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The Slow Drip Of Decarceration: Reversing The Flood Of Mass Incarceration And Its Racist Impact, Olinda Moyd

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

For the last four decades, the flood of African Americans pouring into our jails and prisons can be likened to a watershed where someone turned on a faucet full force and opened the floodgates to all the prison doors. Despite the multitudinous efforts to secure the release of people unwittingly swept up in this flood, most spending decades behind bars, their releases have been mediocre and only a few have slowly dripped towards freedom. Racism seeps into every facet of American life and nowhere is it more prevalent than in our criminal legal system and the crisis of mass incarceration. …

The Rhetoric Of Abortion In Amicus Briefs, Jamie Abrams, Amanda Potts

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The amicus briefs filed in landmark abortion cases before the U.S. Supreme Court serve as a barometer revealing how various constituencies talk about abortion, women, fetuses, physicians, rights, and harms over time. This article conducts an interdisciplinary legal-linguistic study of the amicus briefs that were filed in the milestone abortion cases of Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health. As the first large-scale study of all amicus briefs submitted in these key cases, this article identifies the roles of amicus briefs, analyzes their rhetorical strategies, and describes how their authors engage …

Reevaluating Regional Law Reform Strategies After Dobbs, Jamie Abrams

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This article studies the triad of 2016 social media campaigns known as “#AskDr.Kasich,” “#askbevinaboutmyvag,” and “#PeriodsforPence.” While these campaigns, each located in the regional mid-South, were motivated by restrictive state abortion bills, they uniquely positioned menstruation and women’s bodies at the center of their activism—not abortion alone. They leveraged, as a political fault line, the contradiction of these states’ governors’ perceived disgust relating to basic women’s reproductive health, relative to their patriarchal assuredness in regulating and controlling women’s bodies.

In so doing, they tapped into meaningful disruptions in the geographies, religiosities, and masculinities of abortion politics. These campaigns achieved regional …

The Ripple Effects Of Dobbs On Health Care Beyond Wanted Abortion, Maya Manian

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The Supreme Court’s momentous decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to overturn fifty years of precedent on the constitutional right to abortion represents a sea of change, not only in constitutional law, but also in the public health landscape. Although state laws on abortion are still evolving after Dobbs, the decision almost immediately wreaked havoc on the delivery of medical care for both patients seeking abortion care and those not actively seeking to terminate a pregnancy.

This Article also argues that focusing the public’s attention on the deleterious consequences of abortion bans for health care beyond wanted abortion …

Interjurisdictional Abortion Wars In The Post-Roe Era, Maya Manian

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The Supreme Court appears poised to overrule fifty years of precedent holding that pre-viability prohibitions on abortion are unconstitutional. In a leaked draft opinion of Dobbs v. Jackson Women Health Organization, Justice Alito proclaims that Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey must be overruled and abortion left to the states to regulate. During oral argument in Dobbs, Justice Kavanaugh suggested that overturning Roe would return the Court to a postion of "neutrality" on abortion. Justice Kavanaugh's assertion falls in line with claims by anti-abortion jurists that reversing Roe would simplify abortion law by returning the issue to the …

The Language Of Harm: What The Nassar Victim Impact Statements Reveal About Abuse And Accountability, Jamie Abrams, Amanda Potts

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This Article examines 148 Victim Impact Statements that were delivered to the
court in the Larry Nassar criminal sentencing. Larry Nassar was a doctor for the
United States Gymnastics Association and an employee of Michigan State University
who treated elite athletes, predominantly gymnasts. Nassar pleaded guilty to child
pornography and first-degree criminal sexual misconduct charges in Michigan. His
sentencing received worldwide attention as victims delivered impact statements
describing the harm and betrayal of his conduct. Using corpus-based discourse
analysis, this Article examines the complex strategies that the victims deployed to
describe who Nassar was (a doctor, a monster, a friend), …

Promise Amid Peril: Prea's Efforts To Regulate An End To Prison Rape, Brenda V. Smith

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This Article discusses the modest aspirations of the Prison Rape Elimination Act (“PREA”) that passed unanimously in the United States Congress in 2003. The Article posits that PREA created opportunities for holding correctional authorities accountable by creating a baseline for safety and setting more transparent expectations for agencies’ practices for protecting prisoners from sexual abuse. Additionally, the Article posits that PREA enhanced the evolving standards of decency for the Eighth Amendment and articulated clear expectations of correctional authorities to provide sexual safety for people in custody.

