Law Commons^™

Becoming A Citizen: Marriage, Immigration, And Assimilation, Kerry Abrams

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Untold Truths: The Exclusion Of Enforced Sterilizations From The Peruvian Truth Commission's Final Report, Jocelyn E. Getgen

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This Article argues that the exclusion of enforced sterilization cases from the Peruvian Truth Commission's investigation and Final Report effectively erases State responsibility and decreases the likelihood for justice and reparations for women victims-survivors of State sponsored violence in Peru. In a context of deep cultural and economic divides and violent conflict, this Article recounts how the State's Family Planning Program violated Peruvian women's reproductive rights by sterilizing low-income, indigenous Quechua-speaking women without informed consent. This Article argues that these systematic reproductive injustices constitute an act of genocide, proposes an independent inquiry, and advocates for a more inclusive investigation and …

The Hidden Dimension Of Nineteenth-Century Immigration Law, Kerry Abrams

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Banding Together: Reflections On The Role Of The Women's Bar Association Of The District Of Columbia And The Washington College Of Law In Promoting Women's Rights, Jamie Abrams, Daniela Kraiem

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The Washington College of Law and the Women's Bar Association of the District of Columbia share an important historical connection; Ellen Spencer Mussey and Emma Gillett founded both institutions together, in 1898 and 1917, respectively. Mussey and Gillett were pioneers in legal education, legal reform, and the development of women lawyers. 2 More significant than the work they performed during their lives, however, is the legacy of activism, reform, and support that they ignited by founding two institutions that advance women in the law. These institutions have trained and supported generations of women lawyers through world wars and depressions, through …

The Third Wave: Young Feminists Find Common Ground With Those Who Came Before Them, Jane C. Murphy

All Faculty Scholarship

Reporting on recent research at Chicago-Kent Law School and supported by studies at other schools, a group of student panelists noted sharp differences in participation rates in class discussions and lower feelings of self-confidence among female students compared with their male counterparts.

Fighting Women: The Military, Sex, And Extrajudicial Constitutional Change, Jill Elaine Hasday

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Supreme Court in Rostker v. Goldberg (1981) upheld male-only military registration, and endorsed male-only conscription and combat positions. Few cases have challenged restrictions on women's military service since Rostker, and none have reached the Supreme Court. Federal statutes continue to exclude women from military registration and draft eligibility, and military regulations still ban women from some combat positions. Yet many aspects of women's legal status in the military have changed in striking respects over the past quarter century while academic attention has focused elsewhere. Congress has eliminated statutory combat exclusions, the military has opened many combat positions to women, …

Rape And The Querela In Italy: False Protection Of Victim Agency, Rachel A. Van Cleave

Publications

Italian law requires rape victims to make a formal request that the state prosecute the alleged rapist. This request is called a querela and without such a request prosecution does not proceed, though there are some exceptions. In addition, the request for prosecution is irrevocable; the victim cannot withdraw her request for prosecution. Italian law has included the querela requirement for over one hundred years. It was included in the Zanardelli Code of 1889,3 the first Penal Code of unified Italy, maintained in the Rocco Code of 1930, the Penal Code of Fascist Italy, and-after a great deal of controversy-the …

Abortion, Equality, And Administrative Regulation, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

Abortion and equality are a common pairing; courts as well as legal scholars have noted the importance of abortion and a woman's ability to control whether and when she has children to her ability to participate fully and equally in society. Abortion and administrative regulation, on the other hand, are a more unusual combination. Most restrictions on abortion are legislatively imposed, while guarantees of reproductive freedom are constitutionally derived, so administrative law does not frequently figure in debates about access to abortion.

Learning To Love After Learning To Harm: Post-Conflict Reconstruction, Gender Equality And Cultural Values, Penelope Andrews

Articles & Chapters

The question that the Jacob Zuma rape trial and its aftermath raised was how a country like South Africa, with such a wonderful Constitution and expansive Bill of Rights, could generate such negative and retrogressive attitudes towards women. In line with this inquiry, this article raises three issues: The first focuses on the legacy of apartheid violence and specifically the cultures of masculinity, the underbelly of apartheid violence. Second, the article explores the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), a vital part of the post-apartheid transformation agenda, to examine how the TRC pursued violations of women's human rights. …

Internalizing Gender: International Goals, Comparative Realities, Darren Rosenblum

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This Article uses the example of international women's political rights to examine the value of comparative methodologies in analyzing the process by which nations internalize international norms. As internalized in Brazil and France, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women suggests possibilities for (and possible limitations of) interdisciplinary comparative and international law scholarship. Indeed, international law scholarship is divided between theories of internalization and neorealist challenges to those theories. Comparative methodologies add crucial complexity to internalization theory, the success of which depends on acknowledging vast differences in national legal cultures. Further, comparative methodologies expose important …

No Guarantees: Lessons From The Property Rights Gained And Lost By Married Women In Two American Colonies, Yvette Joy Liebesman

All Faculty Scholarship

While our own history demonstrates long-term forward progress and expansion of women’s rights, it is also marked with periods of back-treading, and there is no absolute assurance that the rights women in the United States enjoy today will be present in the future. Rights of property, suffrage, and liberty are not guaranteed to last forever, and not just in places such as Iran and Afghanistan. Indeed, we are only a few generations removed from circumstances in which our own freedom was sharply curtailed, and they are under a continuing threat.

