Digital Commons Network^™

Reconstructing The Race-Sex Analogy, Serena Mayeri

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Barriers To Access To Abortion Through A Legal Lens, Jocelyn Downie, Carla Nassar

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In addressing whether the procedure for obtaining abortions was operating equitably across Canada, the 1977 Badgley Report concluded that for many women, access to abortion was “practically illusory.” Sadly, although abortion on request became legally permissible for Canadian women in 1988, access to a safe and legal abortion remains practically illusory for many women today. A woman seeking an abortion in Canada must overcome numerous barriers. She must find a way to secure for herself some of the limited resources that our health care system provides for abortion. She must also expend her own, often scarce, personal resources: her time, …

Re-Interpreting The Criminal Regulation Of Sex Work In Light Of R C Labaye, Elaine Craig

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In 2005, the Supreme Court of Canada revised the meaning of indecency under the Criminal Code. This was achieved by removing from its definition any reliance on the community standard of tolerance test. In R. c. Labaye the Court reinforced the notion that the focus of laws regulating sexuality should not be based on sexual morality and moral harm to society but rather on political morality and actual harm to individuals. The reasoning in R. c. Labaye should change the way that courts understand the prostitution-related provisions in the Criminal Code. In particular, a proper application of its reasoning suggests …

Health Equity, Hpv And The Cervical Cancer Vaccine, Joanna Erdman

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This article explores the relationship between technological innovation and health inequity. It examines in particular the relationship between the vaccine against human papillomavirus (HPV) infection, the cause of cervical cancer, and inequity in cervical cancer incidence and mortality. In Canada, screening programs have drastically reduced the incidence of cervical cancer, but their benefits have been unequally distributed. Prevention efforts have disproportionately failed women of disadvantaged social groups. Technological innovation alone will not remedy this inequity. The HPV vaccine merely expands the available means for reducing or increasing health inequity depending on its implementation. For this reason, the article looks beyond …

Equality's Future: An Introduction, Victoria Nourse

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

We stand at an extraordinary moment: never before have so many powerful men wished to be women. For the first time in history, a massive number of male and female voters--18 million in fact--cast their ballots to nominate a woman, Senator Hillary Clinton, to be President of the United States. Disappointed at Senator Clinton's failure to win the Democratic Party's nomination, many women threatened to bolt the party. Sensing opportunity, the Republican Presidential candidate, Senator John McCain, promptly named as his vice-presidential running mate the first woman ever nominated by the Republican Party to a Presidential ticket. And, not to …

Fighting Women: The Military, Sex, And Extrajudicial Constitutional Change, Jill Elaine Hasday

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Supreme Court in Rostker v. Goldberg (1981) upheld male-only military registration, and endorsed male-only conscription and combat positions. Few cases have challenged restrictions on women's military service since Rostker, and none have reached the Supreme Court. Federal statutes continue to exclude women from military registration and draft eligibility, and military regulations still ban women from some combat positions. Yet many aspects of women's legal status in the military have changed in striking respects over the past quarter century while academic attention has focused elsewhere. Congress has eliminated statutory combat exclusions, the military has opened many combat positions to women, …

Equality Opportunity: Marriage Litigation And Iowa's Equal Protection Law, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Discrimination claims against longstanding rules invite the public and the courts to rethink the status quo and address overarching legal and social commitments to equality together with questions specific to the case at hand. Lawsuits seeking marriage rights for same-sex couples quintessentially illustrate this multilayered nature of law reform litigation, as the debates they provoke focus not only on the rights of same-sex couples but also on the meaning of marriage and the meaning of equality more generally. While few other than lawyers, judges, and perhaps some reporters actually read the equal protection and due process arguments that the presiding …

Introduction, Arthur S. Leonard

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Servitude, Liberté Et Citoyenneté Dans Le Monde Atlantique Des Xviiie Et Xixe Siècles: Rosalie De Nation Poulard…, Rebecca J. Scott, Jean Hebrard

Articles

On December 4, 1867, the ninth day of the convention to write a new post-Civil War constitution for the state of Louisiana, delegate Edouard Tinchant rose to propose that the convention should provide “for the legal protection in this State of all women” in their civil rights, “without distinction of race or color, or without reference to their previous condition.” Tinchant’s proposal plunged the convention into additional debates ranging from voting rights and equal protection to recognition of conjugal relationships not formalized by marriage.

This article explores the genesis of Tinchant’s conceptions of citizenship and women’s rights through three generations …

The Failure Of Title Vii As A Rights-Claiming System, Deborah Brake, Joanna L. Grossman

Articles

This Article takes a comprehensive look at the failure of Title VII as a system for claiming nondiscrimination rights. The Supreme Court's recent decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, 127 S. Ct. 2162 (2007), requiring an employee to assert a Title VII pay discrimination claim within 180 days of when the discriminatory pay decision was first made, marks the tip of the iceberg in this flawed system. In the past decade, Title VII doctrines at both ends of the rights-claiming process have become increasing hostile to employees. At the front end, Title VII imposes strict requirements on …

The Invisible Pregnant Athlete And The Promise Of Title Ix, Deborah Brake

Articles

The question of how law should respond to women who become pregnant, and whether to specially accommodate pregnancy or analogize it to other conditions, features prominently in virtually every area of sex equality law. In debates over women's equality in the workplace, for example, it has been the defining issue for the development of and debate over various models of equality in feminist legal theory. Until recently, however, the issue has been all but absent in debates and discussion about Title IX and its promise of sex equality in sports. This changed suddenly in 2007, when ESPN televised a program …

What Counts As 'Discrimination' In Ledbetter And The Implications For Sex Equality Law, Deborah L. Brake

