Law Commons^™

Feminists, Angels, Poets, And Revolutionaries: What I'Ve Learned From Ruthann Robson And Nicole Brossard On What It Means To Be A Law Teacher, Kim Brooks

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This short piece was written as a tribute to the contributions Ruthann Robson has made to legal pedagogy, and was presented at a Symposium in her honor held at CUNY.

Conscience And Emergency Contraception, Leslie C. Griffin

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Harassment Of Sex(Y) Workers: Applying Title Vii To Sexualized Industries, Ann C. Mcginley

Scholarly Works

Like the women blackjack dealers at the Hard Rock, cocktail servers, exotic dancers, and prostitutes in legal brothels are vulnerable to sexual harassment by customers. The content of the four jobs reveals the fallacy of the "good girl"/"bad girl" dichotomy, because all four jobs require behavior that falls into both categories if we expand the definition of good and bad girls to include gendered behavior as well as sexual behavior. Once the defense applies to discrimination in sexualized environments, it could logically apply to sexual or racial harassment cases in companies that permit their employees to harbor and act upon …

Peoples' Tribunals: Legitimate Or Rough Justice, Christine M. Chinkin

Articles

The article examines the use of Peoples' Tribunals in seeking access to justice where none has been possible through more formal methods. It uses as illustration the Women's International War Crimes Tribunal that sought justice for the so-called comfort women, the primarily Asian women who were subjected to sexual slavery by the Japanese military before and during World War Two. The article briefly recounts the fate of the comfort women and then considers the legal and practical obstacles they faced in accessing justice at the end of the War. It outlines how towards the end of the 20th century the …

Welcome And Opening Remarks Work/Life Conflict In The Legal Profession, Jamie Amir, Sarah Lechner, Stuart L. Deutsch, Tanya Kateri Hernandez

Faculty Scholarship

At a symposium sponsored by the Women’s Rights Law Reporter, Professor Tanya Hernandez introduces the keynote speaker, Professor Joan Williams, a law professor at the American Law School, Washington College of Law in Washington,D.C. where she teaches Property, Women's Legal History, Feminist Jurist Prudence, and a Jurist Prudence seminar. The topic of the symposium is Work/Life Conflict in the Legal Profession.

A Conversation Among Deans, Katharine T. Bartlett, Edward Rubin, W. H. Knight

Faculty Scholarship

On March 10, 2006, the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender, Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, and Harvard Law Review co-sponsored a conference, "Results: Legal Education, Institutional Change, and a Decade of Gender Studies," to address the number of student experience studies that detail women's lower performance in and dissatisfaction with law school. Rather than advocate for a particular set of responses to the different experiences of men and women in legal education , this conference sought to foster a discussion about the institutional challenges these patterns highlight. As a means of accomplishing this end, law school deans from …

Homo Sacer, Homosexual: Some Thoughts On Waging Tax Guerrilla Warfare, Anthony C. Infanti

Articles

Inspired by Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, this essay raises the question whether lesbians and gay men should fundamentally rethink their relationship with the law. Until now, lesbians and gay men have played by the rules: We bide our time for the appropriate moment to challenge the application of the law, and then do so from within the legal system through impact litigation. Focusing on Agamben's discussion of Kafka's parable, "Before the Law," this essay challenges us to consider whether, instead of engaging the law on its own terms, lesbians and gay men should use the …

Stepparents As Third Parties In Relation To Their Stepchildren, Margaret Mahoney

Articles

The "third parties" who inspired this symposium are categories of adults who form de facto family ties with children to whom they do not stand in the relationship of legal parent. In the eyes of the law, the status of parenthood is generally restricted to biological and adoptive parents. Within this frame of reference, stepparents constitute a major category of "third parties" who develop relationships with their stepchildren but are not regarded as legal parents.

In spite of the long history of stepfamily issues in the legal arena, and the increased demand for regulation in recent decades, little progress has …

Unwrapping Racial Harassment Law, Pat K. Chew

Articles

This article is based on a pioneering empirical study of racial harassment in the workplace in which we statistically analyze federal court opinions from 1976 to 2002. Part I offers an overview of racial harassment law and research, noting its common origin with and its close dependence upon sexual harassment legal jurisprudence. In order to put the study's analysis in context, Part I describes the dispute resolution process from which racial harassment cases arise.

Parts II and III present a clear picture of how racial harassment law has played out in the courts - who are the plaintiffs and defendants, …

The Adventure(S) Of Blackness In Western Culture: An Epistolary Exchange On Old And New Identity Wars, Adrienne D. Davis, Robert S. Chang

Scholarship@WashULaw

Through a series of letters, Professors Robert Chang and Adrienne Davis examine the politics of positionality in law and literary criticism. They use the scholarly debates and conversations around critical race theory and feminist legal theory as a starting point to formulate some thoughts about Critical Race Feminism ("CRF") and its future. The authors use the epistolary form as a literary device to allow them to collaborate on this project while maintaining their own voices. Thus, the letters are not dated. The letters pay particular attention to various border crossings: male attempts to engage in feminist literary criticism, white attempts …

Race And Gender In The Law Review, Cynthia Grant Bowman, Dorothy E. Roberts, Leonard S. Rubinowitz

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Strange Career Of Jane Crow: Sex Segregation And The Transformation Of Anti-Discrimination Discourse, Serena Mayeri

All Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the causes and consequences of a transformation in anti-discrimination discourse between 1970 and 1977 that shapes our constitutional landscape to this day. Fears of cross-racial intimacy leading to interracial marriage galvanized many white Southerners to oppose school desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s. In the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, some commentators, politicians, and ordinary citizens proposed a solution: segregate the newly integrated schools by sex. When court-ordered desegregation became a reality in the late 1960s, a smattering of southern school districts implemented sex separation plans. As late as 1969, no one saw sex-segregated schools …

Comparative Law Observations On Taxation Of Same-Sex Couples, Henry Ordower

All Faculty Scholarship

Identifies the various models for addressing the interplay between same sex relationship protections and taxation outside the United States.

