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Felice J Batlan

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Building A Regime Of Restrictive Immigration Laws, 1840-1945, Felice Batlan Aug 2018

Building A Regime Of Restrictive Immigration Laws, 1840-1945, Felice Batlan

Felice J Batlan

H-Pad is happy to announce the release of its sixth broadside. In “Building a Regime of Restrictive Immigration Laws, 1840-1945,” Felice Batlan traces a century of U.S. government laws, policies, and attitudes regarding immigration. The broadside explores how ideas about race, class, religion, and the Other repeatedly led to laws restricting the immigration of those who members of Congress, the President, and the U.S. public considered inferior and/or a threat.

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Domestic Disorders: Suffrage And New York's Constitutional Convention Of 1867, Felice Batlan May 2018

Domestic Disorders: Suffrage And New York's Constitutional Convention Of 1867, Felice Batlan

Felice J Batlan

In this essay, Felice Batlan discusses New York State’s Constitutional Convention of 1867. She argues that it is (at least in part) the outcome of this convention and the antagonisms that it created that further propelled Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan Anthony to align with interests opposing African-American suffrage. It also shows the absolute mess of pursuing suffrage on a state by state basis and how legislators themselves equated the voting of African American men with women’s suffrage. The essay is part of a larger project in conversation with scholarship about Reconstruction in the North and a second body of …

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Beyond Greed Is Good: Pop Culture In The Business Law Classroom, Felice Batlan, Joshua Bass Dec 2017

Beyond Greed Is Good: Pop Culture In The Business Law Classroom, Felice Batlan, Joshua Bass

Felice J Batlan

No abstract provided.

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The "Rabbi's Daughter" And The "Jewish Jane Addams": Jewish Women, Legal Aid, And The Fluidity Of Identity, 1890-1930, Felice Batlan Dec 2015

The "Rabbi's Daughter" And The "Jewish Jane Addams": Jewish Women, Legal Aid, And The Fluidity Of Identity, 1890-1930, Felice Batlan

Felice J Batlan

This symposium article discusses an unexamined area of legal aid and legal history—the role that late nineteenth and early twentieth century Jewish women played in the delivery of legal aid as social workers, lawyers, and, importantly, as cultural and legal brokers. It presents two such women who represented different types and models of legal aid—Minnie Low of the Chicago Bureau of Personal Service, a Jewish social welfare organization, and Rosalie Loew of the Legal Aid Society of New York. I interrogate how these women negotiated their identities as Jewish professional women, what role being Jewish and female played in shaping …

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Women And Justice For The Poor: A History Of Legal Aid, 1863–1945, Felice Batlan Dec 2014

Women And Justice For The Poor: A History Of Legal Aid, 1863–1945, Felice Batlan

Felice J Batlan

No abstract provided.

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Legal History And The Politics Of Inclusion, Felice Batlan Dec 2013

Legal History And The Politics Of Inclusion, Felice Batlan

Felice J Batlan

This review considers four very different books that explore how gender and race have structured law and the legal profession. Each interrogates the legitimacy of law by demonstrating how it has produced multiple injustices, thereby challenging the myth that law is about equity or fairness, and that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights produced a set of inalienable rights and liberties that applied to all. 

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Women's Legal History Symposium Introduction: Making History, Felice J. Batlan Dec 2011

Women's Legal History Symposium Introduction: Making History, Felice J. Batlan

Felice J Batlan

This essay introduces the Chicago-Kent Symposium on Women's Legal History: A Global Perspective. It seeks to situate the field of women's legal history and to explore what it means to begin writing a transnational women's history which transcends and at times disrupts the nation state. In doing so, it sets forth some of the fundamental premises of women's legal history and points to new ways of writing such histories.

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The Gendered Lives Of Legal Aid: Lay Lawyers, Social Workers, And The Bar, 1863-1960, Felice J. Batlan Dec 2010

The Gendered Lives Of Legal Aid: Lay Lawyers, Social Workers, And The Bar, 1863-1960, Felice J. Batlan

Felice J Batlan

The Gendered Life of Legal Aid, 1863-1960 (manuscript in process) will be the first monograph on the history of civil legal aid in the United States. By closely examining the history of legal aid in New York, Chicago, and Boston, it presents a number of arguments with wide-ranging implications and it is animated by a host of conflicts. These include the relationship between legal aid and citizenship, the changing status of domestic relations law, the interactions between lawyers and social workers and their different understandings of the role and nature of law, what services legal aid should provide, and even …

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Florence Kelley And The Battle Against Laissez-Faire Constitutionalism, Felice J. Batlan Dec 2009

Florence Kelley And The Battle Against Laissez-Faire Constitutionalism, Felice J. Batlan

Felice J Batlan

The usual story of the demise of laissez-faire constitutionalism in the 1930’s features heroes such as Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter and the great male legal progressives of the day who rose up from academia, the bench, and the bar, to put an end to what historians label "legal orthodoxy." In this essay, I seek to demonstrate that Florence Kelley was a crucially important legal progressive who was at the front lines of drafting and defending new legislation that courts were striking down as violating the Fourteenth Amendment and State constitutions. Looking at who was drafting and lobbying for path breaking …

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The Birth Of Legal Aid: Gender Ideologies, Women, And The Bar In New York City, 1863-1910, Felice J. Batlan Dec 2009

The Birth Of Legal Aid: Gender Ideologies, Women, And The Bar In New York City, 1863-1910, Felice J. Batlan

