Law Commons^™

Gender-Based Religious Persecution, Pooja R. Dadhania

Faculty Scholarship

People fleeing gender-based violence in the home face an uphill battle when seeking asylum in the United States. Through the lens of public and private spheres, this Article explores the underutilized religion ground for asylum for cases involving gender-based violence in the home—i.e., the private sphere. This Article argues that if an individual imposes a patriarchal practice on an asylum seeker in the private sphere and justifies that practice using religion, the asylum seeker’s resistance to that practice should constitute religious expression.

The religion ground protects individuals who are persecuted because of their religious beliefs and religious expression. It typically …

Bridging The Gap In Lgbtq+ Rights Litigation: A Community Discussion On Bisexual Visibility In The Law, Nancy C. Marcus, Bendita Malakia, Ann E. Tweedy, Mya Reid

Faculty Scholarship

This essay discusses the genesis of BiLaw, a coalition of Bi+ lawyers and law students, and highlights the importance of a 2021 Lavender Law session organized by BiLaw in which representatives of LGBT rights organizations discussed the erasure of Bi+ persons in jurisprudence and the importance of, and their commitment to, serving the needs of the Bi+ community, along with those of other stakeholders. A transcript of the groundbreaking discussion follows the essay.

Shortlisted: A Conversation Between Judge Diane Wood, Renee Knake Jefferson, And Hannah Brenner Johnson, Renee Newman Jefferson, Hannah Brenner Johnson, Diane P. Wood

Faculty Scholarship

This article includes an edited excerpt from the introduction to Shortlisted: Women in the Shadows of the Supreme Court and a discussion with the book's authors led by Judge Diane Wood, a senior judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. They discuss the book, the women who were passed over for seats on the Court, and the lessons their stories offer — for women judges and the legal profession as a whole.

Sidelined Again: How The Government Abandoned Working Women Amidst A Global Pandemic, Jessica K. Fink

Faculty Scholarship

Among the weaknesses within American society exposed by the COVID pandemic, almost none has emerged more starkly than the government’s failure to provide meaningful and affordable childcare to working families—and, in particular, to working women. As the pandemic unfolded in the spring of 2020, state and local governments shuttered schools and daycare facilities and directed nannies and other babysitters to “stay at home.” Women quickly found themselves filling this domestic void, providing the overwhelming majority of childcare, educational support for their children, and management of household duties, often to the detriment of their careers. As of March 2021, more than …

The Black-White Paradigm’S Continuing Erasure Of Latinas: See Women Law Deans Of Color, Laura M. Padilla

Faculty Scholarship

The Black-white paradigm persists with unintended consequences. For example, there have been only six Latina law deans to date with only four presently serving. This Article provides data about women law deans of color, the dearth of Latina law deans, and explanations for the data. It focuses on the enduring Black-white paradigm, as well as other external and internal forces. This Article suggests how to increase the number of Latina law deans and emphasizes why it matters.

Yes, Alito, There Is A Right To Privacy: Why The Leaked Dobbs Opinion Is Doctrinally Unsound, Nancy C. Marcus

Faculty Scholarship

On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court released the final Dobbs majority opinion, which is substantially identical to the draft opinion. Consequently, the critique contained in this essay applies equally to the final Dobbs opinion.

On May 2, 2022, a draft majority opinion dated February 2022 and authored by Justice Alito in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was leaked to the public. This Essay addresses the doctrinal infirmities of the underlying analysis of the draft Dobbs opinion, as well as the resulting dangers posed for the protection of fundamental privacy rights and liberties in contexts even beyond abortion.

The …

Disgorging Harvey Weinstein's Salary, Jessica K. Fink

Faculty Scholarship

Harvey Weinstein dramatically altered the way that people view sexual harassment in the workplace. While workplace sexual harassment is far from a new phenomenon – with many perpetrators of such harassment (including Weinstein himself) having gotten away with this misbehavior for decades – the exposure of Weinstein’s misdeeds opened the floodgates, leading countless women from a variety of work environments to share their own experiences with sexual harassment at work. As the #MeToo movement has continued to occupy the headlines, workplace harassment has begun to seem as ubiquitous as it is distressing.

