works” (Cawelti 9). For contemporary crime fiction readers, the doorways to reading, discussed briefly above, have been cast wide open. Stories relying upon the basic crime fiction formula as a foundation can be gothic tales, clue puzzles, forensic procedurals, spy thrillers, hardboiled narratives, or violent crime narratives, amongst many others. The settings can be quiet villages or busy metropolises, landscapes that readers actually inhabit or that provide a form of affordable tourism. These stories can be set in the past, the here and now, or the future. Characters can range from Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin to Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, from Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple to Kerry Greenwood’s Honourable Phryne Fisher. Similarly, language can come in numerous styles from the direct (even rough) words of Carter Brown to the literary prose of Peter Temple. Anything is possible, meaning everything is available to readers. For Auden—although he required a crime to be committed and expected that crime to be resolved—these doorways were only slightly ajar. For him, the story had to be a Whodunit; the setting had to be rural England, though a college setting was also considered suitable; the characters had to be “eccentric (aesthetically interesting individuals) and good (instinctively ethical)” and there needed to be a “completely satisfactory detective” (Sherlock Holmes, Inspector French, and Father Brown were identified as “satisfactory”); and the language descriptive and detailed (406, 409, 408). To illustrate this point, Auden’s concept of crime fiction has been plotted on a taxonomy, below, that traces the genre’s main developments over a period of three centuries. As can be seen, much of what is, today, taken for granted as being classified as crime fiction is completely excluded from Auden’s ideal. Figure 1: Taxonomy of Crime Fiction (Adapted from Franks, Murder 136) Crime Fiction: A Personal Journey I discovered crime fiction the summer before I started high school when I saw the film version of The Big Sleep starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. A few days after I had seen the film I started reading the Raymond Chandler novel of the same title, featuring his famous detective Philip Marlowe, and was transfixed by the second paragraph: The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armour rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the visor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying (9). John Scaggs has written that this passage indicates Marlowe is an idealised figure, a knight of romance rewritten onto the mean streets of mid-20th century Los Angeles (62); a relocation Susan Roland calls a “secular form of the divinely sanctioned knight errant on a quest for metaphysical justice” (139): my kind of guy. Like many young people I looked for adventure and escape in books, a search that was realised with Raymond Chandler and his contemporaries. On the escapism scale, these men with their stories of tough-talking detectives taking on murderers and other criminals, law enforcement officers, and the occasional femme fatale, were certainly a sharp upgrade from C.S. Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia. After reading the works written by the pioneers of the hardboiled and roman noir traditions, I looked to other American authors such as Edgar Allan Poe who, in the mid-1800s, became the father of the modern detective story, and Thorne Smith who, in the 1920s and 1930s, produced magical realist tales with characters who often chose to dabble on the wrong side of the law. This led me to the works of British crime writers including Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers. My personal library then became dominated by Australian writers of crime fiction, from the stories of bushrangers and convicts of the Colonial era to contemporary tales of police and private investigators. There have been various attempts to “improve” or “refine” my tastes: to convince me that serious literature is real reading and frivolous fiction is merely a distraction. Certainly, the reading of those novels, often described as classics, provide perfect combinations of beauty and brilliance. Their narratives, however, do not often result in satisfactory endings. This routinely frustrates me because, while I understand the philosophical frameworks that many writers operate within, I believe the characters of such works are too often treated unfairly in the final pages. For example, at the end of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Frederick Henry “left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain” after his son is stillborn and “Mrs Henry” becomes “very ill” and dies (292–93). Another example can be found on the last page of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four when Winston Smith “gazed up at the enormous face” and he realised that he “loved Big Brother” (311). Endings such as these provide a space for reflection about the world around us but rarely spark an immediate response of how great that world is to live in (Franks Motive). The subject matter of crime fiction does not easily facilitate fairy-tale finishes, yet, people continue to read the genre because, generally, the concluding chapter will show that justice, of some form, will be done. Punishment will be meted out to the ‘bad characters’ that have broken society’s moral or legal laws; the ‘good characters’ may experience hardships and may suffer but they will, generally, prevail. Crime Fiction: A Taste For Justice Superimposed upon Auden’s parameters around crime fiction, are his ideas of the law in the real world and how such laws are interwoven with the Christian-based system of ethics. This can be seen in Auden’s listing of three classes of crime: “(a) offenses against God and one’s neighbor or neighbors; (b) offenses against God and society; (c) offenses against God” (407). Murder, in Auden’s opinion, is a class (b) offense: for the crime fiction novel, the society reflected within the story should be one in “a state of grace, i.e., a society where there is no need of the law, no contradiction between the aesthetic individual and the ethical universal, and where murder, therefore, is the unheard-of act which precipitates a crisis” (408). Additionally, in the crime novel “as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder” (408). Thus, as Charles J. Rzepka notes, “according to W.H. Auden, the ‘classical’ English detective story typically re-enacts rites of scapegoating and expulsion that affirm the innocence of a community of good people supposedly ignorant of evil” (12). This premise—of good versus evil—supports Auden’s claim that the punishment of wrongdoers, particularly those who claim the “right to be omnipotent” and commit murder (409), should be swift and final: As to the murderer’s end, of the three alternatives—execution, suicide, and madness—the first is preferable; for if he commits suicide he refuses to repent, and if he goes mad he cannot repent, but if he does not repent society cannot forgive. Execution, on the other hand, is the act of atonement by which the murderer is forgiven by society (409). The unilateral endorsement of state-sanctioned murder is problematic, however, because—of the main justifications for punishment: retribution; deterrence; incapacitation; and rehabilitation (Carter Snead 1245)—punishment, in this context, focuses exclusively upon retribution and deterrence, incapacitation is achieved by default, but the idea of rehabilitation is completely ignored. This, in turn, ignores how the reading of crime fiction can be incorporated into a broader popular discourse on punishment and how a taste for crime fiction and a taste for justice are inextricably intertwined. One of the ways to explore the connection between crime fiction and justice is through the lens of Emile Durkheim’s thesis on the conscience collective which proposes punishment is a process allowing for the demonstration of group norms and the strengthening of moral boundaries. David Garland, in summarising this thesis, states: So although the modern state has a near monopoly of penal violence and controls the administration of penalties, a much wider population feels itself to be involved in the process of punishment, and supplies the context of social support and valorization within which state punishment takes place (32). It is claimed here that this “much wider population” connecting with the task of punishment can be taken further. Crime fiction, above all other forms of literary production, which, for those who do not directly contribute to the maintenance of their respective legal systems, facilitates a feeling of active participation in the penalising of a variety of perpetrators: from the issuing of fines to incarceration (Franks Punishment). Crime fiction readers are therefore, temporarily at least, direct contributors to a more stable society: one that is clearly based upon right and wrong and reliant upon the conscience collective to maintain and reaffirm order. In this context, the reader is no longer alone, with only their crime fiction novel for company, but has become an active member of “a moral framework which binds individuals to each other and to its conventions and institutions” (Garland 51). This allows crime fiction, once viewed as a “vice” (Wilson 395) or an “addiction” (Auden 406), to be seen as playing a crucial role in the preservation of social mores. It has been argued “only the most literal of literary minds would dispute the claim that fictional characters help shape the way we think of ourselves, and hence help us articulate more clearly what it means to be human” (Galgut 190). Crime fiction focuses on what it means to be human, and how complex humans are, because stories of murders, and the men and women who perpetrate and solve them, comment on what drives some people to take a life and others to avenge that life which is lost and, by extension, engages with a broad community of readers around ideas of justice and punishment. It is, furthermore, argued here that the idea of the story is one of the more important doorways for crime fiction and, more specifically, the conclusions that these stories, traditionally, offer. For Auden, the ending should be one of restoration of the spirit, as he suspected that “the typical reader of detective stories is, like myself, a person who suffers from a sense of sin” (411). In this way, the “phantasy, then, which the detective story addict indulges is the phantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden, to a state of innocence, where he may know love as love and not as the law” (412), indicating that it was not necessarily an accident that “the detective story has flourished most in predominantly Protestant countries” (408). Today, modern crime fiction is a “broad church, where talented authors raise questions and cast light on a variety of societal and other issues through the prism of an exciting, page-turning story” (Sisterson). Moreover, our tastes in crime fiction have been tempered by a growing fear of real crime, particularly murder, “a crime of unique horror” (Hitchens 200). This has seen some readers develop a taste for crime fiction that is not produced within a framework of ecclesiastical faith but is rather grounded in reliance upon those who enact punishment in both the fictional and real worlds. As P.D. James has written: [N]ot by luck or divine intervention, but by human ingenuity, human intelligence and human courage. It confirms our hope that, despite some evidence to the contrary, we live in a beneficent and moral universe in which problems can be solved by rational means and peace and order restored from communal or personal disruption and chaos (174). Dorothy L. Sayers, despite her work to legitimise crime fiction, wrote that there: “certainly does seem a possibility that the detective story will some time come to an end, simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks” (108). Of course, many readers have “learnt all the tricks”, or most of them. This does not, however, detract from the genre’s overall appeal. We have not grown bored with, or become tired of, the formula that revolves around good and evil, and justice and punishment. Quite the opposite. Our knowledge of, as well as our faith in, the genre’s “tricks” gives a level of confidence to readers who are looking for endings that punish murderers and other wrongdoers, allowing for more satisfactory conclusions than the, rather depressing, ends given to Mr. Henry and Mr. Smith by Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell noted above. Conclusion For some, the popularity of crime fiction is a curious case indeed. When Penguin and Collins published the Marsh Million—100,000 copies each of 10 Ngaio Marsh titles in 1949—the author’s relief at the success of the project was palpable when she commented that “it was pleasant to find detective fiction being discussed as a tolerable form of reading by people whose opinion one valued” (172). More recently, upon the announcement that a Miles Franklin Award would be given to Peter Temple for his crime novel Truth, John Sutherland, a former chairman of the judges for one of the world’s most famous literary awards, suggested that submitting a crime novel for the Booker Prize would be: “like putting a donkey into the Grand National”. Much like art, fashion, food, and home furnishings or any