Law Commons^™

A Bibliography Of Title Ix Of The Education Amendments Of 1972, Christine Iaconeta Dulac

Faculty Publications

It has been thirty-five years since the passage of Title IX of the Education Amendment of 1972. Title IX provides that no person shall be excluded from participation in any educational program or activity that receives federal funding. This legislation is credited with bolstering the participation rates of girls and women in athletics. Although athletics are not explicitly addressed in the statutory language, Title IX requires schools to offer male and female students equal opportunities to play sports, to give male and female athletes their fair share of athletic scholarship money, and to treat male and female athletes equally in …

Reproducing Value: How Tax Law Differentially Values Fertility, Sexuality & Marriage, Tessa R. Davis

Faculty Publications

Section 213 of the Internal Revenue Code permits a deduction for an individual’s fertility expenses, but it does not do so evenhandedly. This paper focuses on the current discriminatory effects of §213 doctrine as it is applied to the deductibility of fertility treatments for single persons and/or homosexual couples, as compared to heterosexual, married couples. Traditional economic analysis of the Code fails to explain such discrimination, thus a new approach is required. Utilizing tools from anthropological theory, this paper recognizes and analyzes our tax code (and specifically §213) as a cultural artifact and therein challenges the presumed objectivity of our …

The Lawmaking Family, Noa Ben-Asher

Faculty Publications

Increasingly there are conflicts over families trying to “opt out” of various legal structures, especially public school education. Examples of opting-out conflicts include a father seeking to exempt his son from health education classes; a mother seeking to exempt her daughter from mandatory education about the perils of female sexuality; and a vegetarian student wishing to opt out of in-class frog dissection. The Article shows that, perhaps paradoxically, the right to direct the upbringing of children was more robust before it was constitutionalized by the Supreme Court in Meyer v. Nebraska (1923) and Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925). In …

Procuring Meaningful Land Rights For The Women Of Rwanda, Aparna Polavarapu

Faculty Publications

Land reform and gender equality are important development issues in post-Genocide Rwanda. Beginning in 1999, the government of Rwanda passed and implemented reforms which granted women rights to own and use land on an equal status with men. However, as is expected with widespread social reform, obstacles continue to inhibit widespread gender equality in practice. In Rwanda, major social obstacles manifest in the form of (1) resistance to allowing daughters to inherit land from their parents, (2) adherence to assumptions of female inferiority, and (3) the persistence of informal marriages, in which wives remain unprotected by the new laws. Interested …

Exporting Subjects: Globalizing Family Law Progress Through International Human Rights, Cyra Akila Choudhury

Faculty Publications

This article examines the global export of domestic U.S. legal projects and strategies in the realm of family law and gender justice to South Asia. While such projects have undoubtedly achieved substantial gains for women in the U.S., there have also been costs. At a remove of two decades, scholars have now begun to theorize those costs and argue that feminism needs to reconsider its commitments to particular projects that have been held central to women’s emancipation. Yet much of these critiques have not reached the transnational women’s movements that are led by U.S. feminist activists and scholars. Relying on …

Teaching Gender As A Core Value In Business Organizations Class, Cheryl L. Wade

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

I teach a business organizations course that is typically a large class with up to ninety students. At some point in the first week of each semester, I talk about public companies and the men who lead them. I point out to my students that while it is appropriate in most contexts to use gender-neutral language, it would be inaccurate to do so when talking about big business. Only fifteen percent of the board seats at Fortune 500 companies are held by women, and only sixteen percent of Fortune 500 corporate officers are women. I let my students know …

Empowerment Or Estrangement: Liberal Feminism's Visions Of The “Progress” Of Muslim Women, Cyra Akila Choudhury

Faculty Publications

This paper presents some thoughts on the progress of Muslim women towards gender justice. It argues that Liberal Legal feminism shares a common understanding of history and progress with those Liberal political theories that justified the British Empire. Because of this genealogy, Liberal feminism seeks to reform cultures and societies that do not comport with a particular Liberal teleology that forecloses the expression of alternative ideas of history, progress, and human flourishing. It further argues that Muslim women's organizations that partner with Northern organizations sometimes seek to fulfill Liberal expectations of victimhood at the hands of their culture. The consequence …

Pregnancy Discrimination And Social Change: Evolving Consciousness About A Worker's Right To Job-Protected, Paid Leave, Patricia Shiu, Stephanie Wildman

Faculty Publications

This Article examines the change over the past few decades in U.S. law and societal attitudes concerning a worker's right to job-protected, paid leave. Though common around the world, job-protected, paid leave eludes the U.S. workforce. The authors begin by considering the concept of work, its relation to identity, and the construction of safety nets for workers when they need income replacement. The Article considers the movement to establish job-protected, paid leave that encompasses and values a worker's work, family, and personal life.