This intensified spotlight on sexual harassment has exposed …

Standing In Between Sexual Violence Victims And Access To Justice: The Limits Of Title Ix, Hannah Brenner Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

Sexual violence proliferates across communities, generally, and is especially prevalent in places like colleges and universities. As quasi-closed systems, colleges and universities are governed by their own internal norms, policies, and federal laws, like Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which address how sex discrimination must be handled in institutions of higher education that are in receipt of federal funds. Title IX focuses on all facets of sex discrimination including reporting, investigation, adjudication, and prevention. When schools are accused of failing to adequately respond to reports of sexual misconduct on their campuses, Title IX has been interpreted by …

Victim Impact Statements And Corporate Sex Crimes, Erin L. Sheley

Faculty Scholarship

This Article argues that more frequently including victim impact statements during the sentencing phase of corporate criminal trials would help lay foundation for legislative reforms geared towards punishing corporations on the occasions where genuinely corporate misconduct, such as that of USAG and the Weinstein Company, can be said to have caused sexual offenses. The Article proceeds in three Parts. First, I argue that criminal enforcement against corporations is generally untethered from harm to victims, and that this thwarts one of the most coherent justifications for the existence of corporate criminal liability. Next, I argue that a focus on victim narratives …

Criminalizing Coercive Control Within The Limits Of Due Process, Erin L. Sheley

Faculty Scholarship

The sociological literature on domestic abuse shows that it is more complex than a series of physical assaults. Abusers use “coercive control” to subjugate their partners through a web of threats, humiliation, isolation, and demands. The presence of coercive control is highly predictive of future physical violence and is, in and of itself, also a violation of the victim’s liberty and dignity. In response to these new understandings the United Kingdom has recently criminalized nonviolent coercive control, making it illegal to, on two or more occasions, cause “serious alarm or distress” to an intimate partner that has a “substantial effect” …

Women Law Deans, Gender Sidelining, And Presumptions Of Incompetence, Laura M. Padilla

Faculty Scholarship

Discussions of presumptions of incompetence and gender sidelining all address challenges that women, especially women of color, face in leadership roles. This Article explores these topics in the context of law deans.

This Article starts with updated data on the number of women law deans, including women of color, and demonstrates increased numbers of both women and women of color in deanships. It then shifts to plausible explanations for this growth: some optimistic and some more skeptical. It may be no coincidence that as the job became less desirable, women were appointed in greater numbers.

Next, this Article provides narrative …

Sex Harassment Training Must Change: The Case For Legal Incentives For Transformative Education And Prevention, Susan Bisom-Rapp

Faculty Scholarship

In the wake of the #MeToo moment, employers, legislators, and human resources professionals have defaulted to a familiar solution to what seems like an epidemic of workplace harassment: mandatory sex harassment training. The chosen antidote, however, begs an important question that this author posed over 15 years ago: Does sex harassment training actually prevent harassment? My review of the social science research in 2001 revealed no convincing evidence that sex harassment training curbs harassment. In fact, the scant research available indicated that training, as typically conducted in American workplaces, may backfire, triggering stereotypes about women and people of color, and …

Radical Feminist Harms On Sex Workers, I. India Thusi

Faculty Scholarship

Sex work has long been a site for contesting womanhood, sexuality, race, and patriarchy. Its very existence forces us to examine how we think about two very dirty subjects-money and sex. The radical feminist literature highlights the problems with sex work and often describes it as a form of "human trafficking" and violence against women. This influential philosophy underlies much of the work in human trafficking courts, was evident in a letter signed by several Hollywood starlets in opposition to Amnesty International's support for decriminalization, and is the premise of several movies and documentaries about "sex slavery." Radical feminists aim …

Gender Sidelining And The Problem Of Unactionable Discrimination, Jessica K. Fink

Faculty Scholarship

Gender dynamics suffuse virtually every workplace. Indeed, the way that employees interact with one another turns not only on their individual backgrounds, skills and personalities, but also frequently on their gender. While many employees embrace gender diversity at work and appreciate the benefits of incorporating both male and female perspectives into workplace programs and projects, this ideal does not translate into every work environment. In many workplaces, female workers continue to experience unfair (and often unlawful) treatment based upon their gender. The law has done much to outlaw overt gender discrimination at work, providing a legal framework within which female …

A Title Ix Conundrum: Are Campus Visitors Protected From Sexual Assault?, Hannah Brenner

Faculty Scholarship

Sexual violence is a significant and longstanding problem on college campuses that has been made even more visible by recent media attention to the #MeToo movement. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 addresses discrimination (including sexual violence) that impedes access to education; the law demands compliance from federally funded schools related to their prevention of and response to this problem. The U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted the law to contain an implied private right of action that can be brought against a school for its deliberate indifference to severe and pervasive sex discrimination about which it has knowledge. …

