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An Exegesis Of The Meaning Of Dobbs: Despotism, Servitude, & Forced Birth, Athena D. Mutua

Journal Articles

The Dobbs decision has been leaked. Gathered outside of New York City's St. Patrick's Old Cathedral, pro-choice protesters chant: "Not the church, not the state, the people must decide their fate."

A white man wearing a New York Fire Department sweatshirt and standing on the front steps responds: "l am the people, l am the people, l am the people, the people have decided, the court has decided, you lose . . . . You have no choice. Not your body, not your choice, your body is mine and you're having my baby."

Despicable but not unexpected,³ this man's comments …

Breast Ironing: Analyzing The Rights Of The Girl-Child In The Context Of Cameroon’S Obligation Under International Human Rights Law, Olusola Babatunde Adegbite, Olaitan Oluwaseyi Olusegun

Buffalo Human Rights Law Review

Among the various forms of sexual violence perpetrated against the girl-child, breast ironing remains largely obscured due to its underreporting. Yet thousands of girls, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa where it is most prevalent, continue to suffer in silence. These girls are not just exposed to the immediate violence of this act, but they also carry the scar of this human rights violation for life. With the scholarly focus on the practice rather scant, the necessary legal response has also been checkmated. The goal of this article is to bring international focus to this problem by examining the practice in the …

Kate Kelly’S Ordinary Equality: The Fearless Women And Queer People Who Shaped The U.S. Constitution And The Equal Rights Amendment, B. Austin Waters

Law Librarian Book Reviews

No abstract provided.

Talking About Talking About Surrogacy, Michael Boucai

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Patriarchal Violence, Rona Kaufman

Buffalo Law Review

For over a century, feminist theorists and activists have sought equality for women. They have aimed their efforts at the many distinct and related causes of women’s inequality, among them gendered violence, sexual violence, domestic violence, and violence against women. Recognizing the need to understand problems in order to solve them, feminist theorists have devoted decades to conceptualizing various manifestations of such violence, ranging from private acts, such as sexual assault and intimate partner abuse, to public acts, such as the incarceration of mothers and the criminalization of pregnancy. In this article, I argue in favor of conceptualizing the many …

Abortion Law In A Time Of Judicial Adventurism, Michael Boucai

Other Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Overqualified And Underrepresented: Gender Inequality In Pharmaceutical Patent Law, S. Sean Tu, Paul R. Gugliuzza, Amy Semet

Journal Articles

Pharmaceutical patents represent some of the most valuable intellectual property assets in the world: they can be worth billions of dollars if courts uphold their validity and find them infringed. But, if invalidated, generic drug manufacturers can get to market earlier, generating billions of dollars of revenue for themselves and creating enormous savings for consumers. Accordingly, drug patents are the product of careful, high-cost prosecution and are associated with high-stakes, bet-the-company litigation. But women lawyers are noticeably absent from pharmaceutical patent practice. This article reports an original empirical study finding that women comprise only one-third of the top pharmaceutical patent …

You Need To Calm Down: Examining The Origin And Eliminating The Future Of The “Gay Panic” Defense, Laura R. Conboy

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Bostock’S Paradox: Textualism, Legal Justice, And The Constitution, Marc Spindelman

Buffalo Law Review

The Supreme Court’s opinion in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia—recognizing that anti-gay and anti-trans discrimination are forms of sex discrimination under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act—has already gained a steady reputation as a textualist statutory interpretation decision. The reality of the ruling is far more complicated than that. Bostock is a textualist decision, but, as the argument here shows, Bostock also offers a construction of Title VII’s sex discrimination rule that sounds in a rule-of-law norm of legal justice about LGBT equality that itself traces roots to the Supreme Court’s constitutional LGBT rights jurisprudence. Bostock’s rule-of-law norm …

Mayor Pete, Obergefell Gays, And White Male Privilege, Russell K. Robinson

Buffalo Law Review

This Article argues that Mayor Pete Buttigieg seized the national imagination and a substantial number of Democratic delegates through the combination of his gay identity and his alignment with masculinity norms generally assigned to heterosexual men, and by taking aim at more senior and qualified women candidates, namely Senators Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar. Buttigieg’s unprecedented success suggests that some White gay men now enjoy a unique pathway to reclaiming their status as men and asserting White male privilege. In short, contrary to pervasive media claims, Buttigieg’s success should be read as a breakthrough for certain White gay men, but …

Topology Of The Closet, Michael Boucai

Journal Articles

Despite the closet’s centrality to queer culture and theory, the metaphor’s various meanings have yet to be disaggregated and defined. Following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s identification of the closet with a “crisis of homo/heterosexual definition, indicatively male, dating from the end of the nineteenth century,” the present article uses an array of late-Victorian sources—especially The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds and Teleny, a pornographic novel sometimes attributed to Oscar Wilde—to describe and distinguish: (1) so-called latent homosexuality (“the unconscious closet”); (2) deliberate strategies of suppression, abstention, and reformation (“the conscious closet”); (3) clandestine pursuits of gay sex and sociability (“the double …

Commentary On Emerson V. Magendantz, Lucinda M. Finley

Contributions to Books

Published as Chapter 13 of Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Tort Opinions, Martha Chamallas & Lucinda M. Finley, eds. (Cambridge University Press 2020). Emerson v. Magendantz assesses how to measure harm when people get pregnant after a negligently performed sterilization, or have disabled children after genetic counseling or prenatal testing misdiagnosed the risk. The court permitted parents to recover child-rearing costs only for disabled children, reasoning that the emotional benefits of a healthy child invariably outweigh its economic burdens. Critiquing this reasoning as a double insult to the disabled and to the importance of reproductive autonomy, the feminist rewritten opinion uses the …