one of the innumerable fields of activity and endeavour that are subject to opinion, there will always be those within the world of fiction who claim positions as arbiters of taste. Yet reading is intensely personal. I like a strong, well-plotted story, appreciate a carefully researched setting, and can admire elegant language, but if a character is too difficult to embrace—if I find I cannot make an emotional connection, if I find myself ambivalent about their fate—then a book is discarded as not being to my taste. It is also important to recognise that some tastes are transient. Crime fiction stories that are popular today could be forgotten tomorrow. Some stories appeal to such a broad range of tastes they are immediately included in the crime fiction canon. Yet others evolve over time to accommodate widespread changes in taste (an excellent example of this can be seen in the continual re-imagining of the stories of Sherlock Holmes). Personal tastes also adapt to our experiences and our surroundings. A book that someone adores in their 20s might be dismissed in their 40s. A storyline that was meaningful when read abroad may lose some of its magic when read at home. Personal events, from a change in employment to the loss of a loved one, can also impact upon what we want to read. Similarly, world events, such as economic crises and military conflicts, can also influence our reading preferences. Auden professed an almost insatiable appetite for crime fiction, describing the reading of detective stories as an addiction, and listed a very specific set of criteria to define the Whodunit. Today, such self-imposed restrictions are rare as, while there are many rules for writing crime fiction, there are no rules for reading this (or any other) genre. People are, generally, free to choose what, where, when, why, and how they read crime fiction, and to follow the deliberate or whimsical paths that their tastes may lay down for them. Crime fiction writers, past and present, offer: an incredible array of detective stories from the locked room to the clue puzzle; settings that range from the English country estate to city skyscrapers in glamorous locations around the world; numerous characters from cerebral sleuths who can solve a crime in their living room over a nice, hot cup of tea to weapon wielding heroes who track down villains on foot in darkened alleyways; and, language that ranges from the cultured conversations from the novels of the genre’s Golden Age to the hard-hitting terminology of forensic and legal procedurals. Overlaid on these appeal factors is the capacity of crime fiction to feed a taste for justice: to engage, vicariously at least, in the establishment of a more stable society. Of course, there are those who turn to the genre for a temporary distraction, an occasional guilty pleasure. There are those who stumble across the genre by accident or deliberately seek it out. There are also those, like Auden, who are addicted to crime fiction. So there are corpses for the conservative and dead bodies for the bloodthirsty. There is, indeed, a murder victim, and a murder story, to suit every reader’s taste. References Auden, W.H. “The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on The Detective Story, By an Addict.” Harper’s Magazine May (1948): 406–12. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.harpers.org/archive/1948/05/0033206›. Carter Snead, O. “Memory and Punishment.” Vanderbilt Law Review 64.4 (2011): 1195–264. Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976/1977. Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep. London: Penguin, 1939/1970. ––. The Simple Art of Murder. New York: Vintage Books, 1950/1988. Christie, Agatha. The Mysterious Affair at Styles. London: HarperCollins, 1920/2007. Cole, Cathy. Private Dicks and Feisty Chicks: An Interrogation of Crime Fiction. Fremantle: Curtin UP, 2004. Derrida, Jacques. “The Law of Genre.” Glyph 7 (1980): 202–32. Franks, Rachel. “May I Suggest Murder?: An Overview of Crime Fiction for Readers’ Advisory Services Staff.” Australian Library Journal 60.2 (2011): 133–43. ––. “Motive for Murder: Reading Crime Fiction.” The Australian Library and Information Association Biennial Conference. Sydney: Jul. 2012. ––. “Punishment by the Book: Delivering and Evading Punishment in Crime Fiction.” Inter-Disciplinary.Net 3rd Global Conference on Punishment. Oxford: Sep. 2013. Freeman, R.A. “The Art of the Detective Story.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1924/1947. 7–17. Galgut, E. “Poetic Faith and Prosaic Concerns: A Defense of Suspension of Disbelief.” South African Journal of Philosophy 21.3 (2002): 190–99. Garland, David. Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. London: Random House, 1929/2004. ––. in R. Chandler. The Simple Art of Murder. New York: Vintage Books, 1950/1988. Hitchens, P. A Brief History of Crime: The Decline of Order, Justice and Liberty in England. London: Atlantic Books, 2003. James, P.D. Talking About Detective Fiction. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. Knight, Stephen. Crime Fiction since 1800: Death, Detection, Diversity, 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2010. Knox, Ronald A. “Club Rules: The 10 Commandments for Detective Novelists, 1928.” Ronald Knox Society of North America. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.ronaldknoxsociety.com/detective.html›. Malmgren, C.D. “Anatomy of Murder: Mystery, Detective and Crime Fiction.” Journal of Popular Culture Spring (1997): 115–21. Maloney, Shane. The Murray Whelan Trilogy: Stiff, The Brush-Off and Nice Try. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1994/2008. Marsh, Ngaio in J. Drayton. Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime. Auckland: Harper Collins, 2008. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Penguin Books, 1949/1989. Roland, Susan. From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction. London: Palgrave, 2001. Rzepka, Charles J. Detective Fiction. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. Sayers, Dorothy L. “The Omnibus of Crime.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1928/1947. 71–109. Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction: The New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge, 2005. Sisterson, C. “Battle for the Marsh: Awards 2013.” Black Mask: Pulps, Noir and News of Same. 1 Jan. 2014 http://www.blackmask.com/category/awards-2013/ Sutherland, John. in A. Flood. “Could Miles Franklin turn the Booker Prize to Crime?” The Guardian. 1 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/25/miles-franklin-booker-prize-crime›. Van Dine, S.S. “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1928/1947. 189-93. Wilson, Edmund. “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1944/1947. 390–97. Wyatt, N. “Redefining RA: A RA Big Think.” Library Journal Online. 1 Jan. 2014 ‹http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2007/07/ljarchives/lj-series-redefining-ra-an-ra-big-think›. Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006.

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash ABSTRACT Current studies show that about half of transgender and gender-diverse (TGD) people wish to have children in the future. TGD patients who pursue gender-affirmation interventions must be aware of the impact that various treatments can have on fertility, as gender-affirming care through medical or surgical treatment can limit or alter reproductive potential. Many medical professional societies encourage providers to educate and counsel patients about the consequences of treatment and viable options for fertility preservation (FP) as early as possible, though patients may not be aware of all the family formation methods available. There is a significant need for a tool that thoroughly details not only the various opportunities for parenthood but the perceived cost, rates of success, and risks associated with each option. A fertility decision-aid would allow for a more robust informed consent process and shared decision-making for all individuals pursuing gender-affirming care. INTRODUCTION Over 1.6 million adults and youth in the United States, or about 0.6 percent of those age 13 and over, identify as transgender, according to a report released by The Williams Institute in June 2022.[1] Current studies show that approximately half of transgender and gender-diverse (TGD) people wish to have children in the future, which aligns with the rate of cisgender individuals who desire parenthood in some form.[2] Studies on parenthood show improved quality of life and mental health in TGD adults and decreased incidence of suicide in TGD women.[3] In one study, almost half of the TGD individuals who indicated an interest in parenthood said they wanted genetically related offspring.[4] However, medical or surgical therapies can limit reproductive potential.[5] Recent findings indicate that some TGD adults who underwent medical or surgical paths to affirmation regret decisions that may have led to their inability to have genetic children. Perhaps they did not know it was an option, faced barriers to care, or were not interested at the time.[6] Many medical professional societies, including the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the Endocrine Society, and the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, encourage providers to educate and counsel patients about the consequences of treatment and viable options for fertility preservation as early as possible.[7] This paper argues that TGD patients who pursue gender-affirmation interventions must be aware of the impact treatments can have on fertility and, ultimately, parenthood and that a design tool may help them understand the risks and make informed decisions. l. Gender Affirmation Options Some TGD individuals do not use medical or surgical therapies to feel affirmed in their identity.[8] Non-medical paths to affirmation include social and legal measures.[9] These reversible paths do not impact the individual’s future fertility potential. TGD individuals can follow different paths of gender-affirming care through social, legal, medical, and surgical affirmation.[10] Social affirmation can include using gender-affirming pronouns, names, and clothing.[11] Legal affirmation can include changing the gender and name on a birth certificate and other records in states where this is permissible.[12] Social and legal affirmations are reversible and do not impact fertility potential. Medical affirmation involves the use of gender-affirming hormone therapy. Feminizing or masculinizing hormone therapy allows for the development of secondary sex characteristics that more closely align with the individual's gender identity.[13] No set regimen for treatment exists, as a patient’s goals will determine their individualized plan.[14] Some standard feminizing agents include estrogen, androgen-reducing medications, and progestins, while the common masculinizing agent is testosterone.[15] Gender-affirming hormone therapy is not currently seen as a definitive cause of infertility, as it is possible to discontinue treatment and see a noted reversal of intended effects.[16] Research findings suggest that hormone therapy should stop for a minimum of three months to reverse any treatment effects.[17] The only available data on long-term hormonal therapy use is inconsistent, based on observational studies with varying duration and doses.[18] Individuals can stop gender-affirming hormone therapy, but its lasting impact on fertility is unknown.[19] A TGD individual may choose to undergo surgical interventions that do not impact fertility. These interventions can masculinize or feminize body parts to allow a patient’s physical appearance to align with their gender identity.[20] This care could include breast augmentation for TGD women and Adam’s apple reduction or breast reduction for TGD men.[21] Other surgical interventions will impact TGD individuals’ fertility. Genital surgery for a TGD woman can include the removal of the penis and scrotum (penectomy and orchiectomy) and the construction of a vagina and labia (vaginoplasty and valvuloplasty).[22] A TGD man can have removal of the ovaries and uterus (oophorectomy and hysterectomy) and construction of a penis and scrotum (metoidioplasty, phalloplasty, and scrotoplasty).[23] Following these gender-affirming surgeries, individuals are infertile due to the removal of their reproductive organs.[24] These procedures are irreversible and directly impact reproductive capacity in TGD individuals. ll. Fertility Counseling to Explain Paths to Parenthood Patients receiving gender-affirming care should have the opportunity to learn about the various ways to achieve parenthood, including fertility preservation. Family formation methods include sexual intercourse, artificial insemination, surrogacy, and adoption or foster care.[25] These methods apply to non-TGD people as well. Patients may not be aware of the various means of family-building, so accurate and expansive fertility counseling is essential before initiating medical or surgical affirming care. The frequency with which TGD individuals receive fertility counseling and how thorough it is, is unclear. When surveyed about fertility preservation, healthcare providers reported a lack of confidence in discussing fertility preservation with patients due to gaps in their knowledge on best practices, success rates, and regret rates in patients who did not preserve fertility. They also had varied perceptions of their role in treating patients and whether they should discuss family planning.