Over the past three decades, the locus of authority in the struggle for gender and sexual equality has progressively shifted from parliaments to courts. Whereas the 1990s and 2000s were defined by legislative momentum—when equality and LGBT+ rights were primarily secured through political negotiation—today it is the judiciary that holds the power, and the burden, to arbitrate sexual and moral conflicts. The reversal of Roe v. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court (2022) and the UK Supreme Court’s 2025 ruling on trans women’s rights mark a turning point: liberal democracies have entered a phase of judicial backlash in which legal institutions no longer merely expand rights but also delimit and recalibrate them.
This paper develops a theoretical framework to examine what I term the “judicialization of sexuality”: a process through which courts transform social controversies about gender, sexuality, reproduction, and kinship into legal reasoning and human-rights claims. Far from being neutral arbiters, courts act as producers of moral and political categories, redefining the legitimate boundaries of intimacy, protection, and family life. Drawing on socio-legal and feminist theory, I argue that this process exemplifies a broader form of governmentality in which the judiciary becomes a key site for the administration of sexuality within liberal regimes of power and knowledge.
By comparing recent jurisprudential trajectories in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other Western democracies, the paper highlights a paradox at the core of contemporary liberalism: the very institutions once celebrated as engines of sexual emancipation now function as arenas where competing moral orders are negotiated and sometimes curtailed. Ultimately, this analysis invites us to reconceptualize courts not only as instruments of rights protection, but as constitutive spaces of moral governance, where sexuality is judicially produced, disciplined, and contested—the symbolic frontline of democracy’s struggle over its own normative foundations.