Articles

This article, presented at a Symposium, The Roberts Court and Equal Protection: Gender, Race and Class held at the University of South Carolina School of Law in the Spring of 2008, explores the implications of the Supreme Court's decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. for sex equality law more broadly, including equal protection. There is more interrelation between statutory and constitutional equality law as a source of discrimination protections than is generally acknowledged. Although the Ledbetter decision purports to be a narrow procedural ruling regarding the statute of limitations for Title VII pay discrimination claims, at its …

Deconstructing The Duty To The Tax System: Unfettering Zealous Advocacy On Behalf Of Lesbian And Gay Taxpayers, Anthony C. Infanti

Articles

In this article, I consider how the tax lawyer's generally-acknowledged duty to the tax system should be applied in the representation of lesbian and gay clients. Due to the significant initial advantages that taxpayers are thought to have over the government in the tax compliance and enforcement process, this duty to the tax system requires a tax lawyer to avoid both questionable positions and the temptation to play the audit "lottery." The tax lawyer is asked to temper the zealousness of her advocacy in this way in order to preserve the integrity and, ultimately, the proper functioning of the tax …

Tax As Urban Legend, Anthony C. Infanti

Articles

In this essay, I review UC-Berkeley history professor Robin Einhorn's book, American Taxation, American Slavery. In this provocatively-titled book, Einhorn traces the relationship between democracy, taxation, and slavery from colonial times through the antebellum period. By re-telling some of the most familiar set piece stories of American history through the lens of slavery, Einhorn reveals how the stories that we tell ourselves over and over again about taxation and politics in America are little more than the stuff of urban legend.

In the review, I provide a brief summary of Einhorn's discussion of the relationship between slavery and colonial taxation, …

Tax Equity, Anthony C. Infanti

Articles

Simply put, this article stands the traditional concept of tax equity on its head. Challenging the notion that tax equity is an unequivocal good, this article deconstructs the concept of tax equity to reveal the subtle, yet pernicious ways in which it shapes tax policy debates and impinges upon contributions to those debates. The article describes how tax equity, with its narrow focus on income - as the sole relevant metric for judging tax fairness, presupposes a population that is homogeneous along all other lines. Through this insidious homogenization, tax equity performs both a sanitizing and a screening function in …

Subordination And The Fortuity Of Our Circumstances, Sergio J. Campos

Articles

The antisubordination principle exists at the margins of equality law. This Article seeks to revive the antisubordination principle by taking a fresh look at its structure and underlying justification. First, the Article provides an account of the harm of subordination that focuses on one's position in society, rejecting the focus on groups popular in the existing antisubordination literature. Second, it argues for a theory of state obligation that goes beyond both the existing state action doctrine of the Equal Protection Clause and the failure to protect doctrine associated with Charles Black. The Article argues instead that the antisubordination principle mandates …

League Of Women Voters Panelist, Charlotte Hughart

Charlotte Hughart

No abstract provided.

The Thirteenth Amendment And Access To Education For Children Of Undocumented Workers: A New Look At Plyler V. Doe, Maria Ontiveros, Joshua Drexler

Maria L. Ontiveros

This paper examines the extent to which the Thirteenth Amendment can be used to guarantee access to public education for the children of undocumented workers. It offers a reimagined version of Plyer, written using the Thirteenth Amendment, instead of the Fourteenth Amendment. After offering a brief summary of Thirteenth Amendment jurisprudence, it offers a variety of theoretical frameworks for analyzing the denial of education under the U.S. Constitution. It argues that the Thirteenth Amendment can provide a powerful tool for litigation, moral persuasion, organizing and legislation in the area.

Slipping Through The Cracks And Into Schools: The Need For A Uniform Sexual-Predator Tracking System, Cheryl George

Cheryl Page

No abstract provided.

Toward A True Elements Test: Taylor And The Categorical Analysis Of Crimes In Immigration Law, Rebecca Sharpless

Rebecca Sharpless

When determining the legal effect of a conviction under immigration law, adjudicators claim to apply a uniform, federal standard that prohibits fact finding regarding the underlying circumstances that gave rise to the conviction. This categorical analysis of crimes is firmly rooted in all levels of administrative and federal court case law. Yet fundamental confusion exists concerning what it means to apply a categorical approach to evaluating when a criminal conviction is of a type that triggers deportation. This article demonstrates that a source of this confusion is a misunderstanding of the nature of a conviction and the difference between a …

'No Right To Judge': Feminism And The Judiciary In Third Republic France, Sara L. Kimble

Sara L Kimble

No abstract provided.

Non-Education In America: Gateway To Subsistence Living, Cheryl George

Cheryl Page

No abstract provided.

The Ladies' Health Protective Association: Lay Lawyers And Urban Cause Lawyering, Felice J. Batlan

Felice J Batlan

Communal Crimes Bill, Saumya Uma

Dr. Saumya Uma

This is an alternative draft law on communal violence, drafted by a section of civil society, and submitted to the Indian government in January 2008. It incorporates concepts and standards from international law, and formulates new crimes as well as standards of evidence and procedure.

The Importance Of Effective Investigation Of Sexual Violence And Gender-Based Crimes At The International Criminal Court.Pdf, Susana L. Sacouto

Susana L. SáCouto

Mega-Cases, Diversity, And The Elusive Goal Of Workplace Reform, Nancy Levit

Nancy Levit

Employment discrimination class action suits are part of a new wave of structural reform litigation. Like their predecessors - the school desegregation cases in the 1950s, the housing and voting inequalities cases in the 1960s, prison conditions suits in the 1970s, and environmental lawsuits since then - these are systemic challenges to major institutions affecting large segments of the public. This article explores the effectiveness of various employment discrimination remedies in reforming workplace cultures, promoting corporate accountability, and implementing real diversity.

Reviewing the architecture and aftermath of consent decrees in five major employment discrimination cases - the cases against Shoney's, …