Law Commons^™

Not All Violence In Relationships Is “Domestic Violence", Tamara L. Kuennen

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

The article proceeds in four parts. Part I describes in more detail the work of Donileen Loseke, and Part II applies her methodology by taking stock of the constructs as they currently exist. Part III examines social science data available since Loseke published her study, demonstrating that the current construct reflects, in reality, only a subset of relationship violence and a subset of the people who experience it. Part IV examines whether the main service designed to help people experiencing relationship violence today—law—perpetuates, rather than challenges norms. I argue that it does the former, because legal decision makers, like the …

The Right Family, Noa Ben-Asher, Margot J. Pollans

Faculty Publications

The family plays a starring role in American law. Families, the law tells us, are special. They merit many state and federal benefits, including tax deductions, testimonial privileges, untaxed inheritance, and parental presumptions. Over the course of the twentieth century, the Supreme Court expanded individual rights stemming from familial relationships. In this Article, we argue that the concept of family in American law matters just as much when it is ignored as when it is featured. We contrast policies in which the family is the key unit of analysis with others in which it is not. Looking at four seemingly …

Trauma-Centered Social Justice, Noa Ben-Asher

Faculty Publications

This Article identifies a new and growing phenomenon in the American legal system. Many leading agendas for gender, racial, and climate justice are centered on emotional trauma as the primary injury of contemporary social injustices. By focusing on three social justice movements–#BlackLivesMatter; #MeToo, and Climate Justice–the Article offers the first comprehensive diagnosis and assessment of how emotional trauma has become an engine for legal and policy social justice reforms. From a nineteenth century psychoanalytic theory about repressed childhood sexual memories that manifest in female hysteria, through extensive medicalization and classification in the twentieth century, emotional trauma has evolved and expanded …

The Language Of Harm: What The Nassar Victim Impact Statements Reveal About Abuse And Accountability, Jamie Abrams, Amanda Potts

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This Article examines 148 Victim Impact Statements that were delivered to the
court in the Larry Nassar criminal sentencing. Larry Nassar was a doctor for the
United States Gymnastics Association and an employee of Michigan State University
who treated elite athletes, predominantly gymnasts. Nassar pleaded guilty to child
pornography and first-degree criminal sexual misconduct charges in Michigan. His
sentencing received worldwide attention as victims delivered impact statements
describing the harm and betrayal of his conduct. Using corpus-based discourse
analysis, this Article examines the complex strategies that the victims deployed to
describe who Nassar was (a doctor, a monster, a friend), …

The Problem With Predators, June Carbone, William K. Black

Faculty Works

Both corporate theory and sex discrimination law start with presumptions that CEOs seek to advance legitimate ends and design the internal organization of business enterprises to achieve such ends. Yet, a growing literature questions why CEOs and boards of directors nonetheless select for Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, and toxic masculinity, despite the downsides associated with these traits. Three scholarly literatures—economics, criminology, and gender theory—draw on advances in psychology to shed new light on the construction of seemingly dysfunctional corporate cultures. They start by questioning the assumption that CEOs—even CEOs of seemingly mainstream businesses—necessarily seek to advance “legitimate” ends. Instead, they suggest …

Understanding Illicit Insemination And Fertility Fraud From Patient Experience To Legal Reform, Jody L. Madeira

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Recently, several cases have been filed in North America and Europe alleging that fertility physicians inseminated former patients with their own sperm only to have this conduct come to light decades later when their unsuspecting adult children use direct-to-consumer genetic tests and learn that they are not biologically related to their fathers and often that they have multiple half-siblings. For instance, Donald Cline of Indianapolis, Indiana, has over sixty doctor-conceived children, with more continuing to come forward. Although these cases induce disgust, it has thus far proven difficult to hold these physicians legally accountable because their conduct falls within gaps …

Your Cervix Is Showing: Loitering For Prostitution Policing As Gendered Stop & Frisk, Kate Mogulescu

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Get With The Pronoun, Heidi K. Brown

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Making Sure Pregnancy Works: Accommodation Claims After Young V. United Parcel Service, Inc., Joanna L. Grossman

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling in Young v. United Parcel Service, Inc. outlined a new analytical framework for Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) claims that challenge employers’ failure to “accommodate” pregnant workers. That framework was intended to lessen the evidentiary burden on plaintiff-employees in showing that others “similar in their ability or inability to work” were accommodated and to increase the burden on defendant-employers in justifying such differential treatment. In the five years since Young, however, lower courts have been inconsistent in their application of this mandate. In this Article, we survey the precedent that set the stage for Young, …

Sexual Exploitation And The Adultified Black Girl, Mikah K. Thompson

Faculty Works

A troubling legacy of American chattel slavery is the justice system’s continued failure to provide adequate protection to African-American crime victims. This piece focuses on the law’s historic unwillingness to shield Black girls from acts of sexual violence. During slavery, lawmakers refused to criminalize rape committed against Black girls and women based not only on the fact that they were considered property but also on stereotypes about their sexuality. Even though the law now criminalizes the rape of Black girls, African-American rape survivors encounter more skepticism and hostility when they come forward with their stories compared to their White counterparts. …

Criminal Deterrence: A Review Of The Missing Literature, Alex Raskolnikov

Faculty Scholarship

This review of the criminal deterrence literature focuses on the questions that are largely missing from many recent, excellent, comprehensive reviews of that literature, and from the literature itself. By “missing” I mean, first, questions that criminal deterrence scholars have ignored either completely or to a large extent. These questions range from fundamental (the distributional analysis of the criminal justice system), to those hidden in plain sight (economic analysis of misdemeanors), to those that are well-known yet mostly overlooked (the role of positive incentives, offender’s mental state, and celerity of punishment). I also use “missing” to refer to the areas …

