This talk will shed light on a facet of American life that legal and policy scholars have insufficiently attended to despite its conspicuity: leisure. Basic and sophisticated understandings of leisure define the term as time that is used for one’s personal enjoyment that is untied to work or duties. With this definition in hand, this talk will make three moves.

First, I’ll detail how access to leisure has been an underappreciated component of American history. Whether it is the Civil Rights Movement’s legal challenges against leisure sites that excluded people based on race (e.g., pools, parks, beaches, libraries), the Women’s Rights Movement—which forged new ways of thinking about pleasure and the ways work, social norms, and assumptions about family structure hampered women’s ability to pursue leisure— or late-twentieth-century LGBTQ social movement mobilization around bars and nightlife, history is replete with examples of marginalized groups marshaling law and policy to gain access to leisure.

Second, I’ll show how leisure has fallen off the modern civil rights agenda. There is a robust toolkit for challenging discrimination in leisure sites. Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and various state laws prohibit discrimination in leisure-focused public spaces based on race, nationality, disability, color, religion, sexual identity, and orientation. Nevertheless, litigation, empirical research, and media reports highlight how discrimination based on these categories thrives (e.g., racially discriminatory dress codes in restaurants, sexual harassment of women in gyms, and amusement spaces that are inaccessible to people with disabilities). Despite the prevalence of discrimination, leisure is generally considered to be subordinate to more traditional civil rights issues such as employment, education, or voting and gets short shrift as a policy item.

In the final third of the talk, I’ll make a case for a “leisure justice” agenda that is premised on the enforcement of existing anti-discrimination laws in sites of leisure, the removal of socio-legal obstacles to leisure, and the assessment of distributional determinants of leisure opportunities.