section_path: Sexual behavior/Legal issues
section_name: Legal issues
paragraph_text: Legal issues
  
  Globally, laws regulate human sexuality in several ways, including criminalizing particular sexual behaviors, granting individuals the privacy or autonomy to make their own sexual decisions, protecting individuals with regard to equality and non-discrimination, recognizing and protecting other individual rights, as well as legislating matters regarding marriage and the family, and creating laws protecting individuals from violence, harassment, and persecution.
  
  In the United States, there are two fundamentally different approaches, applied in different states, regarding the way the law is used to attempt to govern a person's sexuality. The "black letter" approach to law focuses on the study of pre-existing legal precedent and attempts to offer a clear framework of rules within which lawyers and others can work. In contrast, the socio-legal approach focuses more broadly on the relationship between the law and society, and offers a more contextualized view of the relationship between legal and social change.
  
  Issues regarding human sexuality and human sexual orientation came to the forefront in Western law in the latter half of the twentieth century, as part of the gay liberation movement's encouragement of LGBT individuals to " come out of the closet " and engage with the legal system, primarily through courts. Therefore, many issues regarding human sexuality and the law are found in the opinions of the courts.