Law Commons^™

The Intersection Of Wrongful Convictions And Gender In Cases Where Women Were Sentenced To Death Or Life In Prison Without Parole, Connor F. Lang

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This Note examines National Registry of Exonerations data and discusses the prevalence of false confessions and presence of a child victim in cases of women who were convicted of murder, received a serious sentence, and were later exonerated. After looking at the cases of women exonerated after receiving death sentences or life without parole sentences in light of the prevalence of these factors, this Note argues that examination of the cases reveals that the presence of a false confession or a child victim may have contributed to some of the wrongful convictions where these factors may have led to the …

Criminal Record Relief For Human Trafficking Survivors: Analysis Of Current State Statutes And The Need For A Federal Model Statute, Ashleigh Pelto

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This Note defines criminal record relief and analyzes the effectiveness of three state criminal record relief statutes at protecting trafficking survivors. This analysis is based on State Report Cards: Grading Criminal Record Relief Laws for Survivors of Human Trafficking by Polaris, a leading human trafficking nonprofit. It next discusses the absence of federal criminal record relief and how a statute at the federal level could provide relief for survivors with federal convictions while simultaneously providing a model for states to ensure their statutes incorporate best practices for record relief moving forward. This Note then discusses how Polaris’s report stops short …

The Stability Paradox: The Two-Parent Paradigm And The Perpetuation Of Violence Against Women In Termination Of Parental Rights And Custody Cases, Judith Lewis

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Despite changing family compositions, entrenched in family law is the antiquated idea that a two-parent household, or its approximation vis-à-vis a shared custody arrangement, promotes stability and integrity and, thus, is in the best interest of the child. Yet, the concept that the two-parent household (or shared involvement of both parents in the child’s life if the parents separate) promotes stability for the family and is best for the child is a dangerous fallacy. When rape or intimate partner violence (IPV) is present, or the re-occurrence of violence remains a threat, the family unit is far from stable.

This Article …

Me Too? The Invisible Older Victims Of Sexual Violence, Ruthy Lowenstein Lazar

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

A review of legal research on violence against women and elder abuse reveals a disturbing picture. There is hardly any American legal research examining sexual abuse of older women and its conceptualization in legal literature and treatment in the legal system.

This Article attempts to fill the abovementioned gap and to bring the hidden issue of sexual violence against older women to light. Scholars writing on rape, violence against women, and elder abuse tend to analyze age and gendered sexual violence separately from each other, without accounting for their interplay. This Article proposes a conceptual framework of sexual abuse of …

Prosecuting Rape Victims While Rapists Run Free: The Consequences Of Police Failure To Investigate Sex Crimes In Britain And The United States, Lisa Avalos

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Imagine that a close friend is raped, and you encourage her to report it to the police. At first, she thinks that the police are taking her report seriously, but the investigation does not seem to move forward. The next thing she knows, they accuse her of lying and ultimately file charges against her. You and your friend are in shock; this outcome never entered your minds. This nightmare may seem inconceivable, but it has in fact occurred repeatedly in both the United States and Britain—countries that are typically lauded for their high levels of gender equality. In Britain, where …

How Feminist Theory Became (Criminal) Law: Tracing The Path To Mandatory Criminal Intervention In Domestic Violence Cases, Claire Houston

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Our popular understanding of domestic violence has shifted significantly over the past forty years, and with it, our legal response. We have moved from an interpretation of domestic violence as a private relationship problem managed through counseling techniques to an approach that configures domestic violence first and foremost as a public crime. Mandatory criminal intervention policies reflect and reinforce this interpretation. How we arrived at this point, and which understanding of domestic violence facilitated this shift, is the focus of this Article. I argue that the move to intense criminalization has been driven by a distinctly feminist interpretation of domestic …

"Off With His __": Analyzing The Sex Disparity In Chemical Castration Sentences, Zachary Edmonds Oswald

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Societies around the world have performed castration, in its various forms, on their male and female members for thousands of years, for numerous reasons. Even within the United States, prisoners have been sentenced to castration (as a form of punishment or crime prevention) since the early twentieth century. In recent years, legislatures have perpetuated this practice but with a modern twist. Now, states use chemical injections to castrate their inmates. It turns out, however, that systemic problems plague the chemical castration sentencing regime. These problems arise from the nature of the crimes eligible for chemical castration sentences, the manner of …