Deporting Undesirable Women, Pooja R. Dadhania

Faculty Scholarship

Immigration law has long labeled certain categories of immigrants "undesirable." One of the longest-standing of these categories is women who sell sex. Current immigration laws subject sellers of sex to an inconsistent array of harsh immigration penalties, including bars to entry to the United States as well as mandatory detention and removal. A historical review of prostitution-related immigration laws reveals troubling origins. Grounded in turn-of-the-twentieth-century morality, these laws singled out female sellers of sex as immoral and as threats to American marriages and families. Indeed, the first such law specifically targeted Asian women as threats to the moral fabric of …

The Rise Of Self Sidelining, Leslie Culver

Faculty Scholarship

This Article coins the term "self sidelining" as an experience emanating from two theories: impostor phenomenon and gender sidelining. The impostor phenomenon is a well-established psychological construct that describes the inability of some high-achieving women and men to internalize success. Gender sidelining, recently popularized in legal scholarship, describes the undermining of women's achievements, as compared to men, that are unactionable as legal discrimination. In view of these theories, this Article contends that when internal fraudulent feelings (imposter phenomenon) are perceived to be externally validated by male gender preference (gender sidelining), women consciously or subconsciously discipline themselves to forgo their professional …

Shortlisted, Hannah Brenner, Renee Knake

Faculty Scholarship

As the New York Times noted in 1971, Mildred Lillie fortunately had no children. Even in her fifties, she maintained "a bathing beauty figure." Lillie was not, however, a swimsuit model. She was one of President Nixon's possible nominees for the United States Supreme Court. This Article tells the stories of nearly a dozen extraordinary women considered, but ultimately not nominated, for the Court before Justice Sandra Day O'Connor became the first in 1981. The public nature of the nomination process enables us to analyze the scrutiny of these women by the profession and media, and analogize to those similarly …

Lifetime Disadvantage, Susan Bisom-Rapp, Malcolm Sargeant

Faculty Scholarship

Lifetime Disadvantage, Discrimination and the Gendered Workforce fills a gap in the literature on discrimination and disadvantage suffered by women at work by focusing on the inadequacies of the current law and the need for a new holistic approach. Each stage of the working life cycle for women is examined with a critical consideration of how the law attempts to address the problems that inhibit women's labor force participation. By using their model of lifetime disadvantage, the authors show how the law adopts an incremental and disjointed approach to resolving the challenges, and argue that a more holistic orientation towards …

Madonnas And Whores In The Workplace, Jessica K. Fink

Faculty Scholarship

Much has been written about “lookism” – the preferential treatment given to those who conform to societal standards of beauty. But in a recent case before the Iowa Supreme Court, a gender discrimination plaintiff alleged a sort of “reverse-lookism,” claiming that her male employer terminated her long-term employment because the employee was too physically attractive, thus tempting the employer to think about entering into an extramarital affair. To the great surprise of many who followed this case, the Iowa Supreme Court sided with the employer, declining to find him liable for gender discrimination. As one might expect, uproar ensued, with …

From One Town's 'Alternative Families' Ordinance To Marriage Equality Nationwide, Barbara Cox

Faculty Scholarship

Many articles have already discussed the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision. In that opinion, the Supreme Court held that individuals who are same-sex couples have a fundamental right to marry just as individuals who are different-sex couples. Basing its decision on the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court held that states could not deny same-sex couples that right. Instead of the numerous scholarly works analyzing the Obergefell decision, this essay looks back at my part in the marriage equality movement, before it was a movement and before it was about marriage, and its …

Marriage Equality Is Both Feminist And Progressive, Barbara Cox

Faculty Scholarship

Marriage equality has the ability to lessen vulnerability for society’s most needy. This article discusses two aspects of marriage equality in particular. Part II discusses why marriage equality can be feminist in practice and why obtaining marriage equality for same-sex couples will advance feminist values within marriage. Part III discusses how marriage equality can be progressive and help those who are vulnerable in our society by providing numerous rights that are otherwise unavailable or expensive to replicate. While marriage equality cannot bring an end to the many problems caused by marriage’s privileged status in our society, it has the ability …