Learning From Wal-Mart, Melissa Hart

Publications

This article considers the landmark gender discrimination class action, Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, both as a prototype of an emerging litigation strategy and also as a case that is entirely unique. As part of a growing trend of gender discrimination class claims, Dukes has the potential to push the boundaries of the law to confront the pervasive, tenacious stereotypes that continue to limit women's workplace opportunities. The plaintiffs' arguments - both the narrative of discrimination their evidence set out and the legal strategies they chose - are strikingly similar to claims that have been made in many class action …

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 United States As Global Sheriff: Using Unilateral Sanctions To Combat Human Trafficking, Janie Chuang

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

In recent years, the issue of human trafficking - the recruitment or movement of persons by means of coercion or deception into exploitative labor or slavery-like practices - has moved from the margins to the mainstream political agenda. The rapid proliferation of international, regional and domestic anti-trafficking laws bespeaks universal condemnation of the practice, but belies deep divisions among States over how to define and approach the problem. It is thus significant that the international community was able to reach consensus and conclude a new international law on trafficking - the Palermo Protocol. But just weeks before the signing of …

Lifting Our Veil Of Ignorance: Culture, Constitutionalism, And Women's Human Rights In Post-September 11 America, Catherine Powell

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

While we live in an Age of Rights, culture continues to be a major challenge to the human rights project. During the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in the 1940s and during the Cold War era, the periodic disputes that erupted over civil and political rights in contrast to economic, social and cultural rights could be read either explicitly or implicitly as a cultural debate.

Gender has figured prominently in this perceived culture clash, for example, with the Bush administration's use of Afghan women as cultural icons in need of liberation--a claim that helped justify the …

Lifting Our Veil Of Ignorance: Culture, Constitutionalism, And Women's Human Rights In Post-September 11 America , Catherine Powell

Faculty Scholarship

This Article challenges the culture clash view of human rights law, which posits a clash between Western countries' presumed respect for women's human rights and non-Western countries' presumed rejection of these rights on cultural and religious grounds. Since the September 11 terrorist attacks, this view has taken on new significance, in light of the perceived civilizational divide between the Western and Muslim worlds. The Article calls into question this view, by examining cultural stereotypes of women used to oppose U.S. ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. My reading, therefore, is at odds …

Gender And Globalization, Christine M. Chinkin

Book Chapters

Christine Chinkin examines the impact of globalization on the public/private dichotomy and the status of women. She begins by tracing how traditional power structures, organized around the public/private division, lead to the subordination of women. The weakening of the nation-state at the end of the twentieth century offers a potential challenge to this gender hierarchy, but the emergence of economic forces associated with globalization and the transition to free market economies in the countries of the former Soviet bloc threaten women's struggle for equality.

Women Choosing Diverse Workplaces: A Rational Preference With Disturbing Implications For Both Occupational Segregation And Economic Analysis Of Law, Scott A. Moss

Publications

Despite women's dramatic labor market gains, there remains a striking degree of occupational segregation by gender. Analysts typically blame discrimination or women's work/family priorities. This Article offers a different explanation.

It is hard for women choosing jobs or occupations to know where they will face discrimination, particularly since recent judicial decisions eliminated certain employer signals that once differentiated fair and discriminatory firms. One way women can effectuate a preference for nondiscriminatory workplaces is by choosing gender-diverse workplaces. Nondiverse workplaces often are not female-friendly, and discrimination may be the reason they are nondiverse. In economic terms, women rationally use level of …

Operation Rescue, Eric S. Yellin

History Faculty Publications

Operation Rescue, founded in 1986, became known as one of the most militant groups opposing a woman’s right to abortion as established in the 1973 Supreme Court case Roe vs. Wade.

Rights Inside Out: The Case Of The Women's Human Rights Campaign, Annelise Riles

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This essay traces the relationship between activists and academics involved in the campaign for “women’s rights as human rights” as a case study of the relationship between different classes of what I call “knowledge professionals” self-consciously acting in a transnational domain. The puzzle that animates this essay is the following: how was it that at the very moment at which a critique of “rights” and a reimagination of rights as “rights talk” proved to be such fertile ground for academic scholarship did the same “rights” prove to be an equally fertile ground for activist networking and lobbying activities? The paper …

Out Of The Shadows: Traversing The Imaginary Of Sameness, Difference, And Relationalism - A Human Rights Proposal, Berta E. Hernández-Truyol

UF Law Faculty Publications

This work seeks to develop a methodology that serves a women's anti-subordination project. To achieve this goal, Part II sets out the theoretical background of feminist theory (II.A) and three waves of feminism (II.B). Part II.C articulates the feminist revelations about law these analytical frameworks have engendered.

