Law Commons^™

Never Equals: Slavery, White Masculinities, And The Legacy Of Law In Today’S Workplace, Ann C. Mcginley

Scholarly Works

This essay discusses two themes of Race Unequals: (1) the role of law in creating and reinforcing gendered, classed, and raced identities on plantations in the Antebellum South; and (2) the existence of slavery's legacy today in workplaces and the law's frequent failure to remedy its damaging tentacles. Part II describes masculinities studies from the social sciences and Multidimensional Masculinities Theory in law and applies the theory to analyze the first theme. Part III considers slavery's legacy in today's workplaces and analyzes employment discrimination law's shortcomings in eliminating racism in workplaces. The essay concludes that White masculinities, established in the …

Misogyny And Murder, Ann C. Mcginley

Scholarly Works

The Atlanta-area shootings of six Asian women in massage parlors in March 2021 raised awareness about anti-Asian discrimination and violence in the United States. When the perpetrator, Robert Aaron Long, shot the Atlanta-area spa victims, public speculation arose about whether he was motivated by hatred for the Asian victims because of their race. Many wondered whether the shooter would be charged and convicted of hate crimes against the victims. When asked by police about his motives, the perpetrator stated that he had a "sex addiction," meaning that the spas created intolerable sexual temptations that he was unable to resist. Considering …

Intersectionality, Police Excessive Force, And Class, Frank Rudy Cooper

Scholarly Works

Recent uprisings over the failure to hold police officers responsible for killing civilians—from Ferguson, Missouri to nationwide George Floyd protests—show the importance of excessive force as a social problem. Some scholars have launched racial critiques of policing as resulting from explicit or implicit racial bias. This Essay is the first to demonstrate that an intersectional analysis of both race and class helps explain both aggressive policing and the Court’s permissive excessive force doctrine.

This Essay identifies several take-aways from intersectionality theory’s basic insight that unique senses of self-identity and unique stereotypes form at places where categories of identity meet. First, …

Teaching With Feminist Judgments: A Global Conversation, Bridget J. Crawford, Kathryn M. Stanchi, Linda L. Berger

Scholarly Works

This conversational-style essay is an exchange among fourteen professors-representing thirteen universities across five countries-with experience teaching with feminist judgments.

Feminist judgments are 'shadow' court decisions rewritten from a feminist perspective, using only the precedent in effect and the facts known at the time of the original decision. Scholars in Canada, England, the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, Scotland, Ireland, India, and Mexico have published (or are currently producing) written collections of feminist judgments that demonstrate how feminist perspectives could have changed the legal reasoning or outcome (or both) in important legal cases.

This essay begins to explore the vast pedagogical potential …

#Metoo Backlash Or Simply Common Sense?: It's Complicated, Ann C. Mcginley

Scholarly Works

This Essay focuses on the skittishness that men express about being accused of sexual harassment. Part II explains the prevalence of sexual harassment and the response to this problem, giving both empirical and anecdotal evidence of male professionals' refusals to spend time with female subordinates. Part III discusses the already-present inequalities in the legal profession, particularly in law firms and raises concerns about how lack of mentoring and sponsorship of women by male supervisors could create an even greater disparity. Part IV analyzes the disparate legal, business, and cultural definitions of sexual harassment, and given the disparities in understandings, raises …

Bridging Divides In Divisive Times: Revisiting The Massie-Fortescue Affair, Stewart Chang

Scholarly Works

This Article revisits the infamous Massie-Fortescue rape and murder cases that occurred in Hawai'i during the 1930s, in order to challenge the methods by which race scholars have previously analyzed the case by relying on gender hierarchies. Thalia Massie, a white woman, accused five "Hawaiians" of gang raping her, even though they were of various Asian Pacific ethnic identities. The rape case ended in a hung jury, and so her relatives resorted to vigilante murder of one of the defendants. The subsequent murder trial resulted in convictions, but the 10- year prison sentences for the white defendants were commuted to …

Cop Fragility And Blue Lives Matter, Frank Rudy Cooper

Scholarly Works

There is a new police criticism. Numerous high-profile police killings of unarmed blacks between 2012–2016 sparked the movements that came to be known as Black Lives Matter, #SayHerName, and so on. That criticism merges race-based activism with intersectional concerns about violence against women, including trans women.

There is also a new police resistance to criticism. It fits within the tradition of the “Blue Wall of Silence,” but also includes a new pro-police movement known as Blue Lives Matter. The Blue Lives Matter movement makes the dubious claim that there is a war on police and counter attacks by calling for …

The Masculinity Mandate: #Metoo, Brett Kavanaugh, And Christine Blasey Ford, Ann C. Mcginley

Scholarly Works

In fall 2019, the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings involving Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's testimony about then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh's alleged behavior at a high school party gone awry.