The Exit Myth: Family Law, Gender Roles, And Changing Attitudes Toward Female Victims Of Domestic Violence, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This Article presents a hypothesis suggesting how and why the criminal justice response to domestic violence changed, over the course of the twentieth century, from sympathy for abused women and a surprising degree of state intervention in intimate relationships to the apathy and discrimination that the battered women' movement exposed. The riddle of declining public sympathy for female victims ofintimate-partner violence can only be solved by looking beyond the criminal law to the social and legal changes that created the Exit Myth. While the situation that gave rise to the battered womens movement in the 1970s is often presumed to …

Beyond Seduction: Lessons Learned About Rape, Politics, And Power From Dominique Strauss-Kahn And Moshe Katsav, Hannah Brenner

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

n the last decade, two influential international political figures, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former head of the International Monetary Fund, and Moshe Katsav, former President of Israel, were accused of engaging in extreme and ongoing patterns of sexual violence. The collection of formal charges against the two men included rape, forcible indecent assault, sexual harassment, and obstruction of justice. The respective narratives surrounding the allegations against Katsav and Strauss-Kahn have their own individual characteristics, and each of the cases unfolded in diverging ways. Yet, the actions of these two men taken together, and the corresponding response of the legal systems in France, …

No Contact Parole Restrictions: Unconstitutional And Counterproductive, Sharon Brett

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Although what Jesse Timmendequas did was abhorrent, the legislation enacted in the wake of his crime went far beyond making sure we know the pedophiles or pedophile-murderers living in our neighborhoods. Megan's name now lends itself to a host of state laws requiring the state to notify neighbors when a sex offender moves into the neighborhood. The term "sex offender" is intentionally broad, covering everyone from voyeurs and exhibitionists to rapists and child molesters. Yet, Megan's Laws treat them the same way, ignoring some crucial questions: Are all sex offenders alike? Are they all monsters? In reality, the majority of …

Victim Participation At The International Criminal Court And The Extraordinary Chambers In The Courts Of Cambodia: A Feminist Project, Susana Sacouto

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

The question this Article poses is whether victim participation--one of the most recent developments in international criminal law--has increased the visibility of the actual lived experience of survivors of sexual and gender-based violence in the context of war, mass violence, or repression. Under the Rome Statute, victims of the world's most serious crimes were given unprecedented rights to participate in proceedings before the Court. Nearly a decade later, a similar scheme was established to allow victims to participate as civil parties in the proceedings before the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC or Extraordinary Chambers), a court created …

The Failure Of Consent: Re-Conceptualizing Rape As Sexual Abuse Of Power, Michal Buchhandler-Raphael

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This Article argues that while rape law reform has accomplished significant changes in the past decades, the reform has since stalled. The contemporary focus on the element of consent might account for this stagnation. This move has both failed to effect instrumental change in the courts as well as in social norms, and is conceptually flawed and normatively misguided. The practical result of these deficiencies is that rape, as defined by our criminal justice system, bears little resemblance to the various forms of sexual abuses that are inflicted on victims. While rape law typically criminalizes only the physically violent sexual …

Passions We Like… And Those We Don't: Anti-Gay Hate Crime Laws And The Discursive Construction Of Sex, Gender, And The Body, Yvonne Zylan

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This Article proceeds as follows. In Part II, the author catalogs the history of anti-gay hate crime laws in the United States, describing the rapid spread of state-level laws extending race- and religion-based hate crime laws to LGB people. The Article also provides an overview of federal legislation addressing anti-gay hate crime. In Part III, it examines the policy environment within which anti-gay hate crime laws have been, and continue to be, considered. Specifically, the jurisprudential frameworks that shape, define, and constrain discourses of equality, rights, and social identity are analyzed. The argument is made that the policy environment of …

Vindicating The Matriarch: A Fair Housing Act Challenge To Federal No-Fault Evictions From Public Housing, Melissa A. Cohen