[26] Patients have reported receiving an overview of fertility options from their primary transgender-healthcare providers before being referred to reproductive specialists.[27] While this is an essential step for patients seeking more information about their opportunities for parenthood, only 16 percent of Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology member clinics share information about options for transgender individuals on their websites.[28] Providers of transgender health care do not, and may not be trained to, provide adequate counsel to patients. Patients also cannot give informed consent for fertility or gender-affirming care interventions without more information on the benefits and burdens of all available treatments. Current literature demonstrates a need for a decision aid that thoroughly details not only the opportunities for parenthood but the perceived cost, rates of success, and risks associated with each option.[29] This tool could foster a more informed dialogue between an individual and their care team. A fertility decision aid would also allow for a more robust informed consent process for all individuals pursuing gender-affirming care. Regardless of the affirmation path chosen, a TGD individual should have early and frequent conversations with their care team regarding fertility. The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) asserts that healthcare professionals should discuss fertility preservation options before initiating gender-affirming hormone therapy or surgery. The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology states that “fertility and parenting desires should be discussed early in the process of transition, before the initiation of hormone therapy or gender affirmation surgery.”[30] The Endocrine Society writes that “all individuals seeking gender-affirming medical treatment should receive information and counsel on options for fertility preservation prior to initiating puberty suppression in adolescents and prior to treating with hormonal therapy in both adolescents and adults."[31] These conversations are essential even if the patient is not interested in parenthood at the time. WPATH addresses the potential for regret, as cases of individuals who received hormone therapy and genital surgery and later desired genetically related children have been identified.[32] TGD patients pursuing gender-affirming care should assess their individual fertility goals to better understand the many ways to build a family. Surveys of TGD adults show that participants want to become parents in various ways. In one study, 31.3 percent of those surveyed wanted to become parents through adoption, 25 percent wanted children through sexual intercourse, 15.6 percent through surrogacy, 12.5 percent using donor sperm, 9.4 percent using a known sperm donor, and 6.3 percent through the foster care system.[33] TGD women showed a significant interest in adoption (75 percent of participants), whereas more than half of TGD men wanted to become parents through sexual intercourse or pregnancy (58.3 percent).[34] These fertility goals should be acknowledged and discussed with the care team to guide decision-making about fertility preservation. lll. Fertility Preservation Individuals who wish to share their genetic makeup with their child will usually need to speak with a reproductive specialist about fertility preservation options. They are the same as those for cisgender individuals using fertility services before cancer treatment or elective preservation.[35] For TGD adults with ovaries, this includes freezing embryos (using donor or partner sperm) or ovarian tissue.[36] While no longer viewed as an experimental treatment, professionals offer tissue freezing to few patients due to a lack of data on its safety and efficacy.[37] For TGD adults with testicles, freezing sperm and preserving testicular tissue can preserve the ability to have biological children.[38] Fertility preservation numbers for TGD adults remain low. A study showed that 76.6 percent of TGD men and 76.1 percent of TGD women considered fertility preservation, but only 3.1 percent and 9.6 percent, respectively, initiated it.[39] Success rate, cost, need for travel, and elevated risk of gender dysphoria likely lead to lower use of fertility preservation.[40] According to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, the average cost of an IVF cycle in the US is $12,400.[41] Intrauterine insemination can range in cost from a few hundred dollars to $2,000 per cycle.[42] There are also associated costs to freeze and store sperm and eggs.[43] Insurance coverage and physical location impact the costs and how the patient bears the costs.[44] For those who do not have sufficient or any insurance coverage, fertility preservation may not be feasible. Of additional significance for this population, fertility preservation techniques can exacerbate gender dysphoria as the patient must produce gametes associated with the gender they do not recognize.[45] For TGD women, masturbating in a clinical setting or sperm banking for sperm cryopreservation can cause severe distress.[46] Furthermore, fertility preservation for TGD men can be challenging and invasive. A transvaginal ultrasound exam is a requirement for the cryopreservation of embryos and oocytes.[47] This exam can cause significant distress as the procedure does not align with their male identity.[48] Controlled ovarian stimulation cycles require two weeks of daily gonadotropin injections, and the patient is given anesthesia for oocyte retrieval.[49] Furthermore, TGD men undergoing fertility preservation must discontinue testosterone use, and menstruation can resume.[50] lV. Other Paths to Parenthood a. Adoption TGD adults can also pursue parenthood through adoption systems, though foster care is a temporary option. While almost one-third of surveyed TGD adults consider adoption a means to parenthood, cost and fear of discrimination can prevent them from following through.[51] TGD individuals have expressed a reluctance to pursue adoption due to the fear of discrimination by adoption agencies, attorneys, or families.[52] Nineteen states in the US allow child welfare agencies to refuse to provide services to LGBTQ+ families if it conflicts with the religious beliefs of the relevant people in the agency.[53] Nineteen states have no laws about discrimination during the adoption process based on sexual orientation or gender identity.[54] Only 29 states have statutory or regulatory protections against discrimination based on orientation and gender identity.[55] b. Surrogacy There are two types of surrogacies: traditional and gestational.[56] In traditional surrogacy, professionals fertilize the surrogate’s egg by the sperm of an intended parent or a sperm donor through intrauterine insemination. In gestational surrogacy, the surrogate undergoes IVF to implant the fertilized embryo.[57] Egg donation can be used for gestational surrogacy if necessary. Those considering surrogacy need to understand the specific laws in their state, as they can differ significantly.[58] c. Intercourse TGD individuals who have not undergone genital surgery can have intercourse with the intention of causing pregnancy. TGD men who have not had genital surgery can bear children. For those who have initiated hormonal therapy, limited data has been collected on the impact of gender-affirming hormone therapy on conception.[59] TGD men have gotten pregnant after discontinuing testosterone use.[60] TGD women who have not had genital surgery can have intercourse with a person with ovaries and produce sperm to fertilize an egg. Gender-affirming hormone therapy possibly affects sperm viability.[61] V. A Decision Aid to Support Informed Consent and Shared Decision Making For individuals pursuing gender-affirming care, time is of the essence when considering fertility preservation. In one review, transgender health doctors reported that most patients did not want to postpone treatment for fertility preservation procedures, even if they wanted children;[62] any delay in treatment can be distressing for those with gender dysphoria.[63] Providers face several challenges when counseling patients about fertility. The WPATH guidelines pose an ethical dilemma for transgender health providers as limited data offers guidance about discussing fertility risks and recommendations with patients.[64] For TGD patients, limited and contradictory data about fertility outcomes before, during, and after gender affirmation exists, particularly for the lasting impact of gender-affirming hormone therapy.[65] For TGD women who have taken estrogen and stopped to pursue fertility preservation, data on sperm quality is mixed.[66] The data on when normal ovarian function resumes is variable for TGD men using testosterone who have stopped to pursue fertility preservation.[67] Much data comes from the oncofertility literature, which indicates that when providers use standardized counseling practices when discussing fertility with their patients, more patients undergo fertility preservation, and patient satisfaction increases.[68] For individuals seeking gender-affirming care, there is a need for a decision aid that providers can utilize across multiple clinics and programs.[69],[70] Patients must be aware of the benefits, risks, and alternatives of any intervention to provide truly informed consent. When discussing fertility for TGD patients, this includes which fertility options are available at each stage of transition and the potential for a live birth with each option.[71] Furthermore, a decision aid would allow for shared decision-making, where the patient is an active participant and co-designer of their treatment plan.[72] Shared decision-making acknowledges the healthcare provider’s beneficence, knowledge, and experience while equally valuing the right to patient autonomy and respecting the ability of the patient to inform the provider.[73] A decision aid can help initiate the conversations between a patient and their provider that allow for a true partnership in decision-making. A recent study investigated the efficacy and impact of a web-based fertility decision aid targeted at TGD adolescents and young adults.[74] This tool, titled Aid for Fertility-Related Medical Decisions (AFFRMED), significantly increased fertility knowledge in both youth and their parents while improving youth’s perceived ability to make fertility decisions.[75] Youth participants and their parents found the tool “feasible, acceptable, and usable.”[76] This initial study was small, with only eight adolescents or young adults and seven parents participating.[77] At large, the effectiveness of the trial will be the next step in determining the legitimacy of the aid for clinical use.[78] A similar decision-making tool designed for TGD adults would also be useful. The tool can present an average range of expected costs as much variability exists and costs change over time. This tool should also include general information on what is required to pursue each path to parenthood. For example, a patient undergoing fertility preservation needs to know what steps are necessary after the cryopreservation of gametes for live birth.[79] CONCLUSION Individuals pursuing gender-affirming care must closely consider the impact of their medical and surgical care on their desire to become parents as early in their affirmation journey as possible. A decision aid can be helpful if it outlines the risks to fertility and options to preserve fertility, with the specific data necessary to make an informed choice. The tool should include the methods of fertility preservation, each step of the protocol and respective risks for each method, the expected timeline from initiation to completion, general success rates, options for remaining gamete disposition, and the average cost of treatment. This should include a list of steps to initiate the process for each method and any potential barriers or obstacles. For surrogacy, the tool should include the two types and the average cost. For intercourse, the aid should include information on risks for discontinuing gender-affirming hormone therapy and general success rates. Clinics and providers could elect to tailor the decision aid for their population to include specific information about local laws and the availability of services. With a standardized fertility decision aid, TGD individuals can have a more thorough understanding of the opportunities and limitations placed on their reproductive capacity. Healthcare providers can feel more confident that their patients have access to relevant information regarding family-building before initiating medical or surgical affirmation. This allows for a more substantial informed consent and shared decision-making process, regardless of the decision made. A trial-tested decision-making tool for TGD adolescents and young adults exists that can serve as a model for creating aid for TGD adults of all ages. 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Journal of Assisted Reproduction and Genetics, 37(10), 2453–2462. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10815-020-01873-9 [7] Bizic, M. R., Jeftovic, M., Pusica, S., Stojanovic, B., Duisin, D., Vujovic, S., Rakic, V., & Djordjevic, M. L. (2018). Gender Dysphoria: Bioethical Aspects of Medical Treatment. BioMed research international, 2018, 9652305. https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/9652305 [8] Rafferty, J., COMMITTEE ON PSYCHOSOCIAL ASPECTS OF CHILD AND FAMILY HEALTH, COMMITTEE ON ADOLESCENCE, & SECTION ON LESBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL, AND TRANSGENDER HEALTH AND WELLNESS (2018). Ensuring Comprehensive Care and Support for Transgender and Gender-Diverse Children and Adolescents. Pediatrics, 142(4), e20182162. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2018-2162 [9] Rafferty (2018). [10] Rafferty (2018). [11] Rafferty (2018). [12] Rafferty (2018). [13] Rafferty (2018). [14] WPATH (2012). [15] WPATH (2012). [16] Bizic (2018). [17] Bizic (2018). [18] Moravek (2019). [19] Finlayson, C., Johnson, E. 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Introduction In November 2020, upon learning that the company’s Covid-19 vaccine trial had been successful, the head of Pfizer’s Vaccine Research and Development, Kathrin Jansen, celebrated with champagne – “some really good stuff” (Cohen). Bubbles seem to go naturally with celebration, and champagne is fundamentally associated with bubbles. Yet, until the late-seventeenth century, champagne was a still wine, and it only reached the familiar levels of bubbliness in the late-nineteenth century (Harding). During this period and on into the early twentieth century, “champagne” was in many ways created, defined, and defended. A “champagne bubble” was created, within which the “nature” of champagne was contested and constructed. Champagne today is the result of hundreds of years of labour by many sorts of bubble-makers: those who make the bubbly drink, and those who construct, maintain, and defend the champagne bubble. In this article, I explore some elements of the champagne bubble, in order to understand both its fragility and rigidity over the years and today. Creating the Champagne Bubble – the Labour of Centuries It is difficult to separate the physical from the mythical as regards champagne. Therefore the categorisations below are always overlapping, and embedded in legal, political, economic, and socio-cultural factors. Just as assemblage – the mixing of wine from different grapes – is an essential element of champagne wine, the champagne bubble may be called heterogeneous assemblage. Indeed, the champagne bubble, as we will see below, is a myriad of different sorts of bubbles, such as terroir, appellation, myth and brand. And just as any assemblage, its heterogeneous elements exist and operate in relation to each other. Therefore the “champagne bubble” discussed here is both one and many, all of its elements fundamentally interconnected, constituting that “one” known as “champagne”. It is not my intention to be comprehensive of all the elements, historical and contemporary. Indeed, that would not be possible within such a short article. Instead, I seek to demonstrate some of the complexity of the champagne bubble, noting the elaborate labour that has gone into its creation. The Physical Champagne and Champagne – from Soil to Bubbles Champagne means both a legally protected geographical area (Champagne), and the wine (here: champagne) produced in this area from grapes defined as acceptable: most importantly pinot noir, pinot meunier (“black” grapes), and chardonnay (“white” grape). The method of production, too, is regulated and legally protected: méthode champenoise. Although the same method is used in numerous locations, these must be called something different: metodo classico (Italy), método tradicional (Spain), Methode Cap Classique (South Africa). The geographical area of Champagne was first legally defined in 1908, when it only included the areas of Marne and Aisne, leaving out, most importantly, the area of Aube. This decision led to severe unrest and riots, as the Aube vignerons revolted in 1911, forcing the inclusion of “zone 2”: Aube, Haute-Marne, and Seine-et-Marne (Guy). Behind these regulations was a surge in fraudulent production in the early twentieth century, as well as falling wine prices resulting from increasing supply of cheap wines (Colman 18). These first appellations d’origine had many consequences – they proved financially beneficial for the “zone 1”, but less so for the “zone 2”. When both these areas were brought under the same appellation in 1927, the financial benefits were more limited – but this may have been due to the Great Depression triggered in 1929 (Haeck et al.). It is a long-standing belief that the soil and climate of Champagne are key contributors to the quality of champagne wines, said to be due to “conditions … most suitable for making this type of wine” (Simon 11). Already in the end of the nineteenth century, the editor of Vigneron champenois attributed champagne’s quality to “a fortunate combination of … chalky soil … [and] unrivalled exposure [to the sun]” (Guy 119) among other things. Factors such as soil and climate, commonly included in and expressed through the idea of terroir, undoubtedly influence grapes and wines made thereof, but the extent remains unproven. Indeed, terroir itself is a very contested concept (Teil; Inglis and Almila). It is also the case that climate change has had, and will continue to have, devastating effects on wine production in many areas, while benefiting others. The highly successful English sparkling wine production, drawing upon know-how from the Champagne area, has been enabled by the warming climate (Inglis), while Champagne itself is at risk of becoming too hot (Robinson). Champagne is made through a process more complicated than most wines. I present here the bare bones of it, to illustrate the many challenges that had to be overcome to enable its production in the scale we see today. Freshly picked grapes are first pressed and the juice is fermented. Grape juice contains natural yeasts and therefore will ferment spontaneously, but fermentation can also be started with artificial yeasts. In fermentation, alcohol and carbon dioxide (CO2) are formed, but the latter usually escapes the liquid. The secret of champagne is its second fermentation, which happens in bottles, after wines from different grapes and/or vineyards have been blended for desired characteristics (assemblage). For the second fermentation, yeast and sugar are added. As the fermentation happens inside a bottle, the CO2 that is created does not escape, but dissolves into the wine. The average pressure inside a champagne bottle in serving temperature is around 5 bar – 5 times the pressure outside the bottle (Liger-Belair et al.). The obvious challenge this method poses has to do with managing the pressure. Exploding bottles used to be a common problem, and the manner of sealing bottles was not very developed, either. Seventeenth-century developments in bottle-making, and using corks to seal bottles, enabled sparkling wines to be produced in the first place (Leszczyńska; Phillips 137). Still today, champagne comes in heavy-bottomed bottles, sealed with characteristically shaped cork, which is secured with a wire cage known as muselet. Scientific innovations, such as calculating the ideal amount of sugar for the second fermentation in 1836, also helped to control the amount of gas formed during the second fermentation, thus making the behaviour of the wine more predictable (Leszczyńska 265). Champagne is characteristically a “manufactured” wine, as it involves several steps of interference, from assemblage to dosage – sugar added for flavour to most champagnes after the second fermentation (although there are also zero dosage champagnes). This lends champagne particularly suitable for branding, as it is possible to make the wine taste the same year after year, harvest after harvest, and thus create a distinctive and recognisable house style. It is also possible to make champagnes for different tastes. During the nineteenth century, champagnes of different dosage were made for different markets – the driest for the British, the sweetest for the Russians (Harding). Bubbles are probably the most striking characteristic of champagne, and they are enabled by the complicated factors described above. But they are also formed when the champagne is poured in a glass. Natural impurities on the surface of the glass provide channels through which the gas pockets trapped in the wine can release themselves, forming strains of rising bubbles (Liger-Belair et al.). Champagne glasses have for centuries differed from other wine glasses, often for aesthetic reasons (Harding). The bubbles seem to do more than give people aesthetic pleasure and sensory experiences. It is often claimed that champagne makes you drunk faster than other drinks would, and there is, indeed, some (limited) research showing that this may well be the case (Roberts and Robinson; Ridout et al.). The Mythical Champagne – from Dom Pérignon to Modern Wonders Just as the bubbles in a champagne glass are influenced by numerous forces, so the metaphorical champagne bubble is subject to complex influences. Myth-creation is one of the most significant of these. The origin of champagne as sparkling wine is embedded in the myth of Dom Pérignon of Hautvillers monastery (1638–1715), who according to the legend would have accidentally developed the bubbles, and then enthusiastically exclaimed “I am drinking the stars!” (Phillips 138). In reality, bubbles are a natural phenomenon provoked by winter temperatures deactivating the fermenting yeasts, and spring again reactivating them. The myth of Dom Pérignon was first established in the nineteenth century and quickly embraced by the champagne industry. In 1937, Moët et Chandon launched a premium champagne called Dom Pérignon, which enjoys high reputation until this day (Phillips). The champagne industry has been active in managing associations connected with champagne since the nineteenth century. Sparkling champagnes had already enjoyed fashionability in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth century, both in the French Court, and amongst the British higher classes. In the second half of the nineteenth century, champagne found ever increasing markets abroad, and the clientele was not aristocratic anymore. Before the 1860s, champagne’s association was with high status celebration, as well as sexual activity and seduction (Harding; Rokka). As the century went on, and champagne sales radically increased, associations with “modernity” were added: “hot-air balloons, towering steamships, transcontinental trains, cars, sports, and other ‘modern’ wonders were often featured in quickly proliferating champagne advertising” (Rokka 280). During this time, champagne grew both drier and more sparkling, following consumer tastes (Harding). Champagne’s most important markets in later nineteenth century included the UK, where the growing middle classes consumed champagne for both celebration and hospitality (Harding), the US, where (upper) middle-class women were served champagne in new kinds of consumer environments (Smith; Remus), and Russia, where the upper classes enjoyed sweeter champagne – until the Revolution (Phillips 296). The champagne industry quickly embraced the new middle classes in possession of increasing wealth, as well as new methods of advertising and marketing. What is remarkable is that they managed to integrate enormously varied cultural thematics and still retain associations with aristocracy and luxury, while producing and selling wine in industrial scale (Harding; Rokka). This is still true today: champagne retains a reputation of prestige, despite large-scale branding, production, and marketing. Maintaining and Defending the Bubble: Formulas, Rappers, and the Absolutely Fabulous Tipplers The falling wine prices and increasing counterfeit wines coincided with Europe’s phylloxera crisis – the pest accidentally brought over from North America that almost wiped out all Europe’s vineyards. The pest moved through Champagne in the 1890s, killing vines and devastating vignerons (Campbell). The Syndicat du Commerce des vins de Champagne had already been formed in 1882 (Rokka 280). Now unions were formed to fight phylloxera, such as the Association Viticole Champenoise in 1898. The 1904 Fédération Syndicale des Vignerons was formed to lobby the government to protect the name of Champagne (Leszczyńska 266) – successfully, as we have seen above. The financial benefits from appellations were certainly welcome, but short-lived. World War I treated Champagne harshly, with battle lines stuck through the area for years (Guy 187). The battle went on also in the lobbying front. In 1935, a new appellation regime was brought into law, which came to be the basis for all European systems, and the Comité National des appellations d'origine (CNAO) was founded (Colman 1922). Champagne’s protection became increasingly international, and continues to be so today under EU law and trade deals (European Commission). The post-war recovery of champagne relied on strategies used already in the “golden years” – marketing and lobbying. Advertising continued to embrace “luxury, celebration, transport (extending from air travel to the increasingly popular automobile), modernity, sports” (Guy 188). Such advertisement must have responded accurately to the mood of post-war, pre-depression Europe. Even in the prohibition US it was known that the “frivolous” French women might go as far as bathe in champagne, like the popular actress Mistinguett (Young 63). Curiously, in the 1930s Soviet Russia, “champagne” (not produced in Champagne) was declared a sign of good living, symbolising