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Full-Text Articles in Law
Working Sex Words, Anita Bernstein
Working Sex Words, Anita Bernstein
Michigan Journal of Gender & Law
Imagine yourself tasked to speak for a few minutes about legal controls on sex-selling in the United States, or any other country you choose. You need not have thought about the particulars. As someone willing to read a law review article, you have enough to say because sex-selling overlaps with the subject knowledge you already have. Criminal law, contracts, employment law, immigration law, tort law, zoning, commercial law, and intellectual property, among other legal categories, all intersect with this topic. In your brief remarks on how law attempts to mediate the sale and purchase of sex, you have only one …
Prohibiting Sex Purchasing And Ending Trafficking: The Swedish Prostitution Law, Max Waltman
Prohibiting Sex Purchasing And Ending Trafficking: The Swedish Prostitution Law, Max Waltman
Michigan Journal of International Law
At the symposium on "Successes and Failures in International Human Trafficking Law" at the University of Michigan Law School in February 2011, I addressed the topic of international sex trafficking law, particularly the Swedish law that prohibits the purchase of sex while simultaneously decriminalizing the prostituted person. Being asked to address trafficking, I was surprised by the name given to my panel: "Kidnapped at Home, Sold Abroad: Sex Trafficking in the International Community." This surprise was owing to the fact that in the most current international instrument defining trafficking, the United Nation's so-called Palermo Protocol, nowhere is the term "kidnapping" …
Left Out In The Cold: Trafficking Victims, Gender, And Misinterpretation Of The Refugee Convention's "Nexus" Requirement, Martina Pomeroy
Left Out In The Cold: Trafficking Victims, Gender, And Misinterpretation Of The Refugee Convention's "Nexus" Requirement, Martina Pomeroy
Michigan Journal of Gender & Law
Victims of human trafficking who seek international protection in their country of destination face a steep uphill battle. Special visa programs designed to regularize their status are often riddled with conditions that make them inaccessible to all but a very few victims. Despite widespread international agreement that the manifold harms inflicted upon the majority of trafficked persons generally rise to the level of persecution, and therefore that victims should be eligible to apply for asylum, many national courts misinterpret international refugee law standards and routinely deny refugee status to deserving applicants. Courts often refuse to recognize persecution on the basis …
Pornography As Trafficking, Catharine A. Mackinnon
Pornography As Trafficking, Catharine A. Mackinnon
Michigan Journal of International Law
In material reality, pornography is one way women and children are trafficked for sex. To make visual pornography, the bulk of the industry's products, real women and children, and some men, are rented out for use in commercial sex acts. In the resulting materials, these people are then conveyed and sold for a buyer's sexual use. Obscenity laws, the traditional legal approach to the problem, do not care about these realities at all. The morality of what is said and shown remains their focus and concern. The injuries inflicted on real people to make the materials, or because they are …
Copyright Infringement, Sex Trafficking, And Defamation In The Fictional Life Of A Geisha, Susan Tiefenbrun
Copyright Infringement, Sex Trafficking, And Defamation In The Fictional Life Of A Geisha, Susan Tiefenbrun
Michigan Journal of Gender & Law
Memoirs of a Geisha has sold and made millions for Arthur Golden since 1997. This is his first novel, and it has earned him worldwide acclaim. A feature film version directed by Steven Spielberg is in the works. The book is translated into more than twenty languages. This article uses the book and the legal controversy that ensued after its publication to ask, and hopefully answer, two questions: First, is the geisha tradition as described by Golden in his fictional biography a variant of sex trafficking and sexual slavery which, despite possible cultural justifications, should be abolished by law? Second, …
Ifeminism, Ashlie Warnick
Ifeminism, Ashlie Warnick
Michigan Law Review
Laws should be judged not by their words or intentions, but by their effects and consequences. When government enacts laws designed to benefit one group, society should judge those laws first by examining whether they have, in practice, provided a net benefit to the law's intended beneficiaries. Next, any such benefit must be weighed against the costs imposed on the rest of society. If the benefits outweigh the costs, this is a socially efficient law. Government should repeal a law when the costs it imposes outweigh its benefits. When laws do not provide a net benefit to the group they …
Mail-Order Brides: Gilded Prostitution And The Legal Response, Eddy Meng
Mail-Order Brides: Gilded Prostitution And The Legal Response, Eddy Meng
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
This Note explores the international mail-order bride industry where women from Asia and other developing countries are trafficked to men in Western industrialized countries. The author discusses the commonalities between the mail-order bride traffic and other forms of sexual exploitation, as well as the cultural and historical forces and the gender, ethnic, and class subordination which together fuel the demand for Asian Pacific mail-order brides. In the United States, the potential for exploitation is made greater in that immigrant brides face a threat of deportation during the first two years of residence via immigration laws. Given the inequalities between consumer-husbands …
Prostitution And Male Supremacy, Andrea Dworkin
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Pimping And Pornography As Sexual Harassment: Amicus Brief In Support Of Plaintiff-Respondent In Thoreson V. Penthouse Int'l Ltd., Dorchen A. Leidholdt
Pimping And Pornography As Sexual Harassment: Amicus Brief In Support Of Plaintiff-Respondent In Thoreson V. Penthouse Int'l Ltd., Dorchen A. Leidholdt
Michigan Journal of Gender & Law
Several issues were raised on appeal to the New York Court of Appeals. Thoreson AKA DiLorenzo was the Respondent on the issue of sexual harassment and the Appellant on the issue of the amount of damages awarded by the Supreme Court. This portion of the brief addresses only the issue of sexual harassment. Wendy C. Lecker (J.D. 1988, New York University School of Law), authored a section on the issue of compensatory damages.
Prostitution: A Narrative By A Former "Call Girl", Anonymous
Prostitution: A Narrative By A Former "Call Girl", Anonymous
Michigan Journal of Gender & Law
Why do women get involved in prostitution? I believe there are two primary causes: money and drugs.