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Pearlie Rucker, sixty-three years old, had been living in public housing in Oakland, California for thirteen years. Ms. Rucker lived with her mentally disabled adult daughter, Gelinda, as well as two grandchildren and one great-grandchild. Ms. Rucker regularly searched Gelinda's room for signs of drugs, and had warned Gelinda that any drug activity on the premises could result in eviction. Nevertheless, Gelinda was caught with drugs three blocks from the apartment. Despite the fact that Ms. Rucker had no knowledge of Gelinda's drug activity, and in fact had been carefully monitoring what happened in her apartment, the Oakland Housing Authority …

Student Gladiators And Sexual Assault: A New Analysis Of Liability For Injuries Inflicted By College Athletes, Ann Scales

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This Article will focus on an issue that was probably not on the minds of 19th century educators, nor primarily on the minds of the legions of present-day academic critics of intercollegiate sports. Namely, this Article explores the ways in which big-time athletics- particularly football-normalize and encourage harms to women, including educational and sexual harms. The author’s theses depend upon acknowledging certain open secrets about college football: that it is a celebration of male physical supremacy (measured by male standards); that it is something that society lets males do and have as their sport, for reasons both good and bad; …

Pursuing The Perfect Mother: Why America's Criminalization Of Maternal Substance Abuse Is Not The Answer- A Compartive Legal Analysis, Linda C. Fentiman

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

In this Article the author will examine not only the substantive legal differences between the United States, Canada, and France, but will also explore how these legal rules fit within a broader social, political, and religious setting. This Article will pursue four lines of inquiry. First, it will briefly chronicle the history of criminal prosecution of pregnant women in America and show how these prosecutions have become markedly more aggressive over the last twenty years. Second, it will situate these prosecutions in the full context of American law and culture, demonstrating how the fetus has received increasing legal recognition in …

Unusual Suspects: Recognizing And Responding To Female Staff Perpetrators Of Sexual Misconduct In U.S. Prisons, Lauren A. Teichner

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Despite the general public's ignorance of this issue of sexual misconduct perpetrated by female prison staff against male inmates, such stories are remarkably familiar to those who study or work in the world of prisons. The Prison Rape Elimination Act ("PREA") of 2003 mandated that the Bureau of Justice Statistics ("the Bureau") undertake new studies of sexual violence in prisons. Accordingly, the Bureau released a report in July 2006 revealing some groundbreaking data. Of the 344 substantiated allegations of staff-on-inmate sexual violence made in federal, state, and private prisons in 2005, 67% of the overall victims were male inmates and …

Rape And The Querela In Italy: False Protection Of Victim Agency, Rachel A. Van Cleave

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This Essay describes the history of the querela in Italy and explores the controversy surrounding the decision to maintain this institution. In addition, this Essay questions the degree to which the querela can protect victim agency when the attitudes of judges and lawyers in the Italian criminal justice system reflect persistent rape myths.

Roman Rape: An Overview Of Roman Rape Laws From The Republican Period To Justinian's Reign, Nghiem L. Nguyen

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

The modern Western crime of rape is commonly defined as "[u]nlawful sexual activity (esp. intercourse) with a person (usu. a female) without consent and usu. by force or threat of injury," and it is often seen as an assault of the person's body and a violation of self-autonomy. However, this differs significantly from the conception of rape in ancient Rome. In fact, "there is no single word in... Latin with the same semantic field as the modern English word 'rape.'” For the Romans, the act of rape was covered under a variety of legal terms, but each of those words …

Global Sex Trafficking And The Trafficking Victims Protection Act Of 2000: Legislative Responses To The Problem Of Modern Slavery, Rosy Kandathil

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Human trafficking is becoming the fastest growing criminal activity in the world. Generally, trafficking is defined as the transportation of persons across international borders for labor purposes, by means of force, fraud, or coercion. Commerce directly related to human slavery yields approximately $7-$10 billion a year, trailing only behind drugs and weapons trade for international profit. According to recent congressional findings, over 700,000 human beings are trafficked across international borders each year, including approximately 50,000 women and children into the United States. Women and girl children are the primary targets for sexual exploitation into prostitution, pornography, sex tourism, and other …

A Matter Of Principle And Consistency: Understanding The Battered Woman And Cultural Defenses, Sharan K. Suri

