Law Commons^™

A Feminist Revisit To The First-Year Curriculum, Anita Bernstein

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Brief Of Intervenor, Women’S Legal Education And Action Fund (Leaf), Goertz V. Gordon, Laura Spitz

Faculty Scholarship

Historically, women have been almost exclusively responsible for the unpaid labour of child care with the assumption of primary child care responsibilities after separation. The courts must analyze each situation to determine whether a joint custody arrangement, in law, is in fact true equal parenting, in roles and responsibilities, or one more akin to sole custody when considering relocation restrictions.

Gender Matters: Implications For Clinical Research And Women's Health Care, Karen H. Rothenberg

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Resistance To Equality, Elizabeth M. Schneider

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Civil Rights Remedy Of The Violence Against Women Act: Legislative History, Policy Implications & Litigation Strategy, Elizabeth M. Schneider

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Violence Against Women Act Project: Teaching A New Generation Of Public Interest Lawyers, Minna J. Kotkin

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Voices/Voces In The Borderlands: A Colloquy On Re/Constructing Identities In Re/Constructed Legal Spaces, Margaret E. Montoya, Melissa Harrison

Faculty Scholarship

While we believe that the work of healing our cultural dyslexia is partly cognitive, in and through this paper we have tried to enact the experiential aspect. We may approach the entrances of the borderlands through reading and thinking, however we believe that the borderlands is a phenomenon of living, a phenomenon of well-intentioned people interacting in deliberate and thoughtful ways with those who are simultaneously like and unlike us/them. The borderlands require that we bring our critical faculties to bear on life's experiences, but, more often than not, we must suspend them in favor of more charitable and affiliative …

Feminism, Law, And Bioethics, Karen H. Rothenberg

Faculty Scholarship

Feminist legal theory provides a healthy skepticism toward legal doctrine and insists that we reexamine even formally gender-neutral rules to uncover problematic assumptions behind them. The article first outlines feminist legal theory from the perspectives of liberal, cultural, and radical feminism. Examples of how each theory influences legal practice, case law, and legislation are highlighted. Each perspective is then applied to a contemporary bioethical issue, egg donation. Following a brief discussion of the common themes shared by feminist jurisprudence, the article incorporates a narrative reflecting on the integration of the common feminist themes in the context of the passage of …

U.N. Women's Event Unleashed Powerful Ideas, Ann Juergens

Faculty Scholarship

Juergens describes her experience at the Non-Governmental Organizations Forum of the United Nations' Fourth World Conference on Women, where a "Platform for Action", the U.N. action plan for women and girls was created.

Straying From The Path Of The Law After One Hundred Years, The, Tracy E. Higgins

Faculty Scholarship

What common ground can be found between modern feminist legal theory and a century-old essay advocating understanding the law from the perspective of the "bad man"? The question admits of no simple answer. Feminists, including myself, might agree with some irony that "[i]f you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man" but would add that this is precisely the problem. Of course, Holmes does not use the concept of the bad man in a feminist sense to suggest that the law empowers the bad man at the expense of women. …

(Dis)Assembling Rights Of Women Workers Along The Global Assembly Line: Human Rights And The Garment Industry Symposium: Political Lawyering: Conversations On Progressive Social Change, Laura Ho, Catherine Powell, Leti Volpp

Faculty Scholarship

Some observers would like to explain away sweatshops as immigrants exploiting other immigrants, as "cultural, or as the importation of a form of exploitation that normally does not happen here but occurs elsewhere, in the "Third World." While the public was shocked by the discovery at El Monte, garment workers and garment worker advocates have for years been describing abuses in the garment industry and have ascribed responsibility for such abuses to manufacturers and retailers who control the industry. Sweatshops, like the one in El Monte, are a home-grown problem with peculiarly American roots. Since the inception of the garment …

Anti-Essentialism, Relativism, And Human Rights , Tracy E. Higgins

Faculty Scholarship

Confronted with the challenge of cultural relativism, feminism faces divergent paths, neither of which seems to lead out of the woods of patriarchy. The first path, leading to simple tolerance of cultural difference, is too broad. To follow it would require feminists to ignore pervasive limits on women's freedom in the name of an autonomy that exists for women in theory only. The other path, leading to objective condemnation of cultural practices, is too narrow. To follow it would require feminists to dismiss the culturally distinct experiences of women as false consciousness. Yet to forge an alternative path is difficult, …

