The roles and rules of law in sexual development

This article provides an overview of the diverse sources of law that regulate sexual development and its resulting behaviors, dispositions, and outcomes. After exploring how the law influences sexuality by regulating families, schools, media, and social service delivery, the article examines the role of criminal and civil law in regulating partners' influences on sexual relationships. The article then briefly analyses how the law influences the manner individuals themselves influence their intimate relationships and social environments. The article emphasizes that the necessary brevity of the overview masks many complexities but that existing laws and trends highlight how the law plays a dominant role in our lives, how the law seeks to promote certain dispositions, that the law must be harnessed to foster healthy relationships, and that contending with the law's dictates provides social scientists with important opportunities to foster social reform and structure healthy, supportive social environments conducive to responsible behaviors, attitudes, and dispositions.