Digital Commons Network^™

Resurrection, Bassim Al Shaker

Northwestern Law Journal des Refusés

No abstract provided.

Foreword, Caroline Faye Radell, Udhanth Mallasani

Northwestern Law Journal des Refusés

No abstract provided.

Enforcing Equity, Daiquiri J. Steele

Northwestern University Law Review

Federal administrative agencies that enforce workplace laws have dual responsibilities: (1) to prevent or remedy noncompliance with the underlying workplace law and (2) to prevent or remedy noncompliance with the law’s antiretaliation provisions. Disparities based on race, sex, and their intersection exist with respect to both of these types of employer noncompliance, as female workers and workers of color experience more violations of the substantive provisions and the retaliation provisions of these laws. While effective enforcement is vital to preserving workplace regulation as a whole, there is also an equity component to enforcement. Because workplace law violations disproportionately harm women …

Gender And Deception: Moral Perceptions And Legal Responses, Gregory Klass, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan

Northwestern University Law Review

Decades of social science research has shown that the identity of the parties in a legal action can affect case outcomes. Parties’ race, gender, class, and age all affect decisions of prosecutors, judges, juries, and other actors in a criminal prosecution or civil litigation. Less studied has been how identity might affect other forms of legal regulation. This Essay begins to explore perceptions of deceptive behavior—i.e., how wrongful it is, and the extent to which it should be regulated or punished—and the relationship of those perceptions to the gender of the actors. We hypothesize that ordinary people tend to perceive …

Healthcare Inequities In The United States And Beyond Are Taking Black Women’S Lives, Alichia Mcintosh

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

Black women have been dying at devastating rates due to health complications at the hands of the United States’ healthcare and legal systems. This Note explores these distressing rates and how they compare to White women while analyzing the fatalities and diagnoses among several health complications and diseases. These fatalities persist due to the United States’ history of racism—such as the institution of slavery and over 100 years of Black bodies experiencing Jim Crow laws—and the socioeconomic disadvantages Black women disproportionally face. This Note emphasizes that these disparities continue because the United States has failed to implement treaties—which it is …

The First Amendment And Online Access To Information About Abortion: The Constitutional And Technological Problems With Censorship, John Villasenor

Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property

To what extent could an abortion-restrictive state impede access to online information about abortion? After Dobbs, this question is no longer theoretical. This essay engages with this issue from both a legal and technological perspective, analyzing First Amendment jurisprudence as well as the technological implications of state-level online censorship. It concludes that the weight of Supreme Court precedent indicates that state attempts to censor information regarding out-of-state abortion services would violate the First Amendment. That said, the essay also recognizes that as Dobbs itself upended precedent, it is unclear what Supreme Court would do when ruling on questions regarding …

The Supreme Court Gets The Ball Rolling: Ncaa V. Alston And Title Ix, Arianna Banks

Northwestern University Law Review

Student-athlete compensation has been a consistent topic of controversy over the past few years, as critics question the legitimacy of the NCAA’s notion of amateurism and proponents favor the status quo. The Supreme Court decision in NCAA v. Alston has only served to intensify the debate, opening the door to alternative compensation structures. Despite a unanimous ruling in favor of the athletes, the limited holding of the case has only produced further questions. In his scathing concurrence, Justice Kavanaugh raises one such question: how does a student-athlete compensation structure comply with Title IX? This Comment seeks to address that question …

Insuring Contraceptive Equity, Jennifer Hickey

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

The United States is in the midst of a family planning crisis. Approximately half of all pregnancies nationwide are unintended. In recognition of the social importance of family planning, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) includes a “contraceptive mandate” that requires insurers to cover contraception at no cost. Yet, a decade after its enactment, the ACA’s promise of universal contraceptive access for insured women remains unfulfilled, with as many as one-third of U.S. women unable to access their preferred contraceptive without cost.