Democracy And Feminism , Tracy E. Higgins

Faculty Scholarship

Although feminist legal theory has had an important impact on most areas of legal doctrine and theory over the last two decades, its contribution to the debate over constitutional interpretation has been comparatively small. In this Article, Professor Higgins explores reasons for the limited dialogue between mainstream constitutional theory and feminist theory concerning questions of democracy, constitutionalism, and judicial review. She argues that mainstream constitutional theory tends to take for granted the capacity of the individual to make choices, leaving the social construction of those choices largely unexamined. In contrast, feminist legal theory's emphasis on the importance of constraints on …

Separating From Children, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

On September 1, 1939, in anticipation of the imminent German bombing of British cities, 150,000 children were assembled at the railway stations of London and sent throughout the day to "'destinations unknown'" in the English countryside. Mothers and children under five were evacuated together but school-age children were shipped out to rural billets in school groups, accompanied only by their teachers and civil defense volunteers. Forty years later, an observer remembered the day vividly:

[T]he mothers [were] trying to hold back their tears as they marched these little boys and girls in their gas masks into the centre …. The …

Restructuring Work And Family Entitlements Around Family Values, Joan C. Williams

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

At The Fusion Of Horizons: Incommensurability And The Public Interest, Joan C. Williams

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Recovering The Full Complexity Of Our Traditions: New Developments In Property Theory, Joan C. Williams

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Turning Labor Into Love: Housework And The Law, Katharine B. Silbaugh

Faculty Scholarship

Women's unpaid domestic labor produces tremendous economic value. In the United States, women spend more of their productive work hours in unpaid labor than in paid labor, and the credible estimates of the economic value of unpaid labor range from the equivalent of 24% to 60% of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product ("GDP"). Given its economic value and its significant role in the working lives of women, it is surprising that the topic of home labor has received no systematic examination by legal scholars. This Article undertakes such an examination. It concludes that a wide range of legal doctrines treat …

Introduction: The Promise Of The Violence Against Women Act Of 1994, Elizabeth M. Schneider

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Why Mandatory Hiv Testing Of Pregnant Women And Newborns Must Fail: A Legal, Historical, And Public Policy Analysis Special Issue: Mandatory Hiv Testing Of Newborns And Their Mothers, Elizabeth B. Cooper

Faculty Scholarship

The debate surrounding mandatory HIV testing of newborns and pregnant women requires an understanding of the historical context of women in the epidemic. Although the epidemic first was recognized in gay men in 1981, anecdotal reports reveal that women already were dying from what seems to have been HIV-related symptomatology. Indeed, in Gena Corea's book, The Invisible Epidemic, we learn that, as early as 1981, not insignificant numbers of drug-using and former drug-using women were falling ill and not recovering from conditions that normally are not fatal, including bacterial pneumonia. Yet, because we did not necessarily expect these populations to …

Domination In The Theory Of Justification And Excuse, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

The major currents driving legal theory have largely bypassed the field of criminal law. Neither the economists nor the advocates of critical legal studies ("crits") have had much to say about the theory of criminal responsibility or the proper mode of trying suspects. The economists have fallen flat in applying their rationalist models to the problems of punishing wrongdoers. The "crits" have had little to add-beyond Mark Kelman's one original and provocative article.

Of all the schools on the march in the law schools today, the feminists have had the most to say about the failings of the criminal law. …

What Does A White Woman Look Like? Racing And Erasing In Law, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

In significant ways, legal texts produce a narrative of national identity. They weave stories about who we are, what we are committed to, and what we expect of one another, individually and collectively. The concept of justiciability can be understood as a set of rules determining what stories courts are allowed to tell about who we are and who we can be. In this sense, Ronald Dworkin's account of judging as writing ongoing chapters in a chain novel provides a compelling conception of law as both describing where we have been and directing where we are going. If the salience …