The modern movement originated with pregnant workers' need for time away from work during pregnancy. Women who …

From Queen Bees And Wannabes To Worker Bees: Why Gender Considerations Should Inform The Emerging Law Of Workplace Bullying, Kerri Lynn Stone

Faculty Publications

This Article submits that the documented phenomenon of workplace bullying operates to stymie the retention and advancement of women in the workplace Research documented in books like Queen Bees and Wannabes shows that as early as the schoolyard, males and females tend to socialize differently, engage in and resolve conflict with peers differently, and absorb bullying behavior differently. Girls often believe or are taught to believe that direct conflict or confrontation is unpalatable and tend to employ more passive aggressive means of engagement with foes. They often internalize and repress feelings that boys are more likely to express. Viewing the …

Obstacles On The Road To Gender Justice: The International Criminal Tribunal For Rwanda As Object Lesson, Beth Van Schaack

Faculty Publications

Although the substantive law concerned with gender violence is now well established, and the principle of legality can no longer serve as a barrier to prosecutions for gender violence, significant obstacles remain to ensuring a robust system of gender justice in international criminal law in the face of continued violations. These obstacles are less visible than defects in positive law because they emerge in the practice of international criminal law at crucial yet shrouded stages of the penal process: investigation, charging, pre-trial plea negotiations, trial preparation, theprovision of protective measures, and appeals. Most importantly, strong positive law is irrelevant where …

Cedaw, Compliance, And Custom: Human Rights Enforcement In Sub-Saharan Africa, Angela M. Banks

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

How Planned Parenthood V. Casey (Pretty Much) Settled The Abortion Wars, Neal Devins

Faculty Publications

More than twenty-one years after Robert Bork's failed Supreme Court nomination and seventeen years after Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, the rhetoric of abortion politics remains unchanged. Pro-choice interests, for example, argue that states are poised to outlaw abortion and that Roe v. Wade is vulnerable to overruling. In this Essay, I will debunk those claims. First, I will explain how Casey's approval of limited abortion rights reflected an emerging national consensus in 1992. Second, I will explain why the Supreme Court is unlikely to risk political backlash by formally modifying Casey- either by restoring the trimester test …

Irrational Exuberance For Babies: The Taste For Heterosexuality And Its Conspicuous Reproduction, Jose M. Gabilondo

Faculty Publications

This article targets a flying buttress of normative heterosexuality: its physical reproduction via procreation and its symbolic propagation through parents' pre-natal preferences for heterosexuality in future children. While the parental "taste for heterosexuality" is often asserted for the sake of future children themselves, this justification overlooks the role of parental self-interest, including anticipated social gains to parents from heterosexuality in children. Hence the taste sets the stage both for sexual orientation-based abuse of future children and the devaluation of sexual minority adults. Courts too have a taste for heterosexuality, shown here in two state court cases denying gays and lesbians …

(Mis)Appropriated Liberty: Identity, Gender Justice And Muslim Personal Law Reform In India, Cyra Akila Choudhury

Faculty Publications

This article argues that in order to emancipate Indian-Muslim women from an outdated family legal code, their position at the intersection of gender and a minority religion must be taken seriously. Proposals for reform that have been suggested by Western liberal, secular feminists that ignore the importance of women's religious affiliation fail to do this. Moreover, by making assumptions about the strength of secularism in India, the willingness of the state to enact legal reforms driven by gender concerns, and by failing to acknowledge the limits of formal rights alone in changing norms, these scholars do not account for the …

Consenting Adults? Why Women Who Submit To Supervisory Sexual Harassment Are Faring Better In Court Than Those Who Say No…And Why They Shouldn’T, Kerri Lynn Stone

Faculty Publications

Today, as a sexual harassment plaintiff who failed to report harassment before bringing suit, you likely will fare better under the law if you submitted to your harasser and engaged in relations with him, than you would if you had passively resisted until you were driven out of your employment. This Article examines the law’s illogical preference for plaintiffs who acquiesced to the propositions of their supervisors over those who resisted harassment but nonetheless failed to report it. It explores the roots of such a preference in society, as well as its consequences. Ultimately, this Article asks critical questions that …

License To Harass: Holding Defendants Accountable For Retaining Recidivist Harassers, Kerri Lynn Stone

Faculty Publications

Harassment victims who suffer a "tangible employment action," which the Supreme Court defines as a "significant change in employment status such as hiring, firing, failure to promote, reassignment, or a decision causing a significant change in benefits," enjoy unfettered recourse when they sue their employers. However, victims who do not endure what a court will deem a "tangible employment action" will have their prima facie case of harassment then rendered vulnerable to the interposition of an affirmative defense by a defendant-employer, who will escape liability if it can show "(a) that the employer exercised reasonable care to prevent and correct …

Lifting The Veil: Women And Islamic Law, Christie S. Warren

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A National Putative Father Registry, Wells Conference On Adoption Law, Mary M. Beck

Faculty Publications

This Article will discuss the mechanics of putative father registries, review jurisdictional issues, analyze the policies behind their development, and review relevant case law over the last 5 years.

