Law Commons^™

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 …

Suffrage And The Terms Of Labor, Robert J. Steinfeld

Contributions to Books

Published as Chapter 9 in Human Capital and Institutions: A Long Run View, David Eltis, Frank D. Lewis & Kenneth L. Sokoloff, eds.

Great books often harbor deep tensions, which are one source of their enduring power. Time on the Cross by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman is a good example (Fogel and Engerman 1974). On the one hand, Time on the Cross argued that the economic science of Cliometrics was indispensable for a proper understanding of the past. Human beings have always been primarily motivated by the desire for gain, and to understand their behavior it is essential to …

Razing The Citizen: Economic Inequality, Gender, And Marriage Tax Reform, Martha T. Mccluskey

Contributions to Books

Published as Chapter 12 in Gender Equality: Dimensions of Women's Equal Citizenship, Linda C. McClain & Joanna L. Grossman, eds.

This chapter links the failure of U.S. social citizenship ideals to a broader weakness in U.S. ideas citizenship. To better advance policies of economic equality, U.S. law and politics needs a stronger vision not just of economic equality, but of gender equality and of democracy in general. Feminist scholars have analyzed how ideas about gender help shape the common assumption that the costs of raising and sustaining capable, productive citizens are largely private family responsibilities. But ideas about gender also …

Changing, Not Balancing, The Market: Economic Politics And "Social" Programs, Martha T. Mccluskey

Contributions to Books

Published in Progressive Lawyering, Globalization, and Markets: Rethinking Ideology and Strategy, Claire Dalton, ed.

How Queer Theory Makes Neoliberalism Sexy, Martha T. Mccluskey

Contributions to Books

Published in Feminist and Queer Legal Theory: Intimate Encounters, Uncomfortable Conversations, Martha Albertson Fineman, Jack E. Jackson & Adam P. Romero, eds.

Some strands of queer theory have echoed conservative law-and-economics (neoliberalism) in criticizing feminism's turn to the state and to moral principle to solve problems of dependency and dominance. But on closer analysis, queer anti-statism and anti-moralism itself relies on and reinforces the identity conventions and regulatory constraints it claims to unsettle. The meaningful question for queer theory, for feminism, and for legal economics, is what kind of state and morality to pursue, not whether individual choice and private …