While much attention has been focused on religious exemptions granted to employers, the primary barrier to no-cost contraception is …

Deepfake Privacy: Attitudes And Regulation, Matthew B. Kugler, Carly Pace

Northwestern University Law Review

Using only a series of images of a person’s face and publicly available software, it is now possible to insert the person’s likeness into a video and show them saying or doing almost anything. This “deepfake” technology has permitted an explosion of political satire and, especially, fake pornography. Several states have already passed laws regulating deepfakes, and more are poised to do so. This Article presents three novel empirical studies that assess public attitudes toward this new technology. In our main study, a representative sample of the U.S. adult population perceived nonconsensually created pornographic deepfake videos as extremely harmful and …

Man Camps And Bad Men: Litigating Violence Against American Indian Women, Ana Condes

Northwestern University Law Review

The crisis of sexual violence plaguing Indian Country is made drastically worse by oil-pipeline construction, which often occurs near reservations. The “man camps” constructed to house pipeline workers are hotbeds of rape, domestic violence, and sex trafficking, and American Indian women are frequently targeted due to a perception that men will not be prosecuted for assaulting them. Victims have little recourse, facing underfunded police departments, indifferent prosecutors, and a federal government all too willing to turn a blind eye to the ongoing violence.

This Note proposes a litigation strategy for tribes to address the crisis and compel federal action. Litigation …

Comparative Limitations On Abortions: The United States Supreme Court V. The European Court Of Human Rights, Sunaya Padmanabhan

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

This Note compares the balancing tests implemented by the United States Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights to determine the legal status of abortion within their jurisdictions. This Note will argue that the Supreme Court’s balancing test better protects a woman’s legal path to an abortion because it A) limits states’ restrictions to specific categories and B) regulates the extent to which states can restrict a woman’s pre-viability abortion.

This Note will also examine the ways in which each court’s abortion jurisprudence substantively restricts a woman’s ability to obtain an abortion, even where legal avenues to the …

Title Ix Administers A Booster Shot: The Effect Of Private Donations On Title Ix, Charlotte Franklin

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (Title IX) prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in federally funded education programs or activities. Since its enactment, Title IX has dramatically increased interscholastic and intercollegiate athletic opportunities for women and girls. Despite indisputable progress since Title IX’s enactment, particularly for female athletes, many high schools and universities still fail to offer equal athletic opportunities for members of both sexes. Inadequate educational resources for high school and university athletic department administrators leads to a misunderstanding of Title IX’s requirements. This misunderstanding results in institutional misconduct and non-compliance with Title IX. In …

Third-Party Standing And Abortion Providers: The Hidden Dangers Of June Medical Services, Elika Nassirinia

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

Standing is a long held, judicially-created doctrine intended to establish the proper role of courts by identifying who may bring a case in federal court. While standing usually requires that a party asserts his or her own rights, the Supreme Court has created certain exceptions that allow litigants to bring suit on behalf of third parties when they suffer a concrete injury, they have a “close relation” to the third party, and there are obstacles to the third party's ability to protect his or her own interests. June Medical Services, heard by the Supreme Court on June 29, 2020, …

Discretion And Disparity In Federal Detention, Stephanie Holmes Didwania

Northwestern University Law Review

The uniquely American phenomenon of mass incarceration plagues the pretrial space. People awaiting trial make up roughly 20% of those held in criminal custody in the United States. Largely overlooked by bail-reform advocates, pretrial detention in the federal criminal system presents a puzzle. The federal system detains defendants at a much higher rate than the states—more than 60% of U.S. citizen-defendants were detained pending trial by federal courts last year. But federal defendants virtually never fail to appear in court, and they are rarely arrested for new crimes while on pretrial release. And unlike state court systems, cash bail is …

On Fosta And The Failures Of Punitive Speech Restrictions, Emily Morgan

Northwestern University Law Review

The Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) has provoked criticism from free-speech advocates, people involved in the commercial sex trade, everyday internet users, and scholars who deem the Act dangerous and ineffective. This Note helps to explain how such a controversial law came to be. Indeed, FOSTA is part of a legacy of failed attempts at reforming laws to comport with feminist goals—in this case, ending online sex trafficking and providing relief for sex-trafficking survivors, a group that consists largely of women and other marginalized people. But FOSTA, like its predecessors, fails to provide real …