The Myth Of Enforcing Border Security Versus The Reality Of Enforcing Dominant Masculinities, Jamie Abrams

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This essay explores the masculinities underpinnings in modern immigration law, policy, and rhetoric. Existing analysis has captured the ways in which Trump-era immigration laws, policies, and rhetoric are explicitly and implicitly packaged in alarming racism and xenophobia. These critical lenses continue a long and deeply worrisome legacy of “othering” and dehumanizing immigrants and, more broadly, marginalizing communities of color in the United States.

Outside of the immigration law lens, separate strands of scholarship and media coverage have highlighted the toxic masculinities of the Trump era. These discussions have generally focused on President Trump’s treatment of women, the gendered campaign dynamics …

The Bemba Appeals Chamber Judgment: Impunity For Sexual And Gender-Based Crimes?, Susana Sacouto, Patricia Viseur Sellers

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

On June 8, 2018, a majority of the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Court (ICC) reversed the conviction of former military commander Jean-Pierre Bemba for the crimes against humanity of rape and murder and the war crimes of rape, murder, and pillaging committed by his troops in the Central African Republic (CAR) between October 2002, and March 2003. The decision was clearly a disappointment for the victims of the crimes committed by Bemba’s troops, who have been waiting for more than fifteen years for a measure of justice. Significantly, the acquittal also means that sixteen years after the Rome …

The #Metoo Movement: An Invitation For Feminist Critique Of Rape Crisis Framing, Jamie Abrams

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This article invites feminists to leverage the #MeToo Movement as a critical analytical tool to explore the longevity of the enduring rape crisis framing of victim services. For nearly half a century, victims have visited rape crisis centers, called rape crisis hotlines, and mobilized rape crisis response teams to provide services and support. This enduring political and social framing around rape as a crisis is opaque, has prompted a political backlash, and risks distorting hard-fought feminist legal, social, and political battles. It has yielded underreporting, underutilization, and recurring risks of budgetary cuts. This model and terminology have gone virtually unchanged …

The Peace Vs. Justice Debate And The Syrian Crisis, Paul Williams, Lisa Dicker, C. Danae Paterson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Peace negotiators often face the difficult decision of whether to pursue peace at the potential cost of achieving justice, or to pursue justice at the potential cost of achieving near term peace. There are abiding ethical and moral debates surrounding this tension between peace and justice. In Syria—where the death toll has exceeded 470,000, 11 million have been displaced, and there are over 14,000 documented cases of torture to the point of death—the peace versus justice debate is a living dilemma with which negotiators are currently grappling. This article strives to examine a timely facet of this multidimensional puzzle: how …

Teenage Pregnancy, Parenting, And Abortion: Legal Limits On Adolescents' Reproductive Rights, Maya Manian

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

As numerous scholars have noted, the law takes a strikingly incoherent approach to adolescent reproduction. States overwhelmingly allow a teenage girl to independently consent to pregnancy care and medical treatment for her child, and even to give up her child for adoption, all without notice to her parents, but require parental notice or consent for abortion. This chapter argues that this oft-noted contradiction in the law on teenage reproductive decision-making is in fact not as contradictory as it first appears. A closer look at the law's apparently conflicting approaches to teenage abortion and teenage childbirth exposes common ground that scholars …

Minors, Parents, And Minor Parents, Maya Manian

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

As numerous scholars have noted, the law takes a strikingly incoherent approach to adolescent reproduction. States overwhelmingly allow a teenage girl to independently consent to pregnancy care and medical treatment for her child, and even to give up her child for adoption, all without notice to her parents, but require parental notice or consent for abortion. This Article argues that this oft-noted contradiction in the law on teenage reproductive decision-making is in fact not as contradictory as it first appears. A closer look at the law’s apparently conflicting approaches to teenage abortion and teenage childbirth exposes common ground that scholars …

