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Place Aux Dames: The Ideological Divide Between U.S. And European Gender Discrimination Laws, Jens Dammann

Cornell International Law Journal

The United States and the European Union are both firmly committed to eliminating gender discrimination. However, as I show in this Article, they have adopted fundamentally different strategies in pursuing this objective: Whereas the United States offers plaintiffs much more generous procedural rules and far more powerful remedies, the European Union relies on more comprehensive substantive prohibitions against discrimination. What lies behind these different approaches? Contrary to existing scholarship, which emphasizes path dependence arguments, I argue that differences between gender discrimination laws in the United States and Europe can best be understood as the result of a fundamental ideological divide. …