Inheritance Law In Tanzania: The Impoverishment Of Widows And Daughters, Tamar Ezer

Articles

No abstract provided.

Child Marriage And Guardianship In Tanzania: Robbing Girls Of Their Childhood And Infantilizing Women, Tamar Ezer, Kate Kerr, Kara Major, Aparna Polavarapu, Tina Tolentino

Articles

No abstract provided.

The Equality Paradise: Paradoxes Of The Law's Power To Advance Equality, Marcia L. Mccormick

All Faculty Scholarship

This paper, written for Texas Wesleyan Law School's Gloucester Conference, ¿Too Pure an Air: Law and the Quest for Freedom, Justice, and Equality,¿ is a brief exploration of a broader project. Every civil rights movement must struggle with how to allocate scarce resources to accomplish the broadest change possible. This paper compares the legal and political strategies of the Black rights movement and the women's rights movement in the United States, comparing both the strategy choices and the results. These two movement followed essentially the same strategies. Where they have attained success and where each has failed demonstrates the limits …

What The Internet Age Means For Female Scholars, Rosa Brooks

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Is the Internet-driven transformation of legal scholarship good for the girls, or bad for the girls?

Will it remove some of the handicaps that have dogged women's efforts to join the ranks of scholarly "superstars"? Or will it only increase the professional obstacles still faced by women in legal academia? In this short Essay, the author tries to predict some of the promises and perils that the Internet holds for women in the legal academy.

Mad Women And Desperate Girls: Infanticide And Child Murder In Law And Myth, Elizabeth Rapaport

Faculty Scholarship

This article first offers a comparison between the stereotype dominated understanding of infanticide and child homicide in the United States and the statistical landscape it obscures. It then turns to the history of the crime of infanticide, a history which confirms that a fascination with deviant women as long dominated the story of infanticide. The article concludes with the exploration of the "Good Mother Defense." That exploration reveals the extent to which the fate of a woman tried for child homicide hinges on whether the jury sees her as a good mother, rather than on the prosecutors' ability to prove …

Addressing The Scourge Of Human Trafficking: The Challenge Ahead, Roza Pati

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Getting Away With Murder: Guatemala's Failure To Protect Women And Rodi Alvarado's Quest For Safety, Angélica Cházaro

Articles

This report examines the underlying conditions that cause women like Rodi to flee their home countries and seek protection elsewhere. The report starts with a description of the circumstances that led Rodi to leave Guatemala. It then analyzes the widespread violence against and murders of women in Guatemala, specifically focusing on the number of murders, the victims, the brutality of the crimes, the context in which they occur, and the theories behind the murders. It next looks to the aspects of the Guatemalan legal and judicial systems that render women vulnerable to violence and then fail to protect them. It …

Working In The Best Interest Of Children: Facilitating The Collaboration Of Lawyers And Social Workers In Abuse And Neglect Cases, Mary Kay Kisthardt

Faculty Works

Working in the best interest of children in abuse and neglect cases is a daunting task for both lawyers and social workers. The legal system is inadequate to meet the myriad needs of children and families in crisis. Yet only under the authority of the legal system can social work and other mental health professions intervene in families on behalf of children. The juvenile court system has been buffeted historically by the competing values and methods of social work and law. The institution and its rules are still evolving today. This dynamic environment means that even if competition for "ownership" …

Re-Thinking Alimony: The Aaml's Considerations For Calculating Alimony, Spousal Support Or Maintenance, Mary Kay Kisthardt

Faculty Works

The mission of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers is "to encourage the study, improve the practice, elevate the standards and advance the cause of matrimonial law, to the end that the welfare of the family and society be protected." The AAML Comission was charged to analyze, critically review and make recommendations consistent with the mission of the Academy. After considering all available sources of information the Commission concluded that there are two significant and related problems associated with the setting of spousal support. The first is a lack of consistency resulting in a perception of unfairness. From this flows …

Mandatory Waiting Periods For Abortions And Female Mental Health, Jonathan Klick

All Faculty Scholarship

Proponents of laws requiring a waiting period before a woman can receive an abortion argue that these cooling off periods protect against rash decisions on the part of women in the event of unplanned pregnancies. Opponents claim, at best, waiting periods have no effect on decision-making and, at worst, they subject women to additional mental anguish and stress. In this article, I examine these competing claims using adult female suicide rates at the state level as a proxy for mental health. Panel data analyses suggest that the adoption of mandatory waiting periods reduce suicide rates by about 10 percent, and …

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.

Latcrit At Ten Years, Margaret E. Montoya

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Denial, Antoinette M. Sedillo Lopez

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Foreign And International Law In Constitutional Gay Rights Litigation: What Claims, What Use And Whose Law?, William D. Araiza

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

On Justitia, Race, Gender, And Blindness, Bennett Capers

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Sexual Punishments, Alice Ristroph

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Need For A Reduced Workweek In The United States, Vicki Schultz, Allison K. Hoffman

All Faculty Scholarship

This paper argues that a reduced workweek offers a way to alleviate work-family conflict without exacerbating the sex-based division of labor in paid work and unpaid family work. We distinguish our position from two other approaches: (1) one that compensates unpaid family work directly (through such policies as traditional welfare provision, or alimony), policies we argue can discourage women from labor force attachment and contribute to sex-stereotyping and sex-segregated employment; and (2) an approach that spurs employers to accommodate workers' family responsibilities (through such policies as part-time work for parents), policies workers often avoid out of a well founded fear …