the standard of living that any Soviet worker had access to (at least in theory) (Gronow). Today, the reputation of champagne is fiercely defended in legal terms. This is not only in terms of protection against other sparkling wine making areas, but also in terms of exploitation of champagne’s reputation by actors in other commercial fields, and even against mass market products containing genuine champagne (Mahy and d’Ath; Schneider and Nam). At the same time, champagne has been widely “democratised” by mass production, enabled partly by increasing mechanisation and scientification of champagne production from the 1950s onwards (Leszczyńska 266). Yet champagne retains its association with prestige, luxury, and even royalty. This has required some serious adaptation and flexibility. In what follows, I look into three cultural phenomena that illuminate processes of such adaptation: Formula One (F1) champagne spraying, the 1990s sitcom Absolutely Fabulous, and the Cristal racism scandal in 2006. The first champagne bottle is said to have been presented to F1 grand prix winner in Champagne in 1950 (Wheels24). Such a gesture would have been fully in line with champagne’s association with cars, sport, and modernity. But what about the spraying? Surely that is not in line with the prestige of the wine? The first spraying is attributed to Jo Siffert in 1966 and Dan Gurney in 1967, the former described as accidental, the latter as a spontaneous gesture of celebration (Wheels24; Dobie). Moët had become the official supplier of F1 champagnes in 1966, and there are no signs that the new custom would have been problematic for them, as their sponsorship continued until 1999, after which Mumm sponsored the sport for 15 years. Today, the champagne to be popped and sprayed is Chanson, in special bottles “coated in the same carbon fibre that F1 cars are made of” (Wheels24). Such an iconic status has the spraying gained that it features in practically all TV broadcasts concerning F1, although non-alcoholic substitute is used in countries where sale of alcohol is banned (Barker et al., “Quantifying”; Barker et al., “Alcohol”). As disturbing as the champagne spraying might look for a wine snob, it is perfectly in line with champagne’s marketing history and entrepreneurial spirit shown since the nineteenth century. Nor is it unheard of to let champagne spray. The “art” of sabrage, opening champagne bottle with a sable, associated with glamour, spectacle, and myth – its origin is attributed to Napoleon and his officers – is perfectly acceptable even for the snob. Sparkling champagne was always bound up with joy and celebration, not a solemn drink, and the champagne bubble was able to accommodate middle classes as well as aristocrats. This brings us to our second example, the British sitcom Absolutely Fabulous. The show, first released in 1992, featured two women, “Eddy” (Jennifer Saunders) and “Patsy” (Joanna Lumley), who spent their time happily smoking, taking drugs, and drinking large quantities of “Bolly” (among other things). Bollinger champagne may have initially experienced “a bit of a shock” for being thus addressed, but soon came to see the benefits of fame (French). In 2005, they hired PR support to make better use of the brand’s “Ab Fab” recognisability, and to improve its prestige reputation in order to justify their higher price range (Cann). Saunders and Lumley were warmly welcomed by the Bollinger house when filming for their champagne tour Absolutely Champers (2017). It is befitting indeed that such controversial fame came from the UK, the first country to discover sparkling champagne outside France (Simon 48), and where the aspirational middle classes were keen to consume it already in the nineteenth century (Harding). More controversial still is the case of Cristal (made by Louis Roederer) and the US rap world. Enthusiastically embraced by the “bling-bling” world of (black) rappers, champagne seems to fit their ethos well. Cristal was long favoured as both a drink and a word in rap lyrics. But in 2006, the newly appointed managing director at the family owned Roederer, Frédéric Rouzaud, made comments considered racist by many (Woodland). Rouzard told in an interview with The Economist that the house observed the Cristal-rap association “with curiosity and serenity”. He reportedly continued: “but what can we do? We can’t forbid people from buying it. I’m sure Dom Pérignon or Krug would be delighted to have their business”. It was indeed those two brands that the rapper Jay-Z replaced Cristal with, when calling for a boycott on Cristal. It would be easy to dismiss Rouzard’s comments as snobbery, or indeed as racism, but they merit some more reflection. Cristal is the premium wine of a house that otherwise does not enjoy high recognisability. While champagne’s history involves embracing new sorts of clientele, and marketing flexibly to as many consumer groups as possible (Rokka), this was the first spectacular crossing of racial boundaries. It was always the case that different houses and their different champagnes were targeted at different clienteles, and it is apparent that Cristal was not targeted at black rap artists. Whereas Bollinger was able to turn into a victory the questionable fame brought by the white middle-class association of Absolutely Fabulous, the more prestigious Cristal considered the attention of the black rapper world more threatening and acted accordingly. They sought to defend their own brand bubble, not the larger champagne bubble. Cristal’s reputation seems to have suffered little – its 2008 vintage, launched in 2018, was the most traded wine of that year (Schultz). Jay-Z’s purchase of his own champagne brand (Armand de Brignac, nicknamed Ace of Spades) has been less successful reputation-wise (Greenburg). It is difficult to break the champagne bubble, and it may be equally difficult to break into it. Conclusion In this article, I have looked into the various dilemmas the “bubble-makers” of Champagne encountered when fabricating what is today known as “champagne”. There have been moments of threat to the bubble they formed, such as in the turn of nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and eras of incomparable success, such as from the 1860s to 1880s. The discussion has demonstrated the remarkable flexibility with which the makers and defenders of champagne have responded to challenges, and dealt with material, socio-cultural, economic, and other problems. It feels appropriate to end with a note on the current challenge the champagne industry faces: Covid-19. The pandemic hit champagne sales exceptionally hard, leaving around 100 million bottles unsold (Micallef). This was not very surprising, given the closure of champagne-selling venues, banning of public and private celebrations, and a general mood not particularly prone to (or even likely to frown upon) such light-hearted matters as glamour and champagne. Champagne has survived many dramatic drops in sales during the twentieth century, such as the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the post-financial crisis collapse in 2009. Yet they seem to be able to make astonishing recoveries. 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We take as our subject what many would deem a waste of good celluloid: the degraded cultural form of the stoner film. Stoner films plot the experiences of the wasted (those intoxicated on marijuana) as they exhibit wastefulness—excessiveness, improvidence, decay—on a number of fronts. Stoners waste time in constantly hunting for pot and in failing to pursue more productive activity whilst wasted. Stoners waste their minds, both literally, if we believe contested studies that indicate marijuana smoking kills brains cells, and figuratively, in rendering themselves cognitively impaired. Stoners waste their bodies through the dangerous practice of smoking and through the tendency toward physical inertia. Stoners waste money on marijuana firstly, but also on such sophomoric accoutrements as the stoner film itself. Stoners lay waste to convention in excessively seeking pleasure and in dressing and acting outrageously. And stoners, if the scatological humour of so many stoner films is any index, are preoccupied with bodily waste. Stoners, we argue here, waste whiteness as well. As the likes of Jesse and Chester (Dude, Where’s My Car?), Wayne and Garth (Wayne’s World), Bill and Ted (Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure) and Jay and Silent Bob (Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back) make clear, whiteness looms large in stoner films. Yet the genre, we argue, disavows its own whiteness, in favour of a post-white hybridity that lavishly squanders white privilege. For all its focus on whiteness, filmic wastedness has always been an ethnically diverse and ambiguous category. The genre’s origins in the work of Cheech Marin, a Chicano, and Tommy Chong, a Chinese-European Canadian, have been buttressed in this regard by many African American contributions to the stoner oeuvre, including How High, Half Baked and Friday, as well as by Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, and its Korean-American and Indian-American protagonists. Cheech and Chong initiated the genre with the release of Up in Smoke in 1978. A host of films have followed featuring protagonists who spend much of their time smoking and seeking marijuana (or—in the case of stoner films such as Dude, Where’s My Car? released during the height of the War on Drugs—acting stoned without ever being seen to get stoned). Inspired in part by the 1938 anti-marijuana film Reefer Madness, and the unintended humour such propaganda films begat amongst marijuana smokers, stoner films are comedies that satirise both marijuana culture and its prohibition. Self-consciously slapstick, the stoner genre excludes more serious films about drugs, from Easy Rider to Shaft, as well as films such as The Wizard of Oz, Yellow Submarine, the Muppet movies, and others popular amongst marijuana smokers because of surreal content. Likewise, a host of films that include secondary stoner characters, such as Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Wooderson in Dazed and Confused, are commonly excluded from the genre on the grounds that the stoner film, first and foremost, celebrates stonerism, that is “serious commitment to smoking and acquiring marijuana as a lifestyle choice.” (Meltzer). Often taking the form of the “buddy film,” stoner flicks generally feature male leads and frequently exhibit a decidedly masculinist orientation, with women, for the most part reduced to little more than the object of the white male gaze.The plot, such as it is, of the typical stoner film concerns the search for marijuana (or an accessory, such as junk food) and the improbable misadventures that ensue. While frequently represented as resourceful and energetic in their quest for marijuana, filmic stoners otherwise exhibit ambivalent attitudes toward enterprise that involves significant effort. Typically represented as happy and peaceable, filmic stoners rarely engage in conflict beyond regular clashes with authority figures determined to enforce anti-drug laws, and other measures that stoners take to be infringements upon happiness. While Hollywood’s stoners thus share a sense of entitlement to pleasure, they do not otherwise exhibit a coherent ideological orthodoxy beyond a certain libertarian and relativistic open-mindedness. More likely to take inspiration from comic book heroes than Aldous Huxley or Timothy Leary, stoners are most often portrayed as ‘dazed and confused,’ and could be said to waste the intellectual tradition of mind expansion that Leary represents. That stoner films are, at times, misunderstood to be quintessentially white is hardly suprising. As a social construct that creates, maintains and legitimates white domination, whiteness manifests, as one of its most defining features, an ability to swallow up difference and to insist upon, at critical junctures, a universal subjectivity that disallows for difference (hooks 167). Such universalising not only sanctions co-optation of ethnic cultural expression, it also functions to mask whiteness’s existence, thus reinforcing its very power. Whiteness, as Richard Dyer argues, is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. It obfuscates itself and its relationship to the particular traits it is said to embody—disinterest, prudence, temperance, rationality, bodily restraint, industriousness (3). Whiteness is thus constructed as neither an ethnic nor racial particularity, but rather the transcendence of such positionality (Wiegman 139). While non-whites are raced, to be white is to be “just human” and thus to possess the power to “claim to speak for the commonality of humanity” whilst denying the accrual of any particular racial privilege (Dyer 2). In refuting its own advantages—which are so wide ranging (from preferential treatment in housing loans, to the freedom to fail without fear of reflecting badly on other whites) that they are, like whiteness itself, both assumed and unproblematic—whiteness instantiates individualism, allowing whites to believe that their successes are in no way the outcome of systematic racial advantage, but rather the product of individual toil (McIntosh; Lipsitz). An examination of the 1978 stoner film Up in Smoke suggests that whatever the ethnic ambiguity of the figure of the stoner, the genre of the stoner film is all about the wasting of whiteness. Up in Smoke opens with two alternating domestic scenes. We first encounter Pedro De Pacas (Cheech Marin) in a cluttered and shadowy room as his siblings romp affectionately upon his back, waking him from his slumber on the couch. Pedro rises, stepping into a bowl of cereal on the floor. He stumbles to the bathroom, where, sleepy and disoriented, he urinates into the laundry hamper. The chaos of Pedro’s disrupted sleep is followed in the film by a more metaphoric awakening as Anthony Stoner (Tommy Chong) determines to leave home. The scene takes place in a far more orderly, light and lavish room. The space’s overpowering whiteness is breached only by the figure of Anthony and his unruly black hair, bushy black beard, and loud Hawaiian shirt, which vibrates with colour against the white walls, white furnishings and white curtains. We watch as Anthony, behind an elaborate bar, prepares a banana protein shake, impassively ignoring his parents, both clothed in all-white, as they clutch martini glasses and berate their son for his lack of ambition. Arnold Stoner [father]: Son, your mother and me would like for you to cozy up to the Finkelstein boy. He's a bright kid, and, uh... he's going to military school, and remember, he was an Eagle Scout. Tempest Stoner [mother]: Arnold…Arnold Stoner: [shouts over/to his wife] Will you shut up? We’re not going to have a family brawl!Tempest Stoner: [continues talking as her husband shouts]…. Retard.Arnold Stoner: [to Anthony] We've put up with a hell of a lot.