Reproducing Inequality Under Title Ix, Deborah L. Brake, Joanna L. Grossman

Articles

This article elaborates on and critiques the law’s separation of pregnancy, with rights grounded in sex equality under Title IX, from reproductive control, which the law treats as a matter of privacy, a species of liberty under the due process clause. While pregnancy is the subject of Title IX protection, reproductive control is parceled off into a separate legal framework grounded in privacy, rather than recognized as a matter that directly implicates educational equality. The law’s division between educational equality and liberty in two non-intersecting sets of legal rights has done no favors to the reproductive rights movement either. By …

Reproducing Dignity: Race, Disability, And Reproductive Controls, Mary Crossley

Articles

Human rights treaties and American constitutional law recognize decisions about reproduction as central to human dignity. Historically and today, Black women and women with disabilities have endured numerous impairments of their freedom to form and maintain families. Other scholars have examined these barriers to motherhood. Unexplored, however, are parallels among the experiences of women in these two groups or the women for whom Blackness and disability are overlapping identities. This Article fills that void. The disturbing legacy of the Eugenics movement is manifest in many settings. Black and disabled women undergo sterilizations at disproportionately high rates. Public benefit programs discourage …

The Legal And Medical Necessity Of Abortion Care Amid The Covid-19 Pandemic, Greer Donley, Beatrice Chen, Sonya Borrero

Articles

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, states have ordered the cessation of non-essential healthcare. Unfortunately, many conservative states have sought to capitalize on those orders to halt abortion care. In this short paper, we argue that abortion should not fall under any state’s non-essential healthcare order. Major medical organizations recognize that abortion is essential healthcare that must be provided even in a pandemic, and the law recognizes abortion as a time-sensitive constitutional right. Finally, we examine the constitutional arguments as to why enforcing these orders against abortion providers should not stand constitutional scrutiny. We conclude that no public health purpose …

Foreword, Sudha Setty

Faculty Scholarship

In November 2019, the Western New England Law Review held its symposium, On Account of Sex: Women’s Suffrage and the Role of Gender in Politics Today. The symposium articles ask us to look at history to see what factors enabled path-breaking activists to secure the right to vote in a time of immense national turmoil. They also ask us to weigh how history should assess the strategic decisions that ultimately gained political rights for some women, but deliberately excluded Black women and other activists.

These historical accounts help us consider how the right to vote is faring, particularly after …

Children's Equality: The Centrality Of Race, Gender, And Class, Nancy E. Dowd

UF Law Faculty Publications

Hierarchies among children dramatically impact their development. Beginning before birth, and continuing during their progression to adulthood from birth to age 18, structural and cultural barriers separate and subordinate some children, while they privilege others. The hierarchies replicate patterns of inequality along familiar lines, particularly those of race, gender, and class, and the intersections of those identities. These barriers, and co-occurring support of privilege for other children, emanate from policies, practices, and structures of the state, including education, health, policing and juvenile justice, and limited social welfare. Reimagining Equality: A New Deal for Children of Color takes on the task …

Children's Equality: Strategizing A New Deal For Children, Nancy E. Dowd

UF Law Faculty Publications

It is the ultimate gift to have one’s work trigger feedback, critique and challenge that expands and deepens the project. Professors Cooper, Huntington, McGinley, Silbaugh, and Woodhouse all have been sources of inspiration for me; their Articles and Essays in response to Reimagining Equality contribute both to my thinking and to the core focus of the book, the well-being, development and equality of all children, but also to the broad focus of this special issue on children and poverty. I am particularly grateful for their challenges and critiques, and their shared focus on the strategies I explore in the book, …

The Politics Of Pregnancy Accommodation, Stephanie Bornstein

UF Law Faculty Publications

How can antidiscrimination law treat men and women “equally” when it comes to the issue of pregnancy? The development of U.S. law on pregnancy accommodation in the workplace tells a story of both legal disagreements about the meaning of “equality” and political disagreements about how best to achieve “equality” at work for women. Federal law has prohibited sex discrimination in the workplace for over five decades. Yet, due to long held gender stereotypes separating work and motherhood, the idea that prohibiting sex discrimination requires a duty to accommodate pregnant workers is a relatively recent phenomenon—and still only partially required by …

Furtive Blackness: On Blackness And Being, T. Anansi Wilson

Faculty Scholarship

Furtive Blackness: On Blackness and Being (“Furtive Blackness”) and The Strict Scrutiny of Black and BlaQueer Life (“Strict Scrutiny”) take a fresh approach to both criminal law and constitutional law; particularly as they apply to African descended peoples in the United States. This is an intervention as to the description of the terms of Blackness in light of the social order but, also, an exposure of the failures and gaps of law. This is why the categories as we have them are inefficient to account for Black life. The way legal scholars have encountered and understood the language of law …

The Strict Scrutiny Of Black And Blaqueer Life, T. Anansi Wilson

Faculty Scholarship

Furtive Blackness: On Blackness and Being (“Furtive Blackness”) and The Strict Scrutiny of Black and BlaQueer Life (“Strict Scrutiny”) take a fresh approach to both criminal law and constitutional law; particularly as they apply to African descended peoples in the United States. This is an intervention as to the description of the terms of Blackness in light of the social order but, also, an exposure of the failures and gaps of law. This is why the categories as we have them are inefficient to account for Black life. The way legal scholars have encountered and understood the language of law …