This essay uses identity performance and multidimensional masculinities theories to analyze the hearings, specifically to consider the gender, race, and class performances of the participants, and how partisans and non-partisans interpreted those performances. This examination demonstrates that the judgment concerning masculinity and femininity performances and their appropriateness is, to a certain extent, in the eye of the beholder. By the same token, public interpretations are not arbitrary. Rather, at least in this …

Why Women? Judging Transnational Courts And Tribunals, Kathryn M. Stanchi, Bridget J. Crawford, Linda L. Berger

Scholarly Works

Calls for greater representation of women on the bench are not new. Many people share the intuition that having more female judges would make a difference to the decisions that courts might reach or how courts arrive at those decisions. This hunch has only equivocal empirical support, however. Nevertheless legal scholars, consistent with traditional feminist legal methods, persist in asking how many women judges there are and what changes might bring more women to the bench. This essay argues that achieving diversity in international courts and tribunals – indeed on any bench – will not happen simply by having more …

Venture Bearding, Benjamin P. Edwards, Ann C. Mcginley

Scholarly Works

“Venture bearding,” a term that we coin in this Article, describes processes of obscuring and covering socially stigmatized identities in business environments. This Article introduces distinctive identity performance strategies from the technology, startup, and venture capital context into the legal literature and discusses what their existence explains about business environments and capital formation. Venture bearding, as we use the term, describes behaviors that persons with contextually stigmatized identities adopt to access social status and capital. In some instances, women, who are stigmatized in this context, may employ men as front persons to conceal that the venture is an exclusively women-owned …

Learning From Feminist Judgments: Lessons In Language And Advocacy, Linda L. Berger, Kathryn M. Stanchi, Bridget J. Crawford

Scholarly Works

Judicial decision-making is not a neutral and logical enterprise that involves applying clear rules to agreed-upon facts. Legal educators can and should help students learn more about how judges actually go about making their decisions. The study of re-imagined judicial decisions, such as the alternative judgments from various Feminist Judgments Projects, can enrich the study of law in multiple ways. First, seeing a written decision that differs from the original can help students think “outside the box” constructed by the original opinion by showing them a concrete example of another perspective written in judicial language. Second, the rewritten judgments show …

Schools As Training Grounds For Harassment, Ann C. Mcginley

Scholarly Works

This article deals with the schools’ role in permitting and encouraging peer sex- and gender-based harassment of children and the law’s role in failing to hold schools accountable for their negligent and intentional behavior in sanctioning it. Part I discusses the evidence of rampant sex- and gender-based harassment in schools. Part II analyzes the problem through the lens of masculinities theory and explains how cultural notions of masculinity create incentives for boys (and some girls) to engage in peer sex- and gender-based harassment.

Part III analyzes court cases and OCR decisions and explains the serious disconnect between the two; it …

Our National Psychosis: Guns, Terror, And Hegemonic Masculinity, Stewart Chang

Scholarly Works

In this Article, Professor Stewart Chang, through the examination of three recent mass shooting, proposes that mass shootings driven by hegemonic masculinity should be classified and addressed as acts of terrorism. Professor Chang defines hegemonic masculinity as patterns or practices that promote the dominant social position of men and the subordinate social position of women and other gender identities. In this Article, he examines how hegemonic masculinity is allowed to become mainstream and flourish unchecked based on our characterization, classification and reaction to mass shootings and their perpetrators.

Rewriting Judicial Opinions And The Feminist Scholarly Project, Linda L. Berger, Kathryn M. Stanchi, Bridget J. Crawford

Scholarly Works

In this introduction to an online symposium on Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Opinions of the United States Supreme Court, the editors of this groundbreaking project reflect on the journey and what remains to be done.