Sexual Lynching, Luis E. Chiesa

Journal Articles

Different groups of people experience rape in different ways. Empirical evidence confirms that women fear rape considerably more than men, that incarcerated males fear being sexually assaulted more than non-incarcerated males, and that transgender individuals are more fearful of being raped than cisgender individuals. In the case of women, fear of rape often conditions many decisions females make, including what to wear, where to go, and how much to drink. In the prison context, fear of rape leads many men to adopt overly aggressive behaviors as a way of safeguarding against being raped. Genderqueer people often follow a series of …

The “Pink Ghettos” Of Public Interest Law: An Open Secret, Sandra Simkins

Buffalo Law Review

There is a downside to public interest law careers and law school pro bono work for women. Law schools cue women to enter and remain at lower rungs of the profession by normalizing women in “caregiving” roles and locking predominantly female clinicians who do public interest work into a lower level status. The ABA contributes to this structural devaluation by ignoring female public interest lawyers. When combined with the culture of public interest organizations, these factors contribute to women’s stagnant progress in the legal profession.

This Article is the first to address this issue comprehensively. It describes the challenges women …

Sexual Orientation Discrimination As A Form Of Sex-Plus Discrimination, Marc Chase Mcallister

Buffalo Law Review

This Article examines whether sexual orientation discrimination claims are a form of sex-plus discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title VII prohibits discrimination in employment on the basis of “sex.” Until very recently, every United States Court of Appeals to have interpreted Title VII’s prohibition of sex discrimination had determined that it does not encompass claims on the basis of sexual orientation. Times, and judicial interpretations, are changing. In April 2017, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit overturned decades of precedent by holding that sexual orientation discrimination claims are indeed encompassed …

Now We Know Better: A New Legal Framework On Sex To Better Promote Autonomy, Equality, Diversity And Care For The Poor, Helen M. Alvaré

Buffalo Law Review

Over especially the last 50 to 60 years, US laws and policies concerning the sexual relationships between men and women have more consciously articulated a need to pursue social justice according to the categories of autonomy, equality, diversity and care for the poor. These categories are admirable on their face and responsive to the times in which they emerged. They are particularly well-suited to the history of discrimination against women and African Americans in the US. They were strongly influenced, inter alia, by the development of contraceptive technology and an array of social welfare initiatives, the rise of feminism and …

Are We Economic Engines Too? Precarity, Productivity, And Gender, Martha T. Mccluskey

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Compensatory Women's Rights Legal Education In Eastern Europe: The Women's Human Rights Training Institute, Isabel Marcus

Journal Articles

To compensate for the absence/minimization of women's rights in the law faculty curriculum in post-socialist states, in 2002 a coalition of women's rights NGOs, funded by OSI, developed a Women's Human Rights Training Institute (WHRTI) in Sofia, Bulgaria. Now embarking on its sixth cycle and having graduated more than 100 lawyers (mostly working in NGOs in post-socialist states), WHRTI has developed a women's rights legal education and training program triad consisting of feminist legal theory, women's rights legal practice, and feminist legal pedagogy. The goal of the program is to educate and train lawyers to understand and use various domestic, …

Common Law Fundamentals Of The Right To Abortion, Anita Bernstein

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

My Coworker, My Enemy: Solidarity, Workplace Control, And The Class Politics Of Title Vii, Ahmed A. White

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Gender Diversity And Disparity In The Legal Profession: An Empirical Analysis Of The Gender Profile In National Law Firms And Law Schools, Edward S. Adams, Samuel P. Engel

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Keepin' It "Real": Israel's Segregation Of Transgender Prisoners And The Transgender/Cisgender Binary, Lihi Yona

Buffalo Journal of Gender, Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

Stemming The Hobby Lobby Tidal Wave: Why Rfra Challenges To Obama's Executive Order Prohibiting Federal Contractors From Discriminating Against Lgbt Employees Will Not Succeed, Kayla A. Higgins

Buffalo Journal of Gender, Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

An Employer's Conscience After Hobby Lobby And The Continuing Conflict Between Women's Rights And Religious Freedom, Sarah M. Stephens

Buffalo Journal of Gender, Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

Gender Identity Behind Bars: An Analysis Of Kosilek V. Spencer, Moira Cooper

Buffalo Journal of Gender, Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

The Fourth Amendment In Schools: An Ambiguous Precedent And The Role Of Gender In Determining Reasonableness, Maria M. Lewis

Buffalo Journal of Gender, Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

Veterans As Victims Of Military Sexual Assault: Unequal Access To Ptsd Disability Benefits And Judicial Remedies, Alexandra Besso

Buffalo Journal of Gender, Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

Thinking Slow About Sexual Assault In The Military, Matthew Burris

Buffalo Journal of Gender, Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

Human Rights Conventions And Reservations: An Examination Of A Critical Deficit In The Cedaw, Michael L. Buenger

Buffalo Human Rights Law Review

Human rights agreements like the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) contain language that seeks to inspire and establish the legal boundaries of state action with regards to protected rights. Such agreements also contain reservation provisions that enable states to join an agreement and simultaneously exempt themselves from the very substantive goals the agreement seeks to achieve. In the past, the issue of reservation compatibility has been treated as political questions under an objection process. Establishing a mechanism for testing reservation compatibility before the International Court of Justice is a better means of ensuring …

Natural Law, Equality, And Same-Sex Marriage, Perry Dane

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.