The Feminist Case For Acknowledging Women's Acts Of Violence, Jamie Abrams

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This Article makes a feminist case for acknowledging women’s acts of violence as consistent with — not threatening to — the goals of the domestic violence movement and the feminist movement. It concludes that broadly understanding women’s use of strength, power, coercion, control, and violence, even illegitimate uses, can be framed consistent with feminist goals. Beginning this conversation is a necessary — if uncomfortable — step to give movement to the movement to end gendered violence.

The domestic violence movement historically framed its work on a gender binary of men as potential perpetrators and women as potential victims. This binary …

Debunking The Myth Of Universal Male Privilege, Jamie Abrams

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Existing legal responses to sexual assault and harassment in the military have stagnated or failed. Current approaches emphasize the prevalence of sexual assault and highlight the masculine nature of the military’s statistical composition and institutional culture. Current responses do not, however, incorporate masculinities theory to disentangle the experiences of men as a group from men as individuals. Rather, embedded within contestations of the masculine military culture is the unstated assumption that the culture universally privileges or benefits the individual men that operate within it. This myth is harmful because it tethers masculinities to military efficacy, suppresses the costs of male …

Stories Of Teaching Race, Gender, And Class: A Narrative, Brenda V. Smith

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This Essay arises out of the keynote speech that I gave at the New England Clinical Conference at Harvard Law School in November 2015. The conference theme was, “Teaching Race, Gender and Class: Learning from Our Students, Communities and Each Other.” The primary planners and hosts for the conference were clinical teachers and programs in the Northeast, but participants came from around the country to talk about the importance of addressing race, gender and class in this moment of black lives mattering. They wanted to talk about the way that these issues of race, gender and class had always been …

Griswold, Geduldig, And Hobby Lobby: The Sex Gap Continues, Maya Manian

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

In her article, The (Non)-Right to Sex, Professor Mary Ziegler excavates the fascinating legal history of the “sex gap” — the historical failure to address sexual liberty — in the constitutional canon and offers an important cautionary tale for contemporary advocacy of marriage equality. By surfacing lost efforts to expand sexual liberty, and by linking that liberty to intersectional concerns about class, gender, and racial equality, Professor Ziegler both explains why sexual freedom has received such limited constitutional protection and shows how incrementalist litigation strategies aimed at progressive legal change have inadvertently strengthened the state’s power to delimit sexual expression. …

Boys, Rape And Masculinity: Reclaiming Boys’ Narratives Of Sexual Violence In Custody, Brenda V. Smith

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This article examines a little studied area at the intersections of masculinity, feminist studies, and criminal justice — sexual abuse of boys in custody by female staff. Professor Smith outlines the scope of the problem and discusses competing narratives that attempt to explain the phenomena: (1) female staff as “mother, sister, friend”; (2) adolescent development theory; (3) complex early childhood trauma; and (4) female authority and power. There is a gap in both masculinity and feminist theory in analyzing sexual aggression and power by women over boys. The talk article concludes with policy and practice prescription and recommendations for further …

The Illusion Of Autonomy In Women's Medical Decision-Making, Jamie Abrams

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This article considers why there is not more conflict between women and their doctors in obstetric decision-making. While patients in every other medical context have complete autonomy to refuse treatment against medical advice, elect high-risk courses of action, and prioritize their own interests above any other decision-making metric, childbirth is viewed anomalously because of the duty to the fetus that the state and the doctor owe at birth. Many feminist scholars have analyzed the complex resolution of these conflicts when they arise, particularly when the state threatens to intervene to override the birthing woman’s autonomy. This article instead considers the …

The Consequences Of Abortion Restrictions For Women's Healthcare, Maya Manian

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This Essay challenges the false assumption that abortion care can be segregated from women’s medical care and targeted for special restrictions without any effects on women’s health more broadly. As a matter of medical reality, abortion cannot be isolated from the continuum of women’s healthcare. Yet policymakers and the public have failed to understand the interconnectedness of abortion with other aspects of women’s medical care. In fact, existing abortion restrictions harm women’s health even for women not actively seeking abortion care, but these impacts remain obscured. For example, antiabortion laws and policies have spillover effects on miscarriage management, prenatal care, …