This project sets out to craft a methodology that can assist the goal of full personhood for women. Women's full personhood is a substantive concept that, as detailed in Part III, I ground on international human rights notions of fundamental rights - rights that we have, or ought to have, because we are …

Panel One: Gender, Race, And Sexuality: Historical Themes And Emerging Issues In Women's Rights Law: Introduction, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Hello and welcome. We are thrilled to see you all here. I speak on behalf of my co-panelists in thanking Sarah Weddington for laying some of the groundwork on which we are standing and for laying some of the foundation that gives rise to the issues we are going to talk about on this panel.

Parallel Lives: Women's Rights And Lesbian Rights Litigation, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

I love the title of this panel because it gave me a chance to think about the historical themes and emerging issues in law related to women's rights, which of course is a mere endless set of possibilities.

I spent much of the last decade doing lesbian and gay civil rights litigation, and the question that I will focus on today grows out of that work and is a comparative one or at least a relational one. The question is this: What is the relationship between women's rights litigation as it has evolved in the last thirty years and lesbian …

Sex, Gender, And September 11, Hilary Charlesworth, Christine M. Chinkin

Articles

The October 2001 issue of the American Journal of International Law contained several editorials on the international law implications of the hijackings of September 11, 2001, and their aftermath. In one respect these editorials resemble other writings on these events in academic and popular media: questions of sex and gender are largely overlooked.' In our view, however, concepts of sex and gender provide a valuable perspective on these devastating actions.' We use the term "sex" here to refer to issues about women as distinct biological beings from men, and the term "gender" to encompass social understandings of femininity and masculinity. …

Women Imagining Justice, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

I'm enormously honored to be here with such an impressive group of women interested in the complex question of Women, Justice, and Authority. Thanks to Judith Resnik and Mary Clark and the students working with them for all their hard work in putting this outstanding weekend together.

The five of us are charged with the unenviable task of "Imagining Justice," a task not significantly less daunting than, say, imagining truth, humor, or community. In preparation for this afternoon, I've been in my office or in the subway trying to imagine justice and after some time, was horrified when I discovered …

Exploring Feminism Globally To Achieve Global Feminism, Anna M. Han

Faculty Publications

Edited Speech delivered on October 6, 2000 at the University of San Diego Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues Conference on Intersectionality and Critical Race Feminism.

In writing this article, I kept thinking of the various stories that I heard during the workshops in Beijing and again I was struck by the commonality of the underlying issues facing women from around the world. While there may be dramatic political, cultural, linguistic and economic differences, I posit that there were more similarities than there were differences.

Holding-Up More Than Half The Sky: Marketization And The Status Of Women In China, Anna M. Han

Faculty Publications

The purpose of this article is to examine generally how Chinese women fared under communism and more specifically, delve into how marketization has adversely impacted the status of women in China. It is this author's contention that despite the overall improvements in the standard of living, Chinese women are increasingly being marginalized economically. The long-term effects of subjugating the advancement of women for the immediate benefits of China's experimentation with a market economy hold vast implications for the future of the country. As China progresses economically, politically and socially, it cannot afford to leave half of its population behind as …

Care As A Public Value: Linking Responsibility, Resources, And Republicanism, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

I begin this Article with the preceding two statements concerning care for children because they focus on the relationship between resources and responsibility and capture two conflicting approaches to that relationship. The first statement resists a definition of "responsibility" that leaves out the work of social reproduction, that is, of caring for children and preparing them to take their place as responsible, self-governing members of society. Highlighting the lack of resources that poor parents face when tackling the work of social reproduction, the statement also suggests common ground among parents across class lines as to the importance of caring for …

Law, Culture, And Equality - Human Rights' Influence On Domestic Norms: The Case Of Women In The Americas, Berta E. Hernández-Truyol

UF Law Faculty Publications

This essay originated with a panel on Alternatives to the Regular Courts that took place during the first Legal and Policy Issues in the Americas conference sponsored by the University of Florida Levin College of Law. Some of the possible alternatives to the courts, in the trade field, that have been discussed include mediation, arbitration, constitutional courts and binational dispute panels. This essay reflects upon another alternative to domestic courts that progressively and increasingly is also being invoked in the trade context: international and regional human rights regimes.

I specifically will review the Inter-American Human Rights System to ascertain the …

Restricting The Rights Of Poor Mothers: An International Human Rights Critique Of "Workfare", Shruti Rana

Faculty Scholarship

In every society, the work that women do is undervalued and unrecognized. Political and social tensions behind conceptions of work, motherhood, and equality can ignite movements that threaten the human rights of women. One such movement is underway in the United States where recent “Workfare” provisions specifically target and punish the most vulnerable members of society under the guise of reform and morality. This critique of Workfare aims to demonstrate some of the dynamism and power of a human rights framework, and to lay the groundwork for effective action to improve the plight of the single mothers who rely on …