The Focus Factor, B. Glenn George

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Necessity Of Sex Change: A Struggle For Intersex And Transsex Liberties, Noa Ben-Asher

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Transsex individuals often desire the future body that they should have, while intersex individuals often mourn the body they had before an unwanted normalizing surgery interfered with it. Thus, Judith Butler, a dominant feminist-queer theorist who has had a significant role in the shaping of queer theory and politics since the early 1990s, has lately commented that "intersex and transsex sometimes seem to be movements at odds with each other, the first opposing unwanted surgery, the second sometimes calling for elective surgery ...." This proposition serves as a point of departure for this Article, which explores current legal …

Gloria’S Story And Guatemala’S Faith: Adulterous Concubinage, Law, And Religion, M C. Mirow

Faculty Publications

John Wertheimer, the author of “Gloria’s Story,” has produced a complex and absorbing text that skillfully guides the reader through the microhistory of Gloria’s concubinage to an enhanced appreciation of the greater legal, social, and institutional forces at play in mid-twentieth century Guatemala. Using Gloria’s story to shift into more general observations about law and society in Guatemala, Wertheimer states that laws can “affect behavior by establishing incentives and disincentives for different types of action and by reinforcing or undermining different values.”1 Wertheimer reads the legal records involving Gloria and her family to write her story from the dominant critical …

Child Marriage And Guardianship In Tanzania: Robbing Girls Of Their Childhood And Infantilizing Women, Aparna Polavarapu

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

At The Top Of The Pyramid: Lessons From The Alpha Women And The Elite Eight, Jayne W. Barnard

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Batson's Blind-Spot: Unconsciousstereotyping And The Peremptory Challenge, Antony Page

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Paradoxes Of Health And Equality: When A Boy Becomes A Girl, Noa Ben-Asher

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

In the fall of 2000, six-year-old male Zachary from a small town in Ohio, claimed that s/he was a girl and requested, from now on, to be called Aurora. When the child's parents honored this unusual wish and made efforts to make official the child's feminine identity, the case turned into a custody battle between the parents and the state of Ohio. Although the child was occasionally treated as a girl at home from the age of two, the attempt to register the child in public school as a girl motivated the state dissolution of this family. At the …

Spotlight: Response To Violence Against Women At The University Of Missouri At Columbia, Mary M. Beck

Faculty Publications

The University of Missouri (“MU”) sits in the picturesque college town of Columbia on the largest and oldest campus of the Missouri University system. MU is a land grant institution created with funds and land appropriated by the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890. The University “honors [that public trust] and accepts the associated accountability” by acquiring, creating, transmitting, and preserving knowledge. “MU's primary mission in research and doctoral education . . . provides the basis for service to the people of [Missouri] via outreach programs.” Domestic violence impacts MU's land grant influenced service mission. Its organizational departments, educational units, …

The "Pitiless Double Abuse" Of Battered Mothers, Justine A. Dunlap

Faculty Publications

Mothers are expected to do and be all for their children, and those who fall short are criticized. Elizabeth Schneider makes this unassailable assertion in her book Battered Women and Feminist Lawmaking. In the chapter entitled Motherhood and Battering, Schneider argues that society reserves its greatest opprobrium for mothers who harm their children or who are perceived to stand idly by while other harm their children. As Schneider demonstrates, women who fail to protect their children, even if they attempt to do so, can be legally liable and soundly condemned. This ill-conceived accountability is most likely to occur …

Towards A National Putative Father Registry Database, Mary M. Beck

Faculty Publications

This Article analyzes putative father registries and proposes federal legislation to create a national database that will enhance and connect the state and local registries. Issues and events leading to the development of registries are reviewed in Part I. Putative father registry mechanics and applicable case law are analyzed in Parts II and III.

Reinforcing The Myth Of The Crazed Rapist: A Feminist Critique Of Recent Rape Legislation, Christina E. Wells, Erin Elliott

Faculty Publications

Part I of this article reviews these new legislative provisions, discussing their requirements as well as the general impetus behind their enactment. Part II discusses both the history of rape prosecution and feminist efforts in the 1970s and 1980s to eliminate barriers to successful rape prosecutions. This part also elaborates upon the myth of the crazed rapist and its relationship to feminist reform efforts. Part III explains how the current legislation is rooted in and reinforces that myth by encouraging unsupportable distinctions among rape defendants. Finally, Part IV discusses the feminist response to such laws and argues for a more …

Exploring Feminism Globally To Achieve Global Feminism, Anna M. Han

Faculty Publications

Edited Speech delivered on October 6, 2000 at the University of San Diego Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues Conference on Intersectionality and Critical Race Feminism.

In writing this article, I kept thinking of the various stories that I heard during the workshops in Beijing and again I was struck by the commonality of the underlying issues facing women from around the world. While there may be dramatic political, cultural, linguistic and economic differences, I posit that there were more similarities than there were differences.