Lessons From Personhood's Defeat: Abortion Restrictions And Side Effects On Women's Health, Maya Manian

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

State personhood laws pose a puzzle. These laws would establish fertilized eggs as persons and, by doing so, would ban all abortions. Many states have consistently supported laws restricting abortion care. Yet, thus far no personhood laws have passed. Why? This Article offers a possible explanation and draws lessons from that explanation for understanding and resisting abortion restrictions more broadly. I suggest that voters’ recognition of the implications of personhood legislation for health issues other than abortion may have led to personhood’s defeat. In other words, opponents of personhood proposals appear to have successfully reconnected abortion to pregnancy care, contraception, …

International Law Weekend, American Branch Of The International Law Association Perspectives On Crimes Of Sexual Violence In International Law, Susana Sacouto

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Functional Parenting And Dysfunctional Abortion Policy: Reforming Parental Involvement Legislation, Maya Manian

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Abortion-related parental involvement mandates raise important family law issues about the scope of parents’ power over their children’s intimate decisions. While there has been extensive scholarly attention paid to the problems with parental involvement laws, relatively little has been said about strategies for reforming these laws. This article suggests using insights from family law relating to functional parenthood and third party caregiving as a basis for crafting more capacious methods of ensuring adult guidance for teenage girls facing an unplanned pregnancy. Recent developments in family law bolster the case for reforming parental involvement legislation to allow teenagers to consult with …

The Feminist Academic's Challenge To Legal Education: Creating Sites For Change, Ann Shalleck

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Two Parts Of The Landscape Of Family In America: Maintaining Both Spousal And Domestic Partner Employee Benefits For Both Same-Sex And Different-Sex Couples, Nancy Polikoff

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Response: And Baby Makes How Many - Using In Re M.C. To Consider Parentage Of A Child Conceived Through Sexual Intercourse And Born To A Lesbian Couple, Nancy Polikoff

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Cohabitation And The Restatement (Third) Of Restitution & Unjust Enrichment, Candace Kovacic-Fleischer

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The Restatement (Third) of Restitution & Unjust Enrichment clarified and modernized a field that had become muddled since the publication of the Restatement (First) in 1937. One area of modernization relates to the changes in law towards women, particularly changes in law toward female cohabitants. Published in 2011, the Restatement (Third) added a new Section 28, which rejected the view that it would be immoral for one cohabitant to bring suit against the other, and relaxed the restriction on recovery in unjust enrichment for "gratuitous" contributions. This Article reviews societal and legal changes for women since 1937 and notes that, …

Examining Entrenched Masculinities Within The Republican Government Tradition, Jamie Abrams

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

“May all our citizens be soldiers, and all our soldiers citizens,” Sarah Livingston Jay toasted to revelers celebrating the Revolutionary War in 1789. She expressly conveyed what this article describes as the “foundational fusion” of republican government traditions coupling the military service of citizens-soldiers with male political citizenship. While the core of this fusion is deep, long-standing, and well-documented, this article explores the implicit tensions conveyed in her toast – the dominant masculinity dimensions of this foundational fusion. How do women and black men historically gain full political citizenship and effectuate republican government guarantees given its anchoring in entrenched dominant …

Inter-American System, Claudia Martin

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

The Collateral Consequences Of Masculinizing Violence, Jamie Abrams

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Before an enraged gunman fired thirty-six deadly shots into an exercise class filled with women, on August 4, 2009, in Pennsylvania, he blogged that his killing spree was the result of his failure to meet society’s expectations of him as a man. This violent act tragically affirms that hegemonic masculinity – a dominant form of masculinity whereby some types of men have power over women and over some other men – can directly cause violence against women and reveals both the underlying connection between masculinities scholarship and feminist scholarship and the value in exploring that linkage further in both theory …