On Beauty And Policing, I. India Thusi

Northwestern University Law Review

“To protect and serve” is the motto of police departments from Los Angeles to Cape Town. When police officers deviate from the twin goals of protection and service, for example by using excessive force or by maintaining hostile relations with the community, scholars recommend more training, more oversight, or more resources in policing. However, police appear to be motivated by a superseding goal in the area of sex work policing. In some places, the policing of sex workers is connected to police officers’ perceptions of beauty, producing a hierarchy of desirable bodies as enforced by those sworn to protect and …

Salary History And The Equal Pay Act: An Argument For The Adoption Of “Reckless Discrimination” As A Theory Of Liability, Kate Vandenberg

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

The Equal Pay Act (EPA) purports to prohibit employers from paying female employees less than male employees with similar qualifications; however, the affirmative defenses provided in the EPA are loopholes that perpetuate the gender pay gap. In particular, the fourth affirmative defense allows for wage differentials based on a “factor other than sex.” Many federal circuits have read this defense broadly to include wage differentials based on salary history. That is, an employer can pay a female employee less than her male counterparts because she was paid less by her previous employer. While salary history was once viewed as an …

Framing Trans Rights, Marie-Amélie George

Northwestern University Law Review

In the wake of marriage equality, opponents of LGBT rights refocused their attention, making transgender rights their main target. To persuade voters to maintain gender identity antidiscrimination protections, LGBT rights campaigns presented trans identity in a specific, but limited, way. These campaigns emphasized gender-conforming transgender individuals—those who adhere to male and female stereotypes—and thereby implicitly reinforced the gender binary. Although LGBT advocates have largely succeeded in their efforts to preserve LGBT rights, their messaging may undermine the movement’s broader litigation strategy and subject nonbinary members of the transgender community to greater discrimination and persecution.

The trans rights framing choices thus …

The Transgender Military Ban: Preservation Of Discrimination Through Transformation, Michele Goodwin, Erwin Chemerinsky

Northwestern University Law Review

This Essay contends that the Trump Administration’s ban on transgender individuals serving in the military is based on prejudice and bias, lacking any legitimate justification. As such, the transgender military ban cannot be justified on legal grounds. Nor can it be justified based on health and safety. Engaging a robust empirical record, the authors show that the ban cannot be justified based on matters of efficiency, preparedness, or combat readiness—arguments used by the Trump Administration to justify the ban. Despite transgender individuals serving openly in the military in recent years, the Trump Administration has not been able to offer in …

#Sowhitemale: Federal Civil Rulemaking, Brooke D. Coleman

Northwestern University Law Review

116 out of 136. That is the number of white men who have served on the eighty-two-year-old committee responsible for creating and maintaining the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. The tiny number of non-white, non-male committee members is disproportionate, even in the context of the white-male-dominated legal profession. If the rules were simply a technical set of instructions made by a neutral set of experts, then perhaps these numbers might not be as disturbing. But that is not the case. The Civil Rules embody normative judgments about the values that have primacy in our civil justice system, and the rule-makers—while …

Bleeding Women Dry: Tampon Taxes And Menstrual Inequity, Jorene Ooi

Northwestern University Law Review

In recent years, the problem of menstrual inequity has attracted increased attention. Most states impose a sales tax on menstrual hygiene products—a “tampon tax.” A burgeoning social movement has sought to end the tampon tax, and lawmakers have taken notice by introducing, and in some cases successfully passing, measures to repeal the tax by exempting menstrual hygiene products from the sales tax. This Note evaluates, from a tax policy standpoint, the pros and cons of repealing the tampon tax. It argues that although repeal is usually undesirable as a matter of tax design, the tax should nevertheless be repealed both …

Equal Protection Under The Carceral State, Aya Gruber

Northwestern University Law Review

McCleskey v. Kemp, the case that upheld the death penalty despite undeniable evidence of its racially disparate impact, is indelibly marked by Justice William Brennan’s phrase, “a fear of too much justice.” The popular interpretation of this phrase is that the Supreme Court harbored what I call a “disparity-claim fear,” dreading a future docket of racial discrimination claims and erecting an impossibly high bar for proving an equal protection violation. A related interpretation is that the majority had a “color-consciousness fear” of remedying discrimination through race-remedial policies. In contrast to these conventional views, I argue that the primary anxiety …

