Law Commons^™

The Tragic Costs Of ‘Protecting’ Trans Youth, Kimberly Jade Norwood, Jaimie Hileman

Scholarship@WashULaw

In the past few decades, our nation has made substantial progress on the rights of LGBTQ+ people. The legalization of gay marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015 was transformative for our nation. Just five years later, another huge victory was scored in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protected gay and transgender people.

With every gain, backlash often follows. Three years after Bostock, a tsunami of anti-LGBTQ+ bills, and more specifically, anti-Trans bills, littered the nation. Hundreds of bills have been filed since Bostock, …

Introduction To The Symposium: Access To Justice: Mass Incarceration And Masculinity Through A Black Feminist Lens, Adrienne D. Davis, Annette R. Appell

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Introduction to the Symposium, Race to Justice: Mass Incarceration and Masculinity through a Black Feminist Lens, rehearses the animating forces that led to a colloquium and a series of papers that explore the question of mass incarceration and the negative state engagement surrounding it through gendered and feminist lenses. The Introduction explains how an analysis of mass incarceration through the lens of gender complicates what is often conceived as a story about race. Instead mass incarceration can be more deeply understood through its gendered effects on men and the women and children connected to those men. These connections include …

Historic And Modern Social Movements For Reparations: The National Coalition Of Blacks For Reparations In America (N’Cobra) And Its Antecedents, Adrienne D. Davis, Adjoa A. Aiyetoro

Scholarship@WashULaw

Most of the legal scholarship on reparations for Blacks in America focuses on its legal or political viability. This literature has considered both procedural obstacles, such as statutes of limitations and sovereign immunity, as well as the substantive conception of a defensible cause of action. Indeed, Congressman John Conyers introduced H.R. 40, a bill to study reparations, in 1989 and every Congressional session since, and there have been three law suits that have received national attention. This Essay takes a different approach, considering reparations as a social movement with a rich and under-explored history. As Robin Kelley explains, such an …

The Voting Rights Act’S Secret Weapon: Pocket Trigger Litigation And Dynamic Preclearance, Travis Crum

Scholarship@WashULaw

Following NAMUDNO, the search is on for a way to save section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). This Note offers a solution through an examination of the VRA’s most obscure provision: section 3. Commonly called the bail-in mechanism or the pocket trigger, section 3 authorizes federal courts to place states and political subdivisions that have violated the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments under preclearance. This Note makes a two-part argument. First, the pocket trigger should be used to alleviate the NAMUDNO Court’s anxiety over the coverage formula’s differential treatment of the states. The Justice Department and civil rights groups …

Making Up Is Hard To Do: Race/Gender/Sexual Orientation In The Law School Classroom, Adrienne D. Davis, Robert S. Chang

Scholarship@WashULaw

This exchange of letters picks up where Professors Adrienne Davis and Robert Chang left off in an earlier exchange that examined who speaks, who is allowed to speak, and what is remembered. Here, Professors Davis and Chang explore the dynamics of race, gender, and sexual orientation in the law school classroom. They compare the experiences of African American women and Asian American men in trying to perform as law professors, considering how makeup and other gender tools simultaneously assist and hinder such performances. Their exchange examines the possibility of bias that complicates the use of student evaluations in assessing teaching …

Foreword-Symposium: Gender, Work & Family Project Inaugural Feminist Legal Theorylecture, Adrienne D. Davis, Joan C. Williams

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Symposium inaugurates the Annual Feminist Legal Theory Lecture Series of the Washington College of Law's Gender, Work & Family Project. Martha Fineman, in honor of her two towering achievements in feminist jurisprudence, is the first lecturer. The first achievement is her ground-breaking work on dependency, about which we will say more later. The second is her equally influential Feminist Theory Workshop, which she began at the University of Wisconsin, and has since moved to Columbia University and now to Cornell. The annual Workshop has provided the opportunity for scores of scholars to present papers related to feminist jurisprudence, helping …