[Anthony starts blender] Can this wait? ... Build your goddamn muscles, huh? You know, you could build your muscles picking strawberries.You know, bend and scoop... like the Mexicans. Shit, maybe I could get you a job with United Fruit. I got a buddy with United Fruit. ... Get you started. Start with strawberries, you might work your way up to these goddamn bananas! When, boy? When...are you going to get your act together?Anthony: [Burps]Tempest Stoner: Gross.Arnold Stoner: Oh, good God Almighty me. I think he's the Antichrist. Anthony, I want to talk to you. [Anthony gathers his smoothie supplements and begins to walk out of the room.] Now, listen! Don't walk away from me when I'm talking to you! You get a goddamn job before sundown, or we're shipping you off to military school with that goddamn Finkelstein shit kid! Son of a bitch!The whiteness of Anthony’s parents is signified so pervasively and so strikingly in this scene—in their improbable white outfits and in the room’s insufferably white décor—that we come to understand it as causative. The rage and racism of Mr. Stoner’s tirade, the scene suggests, is a product of whiteness itself. Given that whiteness achieves and maintains its domination via both ubiquity and invisibility, what Up in Smoke accomplishes in this scene is notable. Arnold Stoner’s tortured syntax (“that goddamn Finkelstein shit kid”) works to “mak[e] whiteness strange” (Dyer 4), while the scene’s exaggerated staging delineates whiteness as “a particular – even peculiar – identity, rather than a presumed norm” (Roediger, Colored White 21). The belligerence of the senior Stoners toward not only their son and each other, but the world at large, in turn, functions to render whiteness intrinsically ruthless and destructive. Anthony’s parents, in all their whiteness, enact David Roediger’s assertion that “it is not merely that ‘Whiteness’s is oppressive and false; it is that ‘Whiteness’s is nothing but oppressive and false” (Toward the Abolition 13).Anthony speaks not a word during the scene. He communicates only by belching and giving his parents the finger as he leaves the room and the home. This departure is significant in that it marks the moment when Anthony, hereafter known only as “Man,” flees the world of whiteness. He winds up taking refuge in the multi-hued world of stonerism, as embodied in the scene that follows, which features Pedro emerging from his home to interact with his Chicano neighbours and to lovingly inspect his car. As a lowrider, a customised vehicle that “begin[s] with the abandoned materials of one tradition (that of mainstream America), … [and is] … then transformed and recycled . . . into new and fresh objects of art which are distinctly Chicano,” Pedro’s car serves as a symbol of the cultural hybridisation that Man is about to undergo (quoted in Ondine 141).As Man’s muteness in the presence of his parents suggests, his racial status seems tentative from the start. Within the world of whiteness, Man is the subaltern, silenced and denigrated, finding voice only after he befriends Pedro. Even as the film identifies Man as white through his parental lineage, it renders indeterminate its own assertion, destabilising any such fixed or naturalised schema of identity. When Man is first introduced to Pedro’s band as their newest member, James, the band’s African American bass player, looks at Man, dressed in the uniform of the band, and asks: “Hey Pedro, where’s the white dude you said was playing the drums?” Clearly, from James’s point of view, the room contains no white dudes, just stoners. Man’s presumed whiteness becomes one of the film’s countless gags, the provocative ambiguity of the casting of a Chinese-European to play a white part underscored in the film by the equally implausible matter of age. Man, according to the film’s narrative, is a high school student; Chong was forty when the film was released. Like his age, Man’s whiteness is never a good fit. That Man ultimately winds up sleeping on the very couch upon which we first encounter Pedro suggests how radical and final the break with his dubious white past is. The “Mexicans” whom his father would mock as fit only for abject labour are amongst those whom Man comes to consider his closest companions. In departing his parents’ white world, and embracing Pedro’s dilapidated, barrio-based world of wastedness, Man traces the geographies narrated by George Lipsitz in The Possessive Investment in Whiteness. Historically, Lipsitz argues, the development of affluent white space (the suburbs) was made possible by the disintegration of African American, Chicano and other minority neighbourhoods disadvantaged by federal, state, and corporate housing, employment, health care, urban renewal, and education policies that favoured whites over non-whites. In this sense, Man’s flight from his parents’ home is a retreat from whiteness itself, and from the advantages that whiteness conveys. In choosing the ramshackle, non-white world of stonerism, Man performs an act of racial treachery. Whiteness, Lipsitz contends, has “cash value,” and “is invested in, like property, but it is also a means of accumulating property and keeping it from others,” which allows for “intergenerational transfers of inherited wealth that pass on the spoils of discrimination to succeeding generations” (vii-viii). Man’s disavowal of the privileges of whiteness is a reckless refusal to accept this racial birthright. Whiteness is thus wasted upon Man because Man wastes his whiteness. Given the centrality of prudence and restraint to hegemonic constructions of whiteness, Man’s willingness to squander the “valuable asset” that is his white inheritance is especially treasonous (Harris 1713). Man is the prodigal son of whiteness, a profligate who pours down the drain “the wages of whiteness” that his forbearers have spent generations accruing and protecting (Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness). His waste not only offends the core values which whiteness is said to comprise, it also denigrates whiteness itself by illuminating the excess of white privilege, as well as the unarticulated excess of meanings that hover around whiteness to create the illusion of transcendence and infinite variety. Man’s performance, like all bad performances of whiteness, “disrupt[s] implicit understandings of what it means to be white” (Hartigan 46). The spectre of seeing white domination go ‘up in smoke’—via wasting, as opposed to hoarding, white privilege—amounts to racial treason, and helps not only to explicate why whites in the film find stonerism so menacing, but also to explain the paradox of “pot [making] the people who don’t smoke it even more paranoid than the people who do” (Patterson). While Tommy Chong’s droll assertion that "what makes us so dangerous is that we're harmless" ridicules such paranoia, it ultimately fails to account for the politics of subversive squandering of white privilege that characterise the stoner film (“Biographies”). Stoners in Up in Smoke, as in most other stoner films, are marked as non-white, through association with ethnic Others, through their rejection of mainstream ideas about work and achievement, and/or through their lack of bodily restraint in relentlessly seeking pleasure, in dressing outrageously, and in refusing to abide conventional grooming habits. Significantly, the non-white status of the stoner is both voluntary and deliberate. While stonerism embraces its own non-whiteness, its Otherness is not signified, primarily, through racial cross-dressing of the sort Eric Lott detects in Elvis, but rather through race-mixing. Stoner collectivity practices an inclusivity that defies America’s historic practice of racial and ethnic segregation (Lott 248). Stonerism further reveals its unwillingness to abide constrictive American whiteness in a scene in which Pedro and Man, both US-born Americans, are deported. The pair are rounded up along with Pedro’s extended family in a raid initiated when Pedro’s cousin “narcs” on himself to la migra (the Immigration and Naturalization Service) in order to get free transport for his extended family to his wedding in Tijuana. Pedro and Man return to the US as unwitting tricksters, bringing back to the US more marijuana than has ever crossed the Mexican-US border at one time, fusing the relationship between transnationalism and wastedness. The disrespect that stoners exhibit for pregnable US borders contests presumed Chicano powerlessness in the face of white force and further affronts whiteness, which historically has mobilised itself most virulently at the threat of alien incursion. Transgression here is wilful and playful; stoners intend to offend normative values and taste through their actions, their dress, and non-white associations as part of the project of forging a new hybridised, transnational subjectivity that threatens to lay waste to whiteness’s purity and privilege. Stoners invite the scrutiny of white authority with their outrageous attire and ethnically diverse composition, turning the “inevitability of surveillance” (Borrie 87) into an opportunity to enact their own wastedness—their wasted privilege, their wasted youth, their wasted potential—before a gaze that is ultimately confounded and threatened by the chaotic hybridity with which it is faced (Hebdige 26). By perpetually displaying his/her wasted Otherness, the stoner makes of him/herself a “freak,” a label cops use derisively throughout Up in Smoke to denote the wasted without realising that stoners define themselves in precisely such terms, and, by doing so, obstruct whiteness’s assertion of universal subjectivity. Pedro’s cousin Strawberry (Tom Skerritt), a pot dealer, enacts freakishness by exhibiting a large facial birthmark and by suffering from Vietnam-induced Post Traumatic Stress disorder. A freak in every sense of the word, Strawberry is denied white status by virtue of physical and mental defect. But Strawberry, as a stoner, ultimately wants whiteness even less than it wants him. The defects that deny him membership in the exclusive “club” that is whiteness prove less significant than the choice he makes to defect from the ranks of whiteness and join with Man in the decision to waste his whiteness wantonly (“Editorial”). Stoner masculinity is represented as similarly freakish and defective. While white authority forcefully frustrates the attempts of Pedro and Man to “score” marijuana, the duo’s efforts to “score” sexually are thwarted by their own in/action. More often than not, wastedness produces impotence in Up in Smoke, either literally or figuratively, wherein the confusion and misadventures that attend pot-smoking interrupt foreplay. The film’s only ostensible sex scene is unconsummated, a wasted opportunity for whiteness to reproduce itself when Man sleeps through his girlfriend’s frenzied discussion of sex. During the course of Up in Smoke, Man dresses as a woman while hitchhiking, Pedro mistakes Man for a woman, Man sits on Pedro’s lap when they scramble to change seats whilst being pulled over by the police, Man suggests that Pedro has a “small dick,” Pedro reports liking “manly breasts,” and Pedro—unable to urinate in the presence of Sgt. Stedenko—tells his penis that if it does not perform, he will “put [it] back in the closet.” Such attenuations of the lead characters’ masculinity climax in the penultimate scene, in which Pedro, backed by his band, performs “Earache My Eye,” a song he has just composed backstage, whilst adorned in pink tutu, garter belt, tassle pasties, sequined opera mask and Mickey Mouse ears: My momma talkin’ to me tryin’ to tell me how to liveBut I don't listen to her cause my head is like a sieveMy daddy he disowned me cause I wear my sister's clothesHe caught me in the bathroom with a pair of pantyhoseMy basketball coach he done kicked me off the teamFor wearing high heeled sneakers and acting like a queen“Earache My Eye” corroborates the Othered natured of stonerism by marking stoners, already designated as