Challenging The Rhetorical Gag And Trap: Reproductive Capacities, Rights, And The Helms Amendment, Michele Goodwin

Northwestern University Law Review

This Essay argues that the battle over women’s autonomy, especially their reproductive healthcare and decision-making, has always been about much more than simply women’s health and safety. Rather, upholding patriarchy and dominion over women’s reproduction historically served political purposes and entrenched social and cultural norms that framed women’s capacities almost exclusively as service to a husband, mothering, reproducing, and sexual chattel. In turn, such social norms—often enforced by statutes and legal opinions—took root in rhetoric rather than the realities of women’s humanity, experiences, capacities, autonomy, and lived lives. As such, law created legal fictions about women and their supposed lack …

"Playing It Safe" With Empirical Evidence: Selective Use Of Social Science In Supreme Court Cases About Racial Justice And Marriage Equality, Russell K. Robinson, David M. Frost

Northwestern University Law Review

This Essay seeks to draw connections between race, sexual orientation, and social science in Supreme Court litigation. In some respects, advocates for racial minorities and sexual minorities face divergent trajectories. Among those asserting civil rights claims, LGBT rights claimants have been uniquely successful at the Court ever since Romer v. Evans in the mid-1990s. During this period, advocates for racial minorities have fought to preserve earlier victories in cases such as Regents of the University of California v. Bakke and have failed to overturn precedents that strictly limit equal protection possibilities, such as McCleskey v. Kemp. Nonetheless, we argue …

Now You See Me: Problems And Strategies For Introducing Gender Self-Determination Into The Eighth Amendment For Gender Nonconforming Prisoners, Lizzie Bright

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

As the fight for transgender rights becomes more visible in the United States, the plight of incarcerated transgender individuals seeking medical care behind bars is likewise gaining attention—and some trans prisoners are gaining access to gender-affirming care. However, progress for incarcerated members of the trans community has been slow, piecemeal, and not without problems. As federal court opinions in Eighth Amendment access-to-care cases brought by trans prisoners show, how a court interprets the subjective intent requirements of the Eighth Amendment and how the imprisoned plaintiff pleads his/her/their case can make or break the claim. Further, courts and plaintiffs rely on …

Have Crisis Pregnancy Centers Finally Met Their Match: California's Reproductive Fact Act, Beth Holtzman

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

A Mother Of A Problem: How The Language Of Inequality Affects Maternity Leave Policies And Women In Law Firms, Hannah Arenstam

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

Stripping Agency From Top To Bottom: The Need For A Sentencing Guideline Safety Valve For Bottoms Prosecuted Under The Federal Sex Trafficking Statutes, Sarah Crocker

Northwestern University Law Review

In domestic sex trafficking, the trafficker often promotes a victim to the coveted position of “lead prostitute,” or “bottom.” Once in this position, the victim engages in acts for which she can be prosecuted under federal sex trafficking statutes that carry ten- and fifteen-year mandatory minimum sentences. To recognize bottoms’ victimization and resulting lack of genuine agency, this Note proposes a Sentencing Guideline safety valve provision. Creating a safety valve would provide sentencing judges with necessary discretion to impose sentences below statutory floors in appropriate cases.

The Case For Trauma-Informed, Gender-Specific Prevention/Early Intervention Programming In Reducing Female Juvenile Delinquency In Florida, Joan Flocks, Emily Calvin, Simone Chriss, Marina Prado-Steiman

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

This article describes the statutory recognition of the need for prevention/early intervention juvenile services in Florida that are both trauma-informed and gender-specific. It examines how childhood trauma can impact at-risk children and the gendered aspects of such trauma. The article then describes the PACE Center for Girls, a Florida-based school, currently undergoing a comprehensive evaluation, which attempts to incorporate elements that fulfill statutory recommendations into its programming.

When Religious Belief Becomes Scientific Opinion: Burwell V. Hobby Lobby And The Unraveling Of Federal Rule 702, Meredith Rachel Mandell

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.