The Masculinity Motivation, Ann C. Mcginley

Scholarly Works

In this essay, Professor Ann McGinley explores a phenomenon she coins the Masculinity Motivation. Society and courts ignore that harassing behaviors and the motives behind them are nearly identical in schools and workplaces. Moreover, the motives driving same-sex harassment are often the same as those causing sex-based harassment of women and girls. These motives include proving the perpetrators' and their group's masculinity, punishing those who do not adhere to gender expectations, and upholding conventional gender norms. Professor McGinley advocates for courts to broadly define "because of sex" under Titles VII and IX by clarifying that harassment motivated to denigrate the …

Gender, Law, And Culture In The Legal Workplace: A Chilean Case Study, Ann C. Mcginley

Scholarly Works

"What has to change is the model of work. It can't be that in order to be a partner in a law firm, a woman has to learn to renounce her children. It is the men who have to renounce this work model and take equal responsibility for their children. It is very difficult for a society to do this. "

How do law and culture affect the behavior of actors on the ground? If culture and law interact, how does this interaction occur? This Article examines how gender and law affect lawyers working in a Latin American country Chile …

Gender Justice: The Role Of Stories And Images, Linda L. Berger, Kathryn M. Stanchi

Scholarly Works

In this book chapter, Professor Berger argues for thoughtful metaphor-making and storytelling in legal writing. Exploring legal rhetoric with an eye for gender justice, she argues metaphor and narrative shape perspective and ask the reader to join the writer in the imaginative work of seeing one thing as another. The same shift in perspective that leads to re-conception—a shift that takes advantage of metaphor and narrative’s ability to say what only they can say—is what writers aim to achieve when they use metaphor and narrative for feminist and social justice advocacy.

Feminist Judging Matters: How Feminist Theory And Methods Affect The Process Of Judgment, Linda L. Berger, Bridget J. Crawford, Kathryn M. Stanchi

Scholarly Works

Professor Linda Berger rejoins her Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Opinions of the United States Supreme Court coauthors in this essay presenting feminism as the foundation for a developing form of rich, complex, and practical legal scholarship-the lens and the means through which we may approach and resolve many legal problems. First, this essay explores the intellectual foundations of feminist legal theory and situates the United States and international feminist judgments projects within that scholarly tradition. It next considers how the feminist judgments projects move beyond traditional academic scholarship to bridge the gap between the real-world practice of law and feminist theory. …

A Genealogy Of Programmatic Stop And Frisk: A Discourse-To-Practice-Circuit, Frank Rudy Cooper

Scholarly Works

President Trump has called for increased use of the recently predominant policing methodology known as programmatic stop and frisk. This Article contributes to the field by identifying, defining, and discussing five key components of the practice: (1) administratively dictated (2) pervasive Terry v. Ohio stops and frisks (3) aimed at crime prevention by means of (4) data-enhanced profiles of suspects that (5) target young racial minority men. Whereas some scholars see programmatic stop and frisk as solely the product of individual police officer bias, this Article argues for understanding how we arrived at specific police practices by analyzing three levels …

Resilience And Native Girls: A Critique, Addie C. Rolnick

Scholarly Works

The term resilience is often used with reference to Indigenous women and Indigenous youth. Native girls are included in each of these categories but are rarely the main focus of a campaign. Their triple vulnerability (gender, indigeneity, and age), however, means that the focus on resilience is often greatest when applied to them. This Article centers them. It traces the development of resilience in the (non-Native) ecological and psychological literature. Although resilience is used across many different disciplines, it is especially prominent in ecological literature about resilient institutions, such as communities and cities, and in psychological literature about resilient individuals. …

Criminalizing Battered Mothers, Courtney Cross

Scholarly Works

How a domestic violence survivor responds to the abuse she is experiencing depends on many factors. Some critical considerations include her access to resources, desire to stay in her relationship, and assessment of her own safety. Criminal and civil court systems place enormous pressure on survivors to separate from their abusive partners. Not only are survivors with children pressured to leave, they are punished when they stay. That punishment can come in any combination of diminished custody rights, limited parental rights, and incarceration. Yet a survivor who flees with her children is not immune to these same consequences: if she …

Using Feminist Theory To Advance Equal Justice Under Law, Linda L. Berger, Bridget J. Crawford, Kathryn M. Stanchi

Scholarly Works

This essay provides an overview of the purposes, themes and scholarly methodologies evidenced at the October 2016 conference, The U.S. Feminist Judgments Project: Writing the Law, Rewriting the Future, a two-day conference hosted by the Center for Constitutional Law at the University of Akron School of Law. This essay provides some of the background to the development of the path-breaking book, Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Opinions of the United States Supreme Court (Cambridge University Press, 2016). It also focuses attention on the importance of diversity on the bench, with a particular need for judges who understand or experience the intersecting …

Telling Stories In The Supreme Court: Voices Briefs And The Role Of Democracy In Constitutional Deliberation, Linda H. Edwards

Scholarly Works

On January 4, 2016, over 112 women lawyers, law professors, and former judges told the world that they had had an abortion. In a daring amicus brief that captured national media attention, the women “came out” to their clients; to the lawyers with or against whom they practice; to the judges before whom they appear; and to the Justices of the Supreme Court.

