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Rosemary Auchmuty, "Last In, First Out: Lesbian and Gay Legal Studies", Feminist Legal Studies V/2 (1997), 235-253: This review of Didi Herman and Carl Stychin, eds. Legal Inversions: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Politics of Law (1995) and Carl Stychin, Law's Desire: Sexuality and the Limits of Justice (1995) welcomes both books as excellent additions to legal studies. It sets out to give a fairly comprehensive description of the content, approach and merits of each book, to situate them in the context of gay and lesbian legal studies, and to make some general points about the absence of gay and lesbian perspectives from feminist legal studies, both in print and in the law classroom. Both books adopt a cross-jurisdictional, comparative approach and cover a range of issues from constitutional law to crime, from case studies to jurisprudence, from custody battles to campaigns around AIDS. Particularly welcome is the broad coverage of lesbian concerns in Legal Inversions, even in those articles written by gay men, and Carl Stychin's engagement with feminist debates (e.g around pornography) in Law's Desire, even where I took issue with his queer analysis. The article concludes that 'lesbian law' has mostly been relegated to a 'lesbianandgay' studies approach, which tends to be dominated by men, and calls for more lesbian-feminist analyses which locate lesbians at the centre of a legal analysis, in relationship to but (where relevant) separate from gay men and straight women, and in all our mdiversity and multiple identities. It also reminds readers that a liberal approach to sexual 'preference' is not enough, that the forces of reaction are strong in the hetero-patriarchy, and that if we do not get lesbian and gay issues into the maintstream, we may be even further marginalised in future. e-mail: auchmur@WESTMINSTER.AC.UK

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