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

To adequately explain and argue why feminists, as a matter of legal theory, must take both the BWS and cultural defenses seriously, these defenses need further elaboration. Section I details what these defenses are, how they developed, and how they work in the justice system. Section II enlarges the picture by revealing the similarities between the two defenses which share not only the same theoretical and practical goals, but also the same criticisms and flaws highlighted by scholars. Finally, Section III asserts that cultural evidence and evidence of battering must be admitted to show the absence of mens rea. However, …

Traffic Jam: Recommendations For Civil Penalties To Curb The Recent Trafficking Of Women From Post-Cold War Russia, Christopher M. Pilkerton

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This Article will examine the recent criminal trend of trafficking women from post-Cold War Russia into the United States. First, it will examine the Russian mafia and its development. It will also discuss the system of economic corruption that currently exists in Russia, which facilitates government involvement with this criminal activity. It will further investigate the issues surrounding trafficked women and the international anti-trafficking conventions that have been created by the United Nations. Next, it will go into a deeper discussion of the current status of relevant international law and the issues involving the International Criminal Court. Finally, this Article …

Be Careful What You Wish For: An Examination Of Arrest And Prosecution Patterns Of Domestic Violence Cases In Two Cities In Michigan, Andrea D. Lyon

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This Article will examine six months of data on arrests for domestic violence in the cities of Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor. In order to be able to interpret what the data means Lyon did some other research. The results were surprising- for example, although women tend to be injured most severely by domestic violence, they use violence in intimate relationships a little more often than men. Part I of this Article traces a brief history of domestic violence and discusses the issue of who commits domestic violence, Part II discusses the "must arrest" and "should arrest" policies and their history, …

Prostitution And Male Supremacy, Andrea Dworkin

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

The assumptions of academia can barely begin to imagine the reality of life for women in prostitution. Academic life is premised on the notion that there is a tomorrow and a next day and a next day; or that someone can come inside from the cold for time to study; or that there is some kind of discourse of ideas and a year of freedom in which you can have disagreements that will not cost you your life. These are premises that those who are students here or who teach here act on every day. They are antithetical to the …

Prostitution And Civil Rights, Catharine A. Mackinnon

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

The gap between the promise of civil rights and the real lives of prostitutes is an abyss which swallows up prostituted women.' To speak of prostitution and civil rights in one breath moves the two into one world, at once exposing and narrowing the distance between them.

An Analysis Of Individual, Institutional, And Cultural Pimping, Evelina Giobbe

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

A pimp is a man .. .who takes all or a part of the earnings of women who sell their bodies for gain. He may have inveigled her into becoming a prostitute or acquired her after she started the business. Invariably he encourages her to continue in prostitution, and he may be either her lover or her husband, but always he is her supposed protector.

Prostitution: Where Racism & Sexism Intersect, Vednita Nelson

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Black women find themselves in a unique and extremely difficult position in our society. They are forced to deal with the oppression that arises from being Black in a white-supremacist culture and the oppression that arises from being female in a male-supremacist culture. In order to examine the experience of being Black and female, this paper attempts to describe that very difficult, tight space where Black women attempt to survive-that space where racism and sexism intersect.

Strategies Of Connection: Prostitution And Feminist Politics, Margaret A. Baldwin

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

A feminist political approach to prostitution must begin from these strengths and be tested against the standards set by them. I want to address how taking each of these strengths seriously can create sustained resistance against prostitution.

Prostitution Is Cruelty And Abuse To Women And Children, Susan Kay Hunter

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Each day I rise to take up the truly good fight to stop the harm to women in prostitution. I long for complete liberation of all oppressed peoples. I passionately believe that the work I do to end prostitution is revolutionary. No one deserves to be used and abused, and that is the universal experience of prostituted women and children. It is also revolutionary work because my freedom as a woman is meaningless so long as some of us can be bought and sold. The giant sex industry grinds on, exploiting and enslaving women, while sexual liberals are well-paid by …

Challenging Solicitation Statues As Unconstitutional: Appellate Brief In Support Of Defendant-Appellant In Ypsilanti V. Patterson, Lore A. Rogers

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Appellate Brief in Support of Defendant-Appellant in Ypsilanti v. Patterson