The past three years have seen an explosion of such “voices briefs,” 16 in Obergefell and 17 in Whole Woman’s Health. The briefs can be powerful, but their use is controversial. They tell the stories of non-parties—strangers …

Shame Agent, Joan W. Howarth

Scholarly Works

As a nation, we have recently experienced a significant positive shift in norms against casual campus sexual violence. These changes are perhaps as dramatic as the attitudinal shifts over recent decades regarding drunk driving or cigarette smoking. In a world in which masculinity is too often associated with sexual conquest, and women still suffer under intense and conflicting pressures regarding their sexual behavior, pushing this potential transformation forward is both difficult and necessary. Enforcement of Title IX protections has become a crucial driver of much of this change.

This is an account of some of what I learned as a …

Beyond The Basketball Court: How Brittney Griner's In My Skin Illustrates Title Ix's Failure To Protect Lgbt Athletes At Religious Institutions, Leslie C. Griffin

Scholarly Works

Symposium: Playing with Pride: LGBT Inclusion in Sports.

Unlike schoolteachers, janitors, coaches, food-service directors, organists, and other workers, professional athletes usually command center stage in society. Their successes and failures loom larger than life. Sometimes their prominent lives highlight themes hidden from public discussion or neglected by the majority. Professional basketball player Brittney Griner's autobiography does just that, by illuminating how "religious freedom" can undermine equality, especially LGBT equality.

From Victims To Litigants, Elizabeth L. Macdowell

Scholarly Works

This Article reports findings from an ethnographic study of self-help programs in two western states. The study investigated how self-help assistance provided by partnerships between courts and nongovernmental organizations implicates advocacy and access to justice for domestic violence survivors. The primary finding is that self-help programs may inadvertently work to curtail, rather than expand, advocacy resources. Furthermore, problems identified with self-help service delivery and negative impacts on advocacy systems may be explained by the structure of work within self-help programs and the nature of partnerships to provide self-help services. The Author uncovers previously unseen impacts of self-help programs on survivors …

Policing And The Clash Of Masculinities, Ann C. Mcginley

Scholarly Works

In 2014 and 2015, the news media inundated U.S. society with reports of brutal killings by police of black men in major American cities. Unfortunately, police departments do not typically keep data on police killings of civilians. The data that exist do show, however, that at least for a five-month period in 2015, there was a disproportionate rate of police killings of unarmed black men.

There is no question that race and class play a key role in the nature of policing that occurs in poor black urban neighborhoods. However, the relationship between police officers and their victims is not …

Models Of Invisibility: Rendering Domestic And Other Gendered Violence Visible To Students Through Clinical Law Teaching, Elizabeth L. Macdowell, Ann Cammett

Scholarly Works

The proliferation of university courses about domestic violence includes clinical courses in law schools in which students represent victims in their legal cases. This essay advocates for a broader approach to teaching about the problem. Using examples from their clinic cases, the authors show how teachers can overcome pedagogical challenges and render domestic and other forms of gendered violence, including state and community violence, more visible to students by intentionally raising and placing it within larger frameworks of structural inequality. In this way, students learn to identify and address gendered violence even when it is not the presenting problem.

Domestic Violence And The Politics Of Self-Help, Elizabeth L. Macdowell

Scholarly Works

Self-help programs are conceptualized as alternatives to attorney representation that can help both courts and unrepresented litigants. The rhetoric of self-help also typically includes empowering unrepresented individuals to help themselves. But how do self-help programs respond to litigants’ efforts at self-advocacy? This Article reports findings from a study of courthouse self-help programs assisting unrepresented litigants applying for protection orders. The central finding is that self-help staff members were not neutral in the provision of services despite a professed ethic of neutrality. Using the sociological concept of demeanor, this Article shows that staff members rewarded protection order applicants who conformed to …

Introduction To The U.S. Feminist Judgments Project, Linda L. Berger, Kathryn M. Stanchi, Bridget J. Crawford

Scholarly Works

The U.S. Feminist Judgments Project turns attention to the U.S. Supreme Court. Contributors to this volume challenge the formalistic concepts that U.S. Supreme Court opinions are, or should be, written from a neutral vantage point and that they are, or should be, based on deductive logic or “pure” rationality. When the project’s authors brought their own feminist consciousness or philosophy to some of the most important (and supposedly “neutral”) decisions and assertions about gender-related issues, the judicial decisions took on a very different character. Feminist consciousness broadens and widens the lens through which we view law and helps the decision …