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Full-Text Articles in Law

In Search Of Equality For Women: From Suffrage To Civil Rights, Nan D. Hunter Jan 2021

In Search Of Equality For Women: From Suffrage To Civil Rights, Nan D. Hunter

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article analyzes women’s rights advocacy and its impact on the meanings of gender equality during the period from the achievement of suffrage in 1920 until the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It teaches that one cannot separate the conceptualization of equality or the jurisprudential philosophy underlying it from the dynamics and characteristics of the social movements that actively give it life. Social movements identify the institutions and practices that will be challenged, decisions that in turn determine which doctrinal issues will provide the raw material for jurisgenerative change. Without understanding a movement’s strategy and opportunities for action, one cannot know …


Fighting Women: The Military, Sex, And Extrajudicial Constitutional Change, Jill Elaine Hasday Jan 2008

Fighting Women: The Military, Sex, And Extrajudicial Constitutional Change, Jill Elaine Hasday

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Supreme Court in Rostker v. Goldberg (1981) upheld male-only military registration, and endorsed male-only conscription and combat positions. Few cases have challenged restrictions on women's military service since Rostker, and none have reached the Supreme Court. Federal statutes continue to exclude women from military registration and draft eligibility, and military regulations still ban women from some combat positions. Yet many aspects of women's legal status in the military have changed in striking respects over the past quarter century while academic attention has focused elsewhere. Congress has eliminated statutory combat exclusions, the military has opened many combat positions to women, …


The Gifts Of Mary Dunlap (1949-2003), Wendy Webster Williams Jan 2004

The Gifts Of Mary Dunlap (1949-2003), Wendy Webster Williams

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

I guess it never really occurred to me that Mary was mortal. It certainly never crossed my mind that I would somehow be around, alive and kicking, in a world without Mary in it. Mary Cynthia Dunlap, larger than life, a force of nature, who filled up a room with her presence, her tall solid self, her waving arms, her energy, her laugh, her voice, her words and words and more words, her hair that (of course) stood straight up on her head, electrified. Mary who, Saint Frances-like, rescued birds and fed them in her big palms, loved dogs and …


The Difference In Women’S Hedonic Lives: A Phenomenological Critique Of Feminist Legal Theory, Robin West Jan 2000

The Difference In Women’S Hedonic Lives: A Phenomenological Critique Of Feminist Legal Theory, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Part One of this article provides a phenomenological and hedonic critique of the conception of the human - and thus the female - that underlies liberal legal feminism. Part Two presents a phenomenological critique of the conception of the human - and thus the female - which underlies radical feminist legal criticism. Again, I will argue that in both cases the theory does not pay enough attention to feminism: liberal feminist legal theory owes more to liberalism than to feminism and radical feminist legal theory owes more to radicalism than it does to feminism. Both models accept a depiction of …


Equality Theory, Marital Rape, And The Promise Of The Fourteenth Amendment, Robin West Jan 1990

Equality Theory, Marital Rape, And The Promise Of The Fourteenth Amendment, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

During the 1980s a handful of state judges either held or opined in dicta what must be incontrovertible to the feminist community, as well as to most progressive legal advocates and academics: the so-called marital rape exemption, whether statutory or common law in origin, constitutes a denial of a married woman's constitutional right to equal protection under the law. Indeed, a more obvious denial of equal protection is difficult to imagine: the marital rape exemption denies married women protection against violent crime solely on the basis of gender and marital status. What possibly could be less rational than a statute …