non-white, as non-straight. In a classic iteration of a bad gender performance, the scene rejects both whiteness and its hegemonic partners-in-crime, heterosexuality and normative masculinity (Butler 26). Here stoners waste not only their whiteness, but also their white masculinity. Whiteness, and its dependence upon “intersection … [with] interlocking axes [of power such as] gender … [and] sexuality,” is “outed” in this scene (Shome 368). So, too, is it enfeebled. In rendering masculinity freakish and defective, the film threatens whiteness at its core. For if whiteness can not depend upon normative masculinity for its reproduction, then, like Man’s racial birthright, it is wasted. The stoner’s embodiment of freakishness further works to emphasise wasted whiteness by exposing just how hysterical whiteness’s defense of its own normativity can be. Up in Smoke frequently inflates not only the effects of marijuana, but also the eccentricities of those who smoke it, a strategy which means that much of the film’s humour turns on satirising hegemonic stereotypes of marijuana smokers. Equally, Cheech Marin’s exaggerated “slapstick, one-dimensional [portrayal] of [a] Chicano character” works to render ridiculous the very stereotypes his character incarnates (List 183). While the film deconstructs processes of social construction, it also makes extensive use of counter-stereotyping in its depictions of characters marked as white. The result is that whiteness’s “illusion of [its] own infinite variety” is contested and the lie of whiteness as non-raced is exposed, helping to explain the stoner’s decision to waste his/her whiteness (Dyer 12; 2). In Up in Smoke whiteness is the colour of straightness. Straights, who are willing neither to smoke pot nor to tolerate the smoking of pot by others/Others, are so comprehensively marked as white in the film that whiteness and straightness become isomorphic. As a result, the same stereotypes are mobilised in representing whiteness and straightness: incompetence, belligerence, hypocrisy, meanspiritedness, and paranoia, qualities that are all the more oppressive because virtually all whites/straights in the film occupy positions of authority. Anthony’s spectacularly white parents, as we have seen, are bigoted and dominating. Their whiteness is further impugned by alcohol, which fuels Mr. Stoner’s fury and Mrs. Stoner’s unintelligibility. That the senior Stoners are drunk before noon works, of course, to expose the hypocrisy of those who would indict marijuana use while ignoring the social damage alcohol can produce. Their inebriation (revealed as chronic in the DVD’s outtake scenes) takes on further significance when it is configured as a decidedly white attribute. Throughout the film, only characters marked as white consume alcohol—most notably, the judge who is discovered to be drinking vodka whist adjudicating drug charges against Pedro and Man—therefore dislodging whiteness’s self-construction as temperate, and suggesting just how wasted whiteness is. While stonerism is represented as pacific, drunkenness is of a piece with white/straight bellicosity. In Up in Smoke, whites/straights crave confrontation and discord, especially the angry, uptight, and vainglorious narcotics cop Sgt. Stedenko (Stacey Keech) who inhabits so many of the film’s counter-stereotypes. While a trio of white cops roughly apprehend and search a carload of innocent nuns in a manner that Man describes as “cold blooded,” Stedenko, unawares in the foreground, gives an interview about his plans for what he hopes will be the biggest border drug bust in US history: “[Reporter:] Do you expect to see any violence here today? [Sgt. Stedenko:] I certainly hope so.” Stedenko’s desire to act violently against stoners echoes mythologies of white regeneration in the Old West, wherein whiteness refurbished itself through violent attacks on Native Americans, whose wasteful cultures failed to make “civilised” use of western lands (Slotkin 565).White aggression is relentlessly depicted in the film, with one important exception: the instance of the stoned straight. Perhaps no other trope is as defining of the genre, as is the scene wherein a straight person accidentally becomes stoned. Up in Smoke offers several examples, most notably the scene in which a motorcycle cop pulls over Pedro and Man as they drive a van belonging to Pedro’s Uncle Chuey. In a plot twist requiring a degree of willing suspension of disbelief that even wasted audiences might find a stretch, the exterior shell of the van, unbeknownst to Pedro and Man, is made entirely of marijuana which has started to smoulder around the exhaust pipe. The cop, who becomes intoxicated whilst walking through the fumes, does not hassle Pedro and Man, as expected, but instead asks for a bite of their hot dog and then departs happily, instructing the duo to “have a nice day.” In declining, or perhaps simply forgetting, to exercise his authority, the cop demonstrates the regenerative potential not of violent whiteness but rather of hybrid wastedness. Marijuana here is transformative, morphing straight consciousness into stoner consciousness and, in the process, discharging all the uptight, mean-spirited, unnecessary, and hence wasteful baggage of whiteness along the way. While such a utopian potential for pot is both upheld and satirised in the film, the scene amounts to far more than an inconsequential generic gag, in that it argues for the disavowal of whiteness via the assumption of the voluntary Otherness that is stonerism. Whiteness, the scene suggests, can be cast off, discarded, wasted and thus surmounted. Whites, for want of a better phrase, simply need to ‘just say no’ to whiteness in order to excrete the brutality that is its necessary affliction and inevitable result. While Up in Smoke laudably offers a powerful refusal to horde the assets of whiteness, the film fails to acknowledge that ‘just saying no’ is, indeed, one of whiteness’s exclusive privileges, since whites and only whites possess the liberty to refuse the advantages whiteness bestows. Non-whites possess no analogical ability to jettison the social constructions to which they are subjected, to refuse the power of dominant classes to define their subjectivity. Neither does the film confront the fact that Man nor any other of Up in Smoke’s white freaks are disallowed from re-embracing their whiteness, and its attendant value, at any time. However inchoate the film’s challenge to racial privilege, Up in Smoke’s celebration of the subversive pleasures of wasting whiteness offers a tentative, if bleary, first step toward ‘the abolition of whiteness.’ Its utopian vision of a post-white hybridised subjectivity, however dazed and confused, is worthy of far more serious contemplation than the film, taken at face value, might seem to suggest. Perhaps Up in Smoke is a stoner film that should also be viewed while sober. ReferencesBill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Dir. Stephen Herek. Orion Pictures Corporation, 1989.“Biographies”. 10 June 2010 ‹http://www.cheechandchongfans.com/biography.html›. Borrie, Lee. "Wild Ones: Containment Culture and 1950s Youth Rebellion”. Diss. University of Canterbury, 2007.Butler, Judith. "Critically Queer”. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1.1 (1993): 17-32.Chavoya, C. Ondine. “Customized Hybrids: The Art of Ruben Ortiz Torres and Lowriding in Southern California”. 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Image 1: A Little Free Library. Image credit: Nadine Kozak.IntroductionLittle Free Libraries give people a reason to stop and exchange things they love: books. It seemed like a really good way to build a sense of community.Dannette Lank, Little Free Library steward, Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, 2013 (Rumage)Against a backdrop of stagnant literacy rates and enduring perceptions of urban decay and the decline of communities in cities (NCES, “Average Literacy”; NCES, “Average Prose”; Putnam 25; Skogan 8), legions of Little Free Libraries (LFLs) have sprung up across the United States between 2009 and the present. LFLs are small, often homemade structures housing books and other physical media for passersby to choose a book to take or leave a book to share with others. People have installed the structures in front of homes, schools, libraries, churches, fire and police stations, community gardens, and in public parks. There are currently 50,000 LFLs around the world, most of which are in the continental United States (Aldrich, “Big”). LFLs encompass building in multiple senses of the term; LFLs are literally tiny buildings to house books and people use the structures for building neighbourhood social capital. The organisation behind the movement cites “building community” as one of its three core missions (Little Free Library). Rowan Moore, theorising humans’ reasons for building, argues desire and emotion are central (16). The LFL movement provides evidence for this claim: stewards erect LFLs based on hope for increased literacy and a desire to build community through their altruistic actions. This article investigates how LFLs build urban community and explores barriers to the endeavour, specifically municipal building and right of way ordinances used in attempts to eradicate the structures. It also examines local responses to these municipal actions and potential challenges to traditional public libraries brought about by LFLs, primarily the decrease of visits to public libraries and the use of LFLs to argue for defunding of publicly provided library services. The work argues that LFLs build community in some places but may threaten other community services. This article employs qualitative content analysis of 261 stewards’ comments about their registered LFLs on the organisation’s website drawn from the two largest cities in a Midwestern state and an interview with an LFL steward in a village in the same state to analyse how LFLs build community. The two cities, located in the state where the LFL movement began, provide a cross section of innovators, early adopters, and late adopters of the book exchanges, determined by their registered charter numbers. Press coverage and municipal documents from six cities across the US gathered through a snowball sample provide data about municipal challenges to LFLs. Blog posts penned by practising librarians furnish some opinions about the movement. This research, while not a representative sample, identifies common themes and issues around LFLs and provides a basis for future research.The act of building and curating an LFL is a representation of shared beliefs about literacy, community, and altruism. Establishing an LFL is an act of civic participation. As Nico Carpentier notes, while some civic participation is macro, carried out at the level of the nation, other participation is micro, conducted in “the spheres of school, family, workplace, church, and community” (17). Ruth H. Landman investigates voluntary activities in the city, including community gardening, and community bakeries, and argues that the people associated with these projects find themselves in a “denser web of relations” than previously (2). Gretchen M. Herrmann argues that neighbourhood garage sales, although fleeting events, build an enduring sense of community amongst participants (189). Ray Oldenburg contends that people create associational webs in what he calls “great good places”; third spaces separate from home and work (20-21). Little Free Libraries and Community BuildingEmotion plays a central role in the decision to become an LFL steward, the person who establishes and maintains the LFL. People recount their desire to build a sense of community and share their love of reading with neighbours (Charter 4684; Charter 8212; Charter 9437; Charter 9705; Charter 16561). One steward in the study reported, “I love books and I want to be able to help foster that love in our neighbourhood as well” (Charter 4369). Image 2: A Little Free Library, bench, water fountain, and dog’s water bowl for passersby to enjoy. Image credit: Nadine Kozak.Relationships and emotional ties are central to some people’s decisions to have an LFL. The LFL website catalogues many instances of memorial LFLs, tributes to librarians, teachers, and avid readers. Indeed, the first Little Free Library, built by Todd Bol in 2009, was a tribute to his late mother, a teacher who loved reading (“Our History”). In the two city study area, ten LFLs are memorials, allowing bereaved families to pass on a loved one’s penchant for sharing books and reading (Charter 1235; Charter 1309; Charter 4604; Charter 6219; Charter 6542; Charter 6954; Charter 10326; Charter 16734; Charter 24481; Charter 30369). In some cases, urban neighbours come together to build, erect, and stock LFLs. One steward wrote: “Those of us who live in this friendly neighborhood collaborated to design[,] build and paint a bungalow themed library” to match the houses in the neighbourhood (Charter 2532). Another noted: “Our neighbor across the street is a skilled woodworker, and offered to build the library for us if we would install it in our yard and maintain it. What a deal!” (Charter 18677). Community organisations also install and maintain LFLs, including 21 in the study population (e.g. Charter 31822; Charter 27155).Stewards report increased communication with neighbours due to their LFLs. A steward noted: “We celebrated the library’s launch on a Saturday morning with neighbors of all ages. We love sitting