“The Tyranny Of The Majority Is No Myth”: Its Dangers For Legally Married Same-Sex Couples, Barbara Cox

Faculty Scholarship

This article has three sections. Section 1 explains that sexual minorities, consisting of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and queer people (LGBTQ), 15 comprise a small number of people within the U.S. and describes the current laws granting and prohibiting legal rights to married or partnered same-sex couples. Thus, the LGBTQ community is dependent on the non-LGBTQ community to decide its rights when those rights are debated at the ballot box, a bad public policy in and of itself. 16 Section II considers the question posed by this symposium: is the tyranny of the majority a danger to minority communities or …

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

Faculty Scholarship

In 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 offormal 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, Israel, …

Transcending The Criminal Law's "One Size Fits All" Response To Domestic Violence, Hannah Brenner

Faculty Scholarship

Domestic violence is no longer a private matter confined within the four walls of the home. The shift from private to public is connected with marked progress within the legal system, which strives to protect victims and hold batterers accountable through a myriad of specific responses that have ranged from attitudinal and logistical shifts from law enforcement to increased attention within legal education to a general acknowledgment of the impact of domestic violence on individual victims, children, families, and the broader community to the passage of federal and state legislation.

The state legislative landscape has historically centered around a very …

Rethinking Gender Equality In The Legal Profession's Pipeline To Power: A Study On Media Coverage Of Supreme Court Nominees (Phase 1, The Introduction Week), Hannah Brenner, Renee Newman Knake

Faculty Scholarship

Three women now sit on the Supreme Court of the United States, and a fourth recently retired, suggesting the attainment of formal gender equality. Despite this appearance of progress, women remain significantly underrepresented in major leadership roles within the legal profession, where they face extensive gender bias and stereotyping. This gender bias and stereotyping is also leveraged against women who are featured in the media, illustrated vividly by coverage of the most recent Supreme Court nominations. Headlines from mainstream news, "Then Comes the Marriage Question" in the New York Times or "The Supreme Court Needs More Mothers" in the Washington …

The Gendered Aspects Of Social Justice Work And Occupational Segregation In The Legal Academy: A Review Of 2003, Barbara Cox

Faculty Scholarship

My service as chair of the Section on Women in Legal Education ("Section") was rather unusual. I started serving on the Executive Committee in 1999 and became Chair-Elect in 2001. Veryl Miles (Catholic) was Chair for 2001 but became Deputy Director of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) in August that year, so I served out her term as Interim Chair from August 1 to December 31, 2001. Then I became Chair-Elect again in 2002 (because I was on sabbatical that year and could not serve as Chair) and Vernellia Randall agreed to step in as Chair. I served …

Rabenmutter And The Glass Ceiling: An Analysis Of Role Conflict Experienced By Women Lawyers In Germany As Compared With Women Lawyers In The United States, Jacquelyn H. Slotkin

Faculty Scholarship

The purpose of this article is to analyze and compare women lawyers in Germany with women lawyers in the United States: their legal education, gender proportion in the legal profession, work opportunities, satisfaction with professional choices, and role conflicts. 22 Part I of this article will describe Germany's legal education and compare it with U.S. legal education. Part II will review the literature and issues relevant to German women lawyers as compared with U.S. women lawyers and will summarize and analyze how societal attitudes have affected women's choices in Germany and in the United States. Part III will compare demographic …

Aals As Creative Problem Solver: Implementing Bylaw 6-4(A) To Prohibit Discrimination On The Basis Of Sexual Orientation In Legal Education, Barbara Cox

Faculty Scholarship

I wrote this article because it is important for the legal education community to understand the important leadership that the AALS has provided in lessening the discrimination that sexual minorities encounter in legal education, and to know of the challenges and problems it encountered in making Bylaw 6-4(a) into more than a membership requirement in name only.

Using An “Incidents Of Marriage” Analysis When Considering Interstate Recognition Of Same-Sex Couples’ Marriages, Civil Unions, And Domestic Partnerships, Barbara Cox

Faculty Scholarship

Despite discussions for over ten years, we still do not have any decisions on interstate or international recognition of marriages by same-sex couples. We do have, however, six cases in the United States on the interstate recognition and validation of Vermont civil unions. In these six cases, same-sex couples from six different states who had entered into Vermont civil unions came to their courts seeking resolution of legal issues that arose in their relationships. The rest of this article now turns to these six decisions and considers how each court dealt with the same-sex couple seeking legal assistance with the …