Felice J Batlan

This article provides a case study and an in-depth analysis of the WWPU. It then discusses how by the turn of the century, when the Society became the dominant provider of legal aid in New York City, women’s roles as legal providers and recipients of legal aid was even further expanded. By doing so, I demonstrate that gender was foundational to the development of legal aid and that women played crucial roles as lawyers, benefactors, and clients. Although this article focuses on New York, legal aid organizations in cities such as Chicago and Philadelphia also first arose to provide free …

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Not Our Mother's Law School?: A Third-Wave Feminist Study Of Women's Experiences In Law School (With Kelly Hradsky, Kristen Jeschke, Lavonne Meyer & Jill Roberts), Felice J. Batlan Dec 2008

Not Our Mother's Law School?: A Third-Wave Feminist Study Of Women's Experiences In Law School (With Kelly Hradsky, Kristen Jeschke, Lavonne Meyer & Jill Roberts), Felice J. Batlan

Felice J Batlan

This Article proceeds as follows: Part II discusses how we attempted to define and use a third-wave feminist methodology in creating our gender survey. Deeply cognizant of the importance of autobiography to third-wave feminism, Part III includes our own stories about our experiences in law school. Part IV presents the results of our study and Part V sets forth a series of recommendations for improving men and women‟s experiences in law school. The Conclusion sums up what we have learned from our study and its broader implications.

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The Ladies' Health Protective Association: Lay Lawyers And Urban Cause Lawyering, Felice J. Batlan Dec 2007

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

Felice J Batlan

The legal history of women and gender is a crucial and radical project that seeks to rewrite the dominant legal narratives that we tell about the development of law and the role that law has played. It is in part about how law shapes culture and society and how society and culture shape law. Crucial to any understanding of law, culture, and society is how gender functions. Yet gender is a slippery term that is at once historically contingent, malleable, shifting, and unstable. This indeterminacy makes gender such a rich mode of analysis.' Creating a women's or gendered legal history …

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Law In The Time Of Cholera: Disease, State Power, And Quarantine Past And Future, Felice J. Batlan Jan 2007

Law In The Time Of Cholera: Disease, State Power, And Quarantine Past And Future, Felice J. Batlan

Felice J Batlan

When the World Trade Center Twin Towers fell in 2001, the United States entered a period of what seems like perpetual crisis-a country increasingly threatened from within and outside its borders. In the aftermath of 9/11, Arab Americans, as well as other foreign nationals, worried about their immigration status and the potential violence they might face and feared that they would be painted as enemies of the United States. In law enforcement initiatives following the attacks, Arab American men were jailed, often for significant periods of time, on charges that were at best specious. Likewise, enemy combatants in Guantinamo Bay …

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Law And The Fabric Of The Everyday: Settlement Houses, Sociological Jurisprudence, And The Gendering Of Urban Legal Culture, Felice J. Batlan Jan 2006

Law And The Fabric Of The Everyday: Settlement Houses, Sociological Jurisprudence, And The Gendering Of Urban Legal Culture, Felice J. Batlan

Felice J Batlan

This Article argues that at the turn of the twentieth century, settlement houses were particularly important and vibrant legal sites, in which women settlement workers played groundbreaking and multiple legal roles.' Settlement houses created a geographical and intellectual space where diverse parties participated in analyzing, examining, discussing, popularizing, producing, and reforming law. More broadly, settlement houses were part of a rich and prolific urban legal environment that produced and prompted legal innovation and experimentation. Surprisingly, however, legal scholars have almost entirely neglected the groundbreaking legal work that settlement houses performed. Such neglect results in an impoverished understanding of fin-de-siecle legal …

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Engendering Legal History, Felice J. Batlan Jan 2005

Engendering Legal History, Felice J. Batlan

Felice J Batlan

No abstract provided.

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A Journal Of One's Own? Beginning The Project Of Historicizing The Development Of Women's Law Journals, Felice J. Batlan Jan 2003

A Journal Of One's Own? Beginning The Project Of Historicizing The Development Of Women's Law Journals, Felice J. Batlan

Felice J Batlan

Since the 1970s, feminism has helped transform the university and the production of knowledge. Not only have increasing numbers of female students, professors, and administrators entered universities, they have also created women's studies programs and courses, which have been slowly integrated into the various disciplines and university curricula. Further, feminism has spurred scholars to question traditional ways of knowing and teaching, academic disciplines, categorizations of knowledge, scholarly methodologies, and the university's separation from the broader community. One component in this production and distribution of new knowledge has been the establishment of feminist academic journals such as Feminist Studies (1972), Women's …

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A Re-Evaluation Of The New York Court Of Appeals: The Home, The Market And Labor, 1885-1905, Felice J. Batlan Jan 2002

A Re-Evaluation Of The New York Court Of Appeals: The Home, The Market And Labor, 1885-1905, Felice J. Batlan

Felice J Batlan

Closely examining a range of New York Court of Appeals police‐power cases during the period 1885 to 1905, this article demonstrates that the New York Court had a long history of accepting and continually expanding the police power. In these police‐power cases, one finds the court grappling with an evolving sense of how to balance the concept of and need for a well‐regulated society against the rights of an individual in an increasingly complex and interconnected world, as well as a tenacious refusal to abandon Victorian bourgeois norms regarding the dichotomy between the home and workplace. By contextualizing and historicizing …

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