on our front porch and catching up with the people who stop to check out the books” (Charter 9673). Another exclaimed:within 24 hours, before I had time to paint it, my Little Free Library took on a life of its own. All of a sudden there were lots of books in it and people stopping by. I wondered where these books came from as I had not put any in there. Little kids in the neighborhood are all excited about it and I have met neighbors that I had never seen before. This is going to be fun! (Charter 15981)LFLs build community through social interaction and collaboration. This occurs when neighbours come together to build, install, and fill the structures. The structures also open avenues for conversation between neighbours who had no connection previously. Like Herrmann’s neighbourhood garage sales, LFLs create and maintain social ties between neighbours and link them by the books they share. Additionally, when neighbours gather and communicate at the LFL structure, they create a transitory third space for “informal public life”, where people can casually interact at a nearby location (Oldenburg 14, 288).Building Barriers, Creating CommunityThe erection of an LFL in an urban neighbourhood is not, however, always a welcome sight. The news analysis found that LFLs most often come to the attention of municipal authorities via citizen complaints, which lead to investigations and enforcement of ordinances. In Kansas, a neighbour called an LFL an “eyesore” and an “illegal detached structure” (Tapper). In Wisconsin, well-meaning future stewards contacted their village authorities to ask about rules, inadvertently setting off a six-month ban on LFLs (Stingl; Rumage). Resulting from complaints and inquiries, municipalities regulated, and in one case banned, LFLs, thus building barriers to citizens’ desires to foster community and share books with neighbours.Municipal governments use two major areas of established code to remove or prohibit LFLs: ordinances banning unapproved structures in residents’ yards and those concerned with obstructions to right of ways when stewards locate the LFLs between the public sidewalk and street.In the first instance, municipal ordinances prohibit either front yard or detached structures. Controversies over these ordinances and LFLs erupted in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, in 2012; Leawood, Kansas, in 2014; Shreveport, Louisiana, in 2015; and Dallas, Texas, in 2015. The Village of Whitefish Bay banned LFLs due to an ordinance prohibiting “front yard structures,” including mailboxes (Sanburn; Stingl). In Leawood, the city council argued that an LFL, owned by a nine-year-old boy, violated an ordinance that forbade the construction of any detached structures without city council permission. In Shreveport, the stewards of an LFL received a cease and desist letter from city council for having an “accessory structure” in the front yard (LaCasse; Burris) and Dallas officials knocked on a steward’s front door, informing her of a similar breach (Kellogg).In the second instance, some urban municipalities argued that LFLs are obstructions that block right of ways. In Lincoln, Nebraska, the public works director noted that the city “uses the area between the sidewalk and the street for snow storage in the winter, light poles, mailboxes, things like that.” The director continued: “And I imagine these little libraries are meant to congregate people like a water cooler, but we don’t want people hanging around near the road by the curb” (Heady). Both Lincoln in 2014 and Los Angeles (LA), California, in 2015, cited LFLs for obstructions. In Lincoln, the city notified the Southminster United Methodist Church that their LFL, located between the public sidewalk and street, violated a municipal ordinance (Sanburn). In LA, the Bureau of Street Services notified actor Peter Cook that his LFL, situated in the right of way, was an “obstruction” that Cook had to remove or the city would levy a fine (Moss). The city agreed at a hearing to consider a “revocable permit” for Cook’s LFL, but later denied its issuance (Condes).Stewards who found themselves in violation of municipal ordinances were able to harness emotion and build outrage over limits to individuals’ ability to erect LFLs. In Kansas, the stewards created a Facebook page, Spencer’s Little Free Library, which received over 31,000 likes and messages of support. One comment left on the page reads: “The public outcry will force those lame city officials to change their minds about it. Leave it to the stupid government to rain on everybody’s parade” (“Good”). Children’s author Daniel Handler sent a letter to the nine-year-old steward, writing as Lemony Snicket, “fighting against librarians is immoral and useless in the face of brave and noble readers such as yourself” (Spencer’s). Indeed, the young steward gave a successful speech to city hall arguing that the body should allow the structures because “‘lots of people in the neighborhood used the library and the books were always changing. I think it’s good for Leawood’” (Bauman). Other local LFL supporters also attended council and spoke in favour of the structures (Harper). In LA, Cook’s neighbours started a petition that gathered over 100 signatures, where people left comments including, “No to bullies!” (Lopez). Additionally, neighbours gathered to discuss the issue (Dana). In Shreveport, neighbours left stacks of books in their front yards, without a structure housing them due to the code banning accessory structures. One noted, “I’m basically telling the [Metropolitan Planning Commission] to go sod off” (Friedersdorf; Moss). LFL proponents reacted with frustration and anger at the perceived over-reach of the government toward harmless LFLs. In addition to the actions of neighbours and supporters, the national and local press commented on the municipal constraints. The LFL movement has benefitted from a significant amount of positive press in its formative years, a press willing to publicise and criticise municipal actions to thwart LFL development. Stewards’ struggles against municipal bureaucracies building barriers to LFLs makes prime fodder for the news media. Herbert J. Gans argues an enduring value in American news is “the preservation of the freedom of the individual against the encroachments of nation and society” (50). The juxtaposition of well-meaning LFL stewards against municipal councils and committees provided a compelling opportunity to illustrate this value.National media outlets, including Time (Sanburn), Christian Science Monitor (LaCasse), and The Atlantic, drew attention to the issue. Writing in The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf critically noted:I wish I was writing this to merely extol this trend [of community building via LFLs]. Alas, a subset of Americans are determined to regulate every last aspect of community life. Due to selection bias, they are overrepresented among local politicians and bureaucrats. And so they have power, despite their small-mindedness, inflexibility, and lack of common sense so extreme that they’ve taken to cracking down on Little Free Libraries, of all things. (Friedersdorf, n.p.)Other columnists mirrored this sentiment. Writing in the LA Times, one commentator sarcastically wrote that city officials were “cracking down on one of the country’s biggest problems: small community libraries where residents share books” (Schaub). Journalists argued this was government overreach on non-issues rather than tackling larger community problems, such as income inequality, homelessness, and aging infrastructure (Solomon; Schaub). The protests and negative press coverage led to, in the case of the municipalities with front yard and detached structure ordinances, détente between stewards and councils as the latter passed amendments permitting and regulating LFLs. Whitefish Bay, Leawood, and Shreveport amended ordinances to allow for LFLs, but also to regulate them (Everson; Topil; Siegel). Ordinances about LFLs restricted their number on city blocks, placement on private property, size and height, as well as required registration with the municipality in some cases. Lincoln officials allowed the church to relocate the LFL from the right of way to church property and waived the $500 fine for the obstruction violation (Sanburn). In addition to the amendments, the protests also led to civic participation and community building including presentations to city council, a petition, and symbolic acts of defiance. Through this protest, neighbours create communities—networks of people working toward a common goal. This aspect of community building around LFLs was unintentional but it brought people together nevertheless.Building a Challenge to Traditional Libraries?LFL marketing and communication staff member Margaret Aldrich suggests in The Little Free Library Book that LFLs are successful because they are “gratifyingly doable” projects that can be accomplished by an individual (16). It is this ease of building, erecting, and maintaining LFLs that builds concern as their proliferation could challenge aspects of library service, such as public funding and patron visits. Some professional librarians are in favour of the LFLs and are stewards themselves (Charter 121; Charter 2608; Charter 9702; Charter 41074; Rumage). Others envision great opportunities for collaboration between traditional libraries and LFLs, including the library publicising LFLs and encouraging their construction as well as using LFLs to serve areas without, or far from, a public library (Svehla; Shumaker). While lauding efforts to build community, some professional librarians question the nomenclature used by the movement. They argue the phrase Little Free Libraries is inaccurate as libraries are much more than random collections of books. Instead, critics contend, the LFL structures are closer to book swaps and exchanges than actual libraries, which offer a range of services such as Internet access, digital materials, community meeting spaces, and workshops and programming on a variety of topics (American Library Association; Annoyed Librarian). One university reference and instruction librarian worries about “the general public’s perception and lumping together of little free libraries and actual ‘real’ public libraries” (Hardenbrook). By way of illustration, he imagines someone asking, “‘why do we need our tax money to go to something that can be done for FREE?’” (Hardenbrook). Librarians holding this perspective fear the movement might add to a trend of neoliberalism, limiting or ending public funding for libraries, as politicians believe that the localised, individual solutions can replace publicly funded library services. This is a trend toward what James Ferguson calls “responsibilized” citizens, those “deployed to produce governmentalized results that do not depend on direct state intervention” (172). In other countries, this shift has already begun. In the United Kingdom (UK), governments are devolving formerly public services onto community groups and volunteers. Lindsay Findlay-King, Geoff Nichols, Deborah Forbes, and Gordon Macfadyen trace the impacts of the 2012 Localism Act in the UK, which caused “sport and library asset transfers” (12) to community and volunteer groups who were then responsible for service provision and, potentially, facility maintenance as well. Rather than being in charge of a “doable” LFL, community groups and volunteers become the operators of much larger facilities. Recent efforts in the US to privatise library services as governments attempt to cut budgets and streamline services (Streitfeld) ground this fear. Image 3: “Take a Book, Share a Book,” a Little Free Library motto. Image credit: Nadine Kozak. LFLs might have real consequences for public libraries. Another potential unintended consequence of the LFLs is decreasing visits to public libraries, which could provide officials seeking to defund them with evidence that they are no longer relevant or necessary. One LFL steward and avid reader remarked that she had not used her local public library since 2014 because “I was using the Little Free Libraries” (Steward). Academics and librarians must conduct more research to determine what impact, if any, LFLs are having on visits to traditional public libraries. ConclusionLittle Free Libraries across the United States, and increasingly in other countries, have generated discussion, promoted collaboration between neighbours, and led to sharing. In other words, they have built communities. This was the intended consequence of the LFL movement. There, however, has also been unplanned community building in response to municipal threats to the structures due to right of way, safety, and planning ordinances. The more threatening concern is not the municipal ordinances used to block LFL development, but rather the trend of privatisation of publicly provided services. While people are celebrating the community built by the LFLs, caution must be exercised lest central institutions of the public and community, traditional public libraries, be lost. Academics and communities ought to consider not just impact on their local community at the street level, but also wider structural concerns so that communities can foster many “great good places”—the Little Free Libraries and traditional public libraries as well.ReferencesAldrich, Margaret. “Big Milestone for Little Free Library: 50,000 Libraries Worldwide.” Little Free Library. 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