Law Commons^™

Question #1: Is There A Gender Gap In Performance On Multiple Choice Exams? A. Always B. Never C. Most Of The Time, Jane Bloom Grisé

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The correct answer to Question #1 is C. Most of the time, women score lower than men on multiple-choice exams. Question #2: How did you become interested in this topic?

A. The author likes to create multiple-choice tests.

B. The author does well on multiple-choice tests.

C. The author unexpectedly discovered this disparity.

The correct answer is C. I discovered this disparity unexpectedly and was surprised to find that women scored lower than men on multiple-choice exams and that multiple-choice exams underpredicted women's academic performance.

While educators might assume that different types of assessments such as multiple-choice and essays are …

Criminalizing Pregnancy, Cortney E. Lollar

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The state of Tennessee arrested a woman two days after she gave birth and charged her with assault of her newborn child based on her use of narcotics during her pregnancy. Tennessee's 2014 assault statute was the first to explicitly criminalize the use of drugs by a pregnant woman. But this law, along with others like it being considered by legislatures across the country, is only the most recent manifestation of a long history of using criminal law to punish poor mothers and mothers of color for their behavior while pregnant. The purported motivation for such laws is the harm …

From Citizenship To Custody: Unwed Fathers Abroad And At Home, Albertina Antognini

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The sex-based distinctions of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) have been remarkably resilient in the face of numerous equal protection challenges. In Miller v. Albright, Nguyen v. INS, and most recently United States v. Flores-Villar — collectively the "citizenship transmission cases" — the Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of the INA’s provisions that require unwed fathers, but not unwed mothers, to take a series of affirmative steps in order to transmit citizenship to their children born abroad.

The conventional account of these citizenship transmission cases is that the Court upholds sex-based distinctions that would otherwise fail …

Reflections On The Limitations Of Rational Discourse, Empirical Data, And Legal Mandates As Tools For The Achievement Of Gender Equity In American Higher Education, Susan J. Scollay, Carolyn S. Bratt

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Scholars and academicians implicitly accept and subscribe to the notion that reasoned discourse supported by empirical data is at the core of the academic enterprise. Theoretically, then, organizational change within the academy ought to be attainable through the use of rational processes based upon the systematic collection, analysis, and interpretation of data to define the scope of the problem and to identify logical solutions. However, the centuries-long attempt to achieve gender equity for women in institutions of higher education belies the truth of that belief in the power of reason as a catalyst for reforming American higher education.

Beginning with …