Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons^™

The Tragic Costs Of ‘Protecting’ Trans Youth, Kimberly Jade Norwood, Jaimie Hileman

Scholarship@WashULaw

In the past few decades, our nation has made substantial progress on the rights of LGBTQ+ people. The legalization of gay marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015 was transformative for our nation. Just five years later, another huge victory was scored in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protected gay and transgender people.

With every gain, backlash often follows. Three years after Bostock, a tsunami of anti-LGBTQ+ bills, and more specifically, anti-Trans bills, littered the nation. Hundreds of bills have been filed since Bostock, …

Reflections On “Personal Responsibility” After Covid And Dobbs: Doubling Down On Privacy, Susan Frelich Appleton, Laura A. Rosenbury

Scholarship@WashULaw

This essay uses lenses of gender, race, marriage, and work to trace understandings of “personal responsibility” in laws, policies, and conversations about public support in the United States over three time periods: (I) the pre-COVID era, from the beginning of the American “welfare state” through the start of the Trump administration; (II) the pandemic years; and (III) the present post-pandemic period. We sought to explore the possibility that COVID and the assistance programs it inspired might have reshaped the notion of personal responsibility and unsettled assumptions about privacy and dependency. In fact, a mixed picture emerges. On the one hand, …

Teaching With Feminist Judgments: A Global Conversation, Susan Frelich Appleton, Gabrielle J. Appleby, Ross Astoria, Linda L. Berger, Bridget J. Crawford, Sharon Cowan, Rosalind Dixon, Troy Lavers, Andrea L. Mcardle, Elisabeth Mcdonald, Teri A. Mcmurtry-Chubb, Vanessa Munro, Kathryn M. Stanchi, Pam Wilkins

Scholarship@WashULaw

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 …

Introduction To The Symposium: Access To Justice: Mass Incarceration And Masculinity Through A Black Feminist Lens, Adrienne D. Davis, Annette R. Appell

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Introduction to the Symposium, Race to Justice: Mass Incarceration and Masculinity through a Black Feminist Lens, rehearses the animating forces that led to a colloquium and a series of papers that explore the question of mass incarceration and the negative state engagement surrounding it through gendered and feminist lenses. The Introduction explains how an analysis of mass incarceration through the lens of gender complicates what is often conceived as a story about race. Instead mass incarceration can be more deeply understood through its gendered effects on men and the women and children connected to those men. These connections include …

Introduction To The Symposium: The Politics Of Identity After Identity Politics, Adrienne D. Davis

Scholarship@WashULaw

The Essays in this volume seek to shed some light on the politics of identity after the 2008 Presidential election in which identity politics dominated. To explore how 2008 and its aftermath have shifted both academic and political debates, Professor Adrienne Davis invited scholars from a variety of disciplines who embrace diverse methodologies—political theory; cultural studies; history; and law. These authors explore identity politics as a field of academic inquiry; a cultural discourse; a legal claim; a negotiation of institutions and power; and a predicate for political alliances. Collectively, the Articles both develop new frameworks and intervene in old ones …

Three Snapshots Of Scholarly Engagement: Catharine Mackinnon’S Ethical Entrenchment, Transformative Politics, And Personal Commitment, Adrienne D. Davis

Scholarship@WashULaw

One of Catharine MacKinnon's germinal works calls attention to the political effects of modifiers. So, I was intrigued by the modifier of the conference panel that sparked this essay, the "engaged" scholar. I was struck by the quite distinct connotations invoked by this modifier. Of course there is the use I believe was envisioned by the plenary organizers as characterizing Professor MacKinnon's stunning body of legal work: engaged as in connected to something, seriously paying attention to consequences, rigorous and sustained involvement with a subject. Yet there are other connotations of engaged that I think are also helpful in understanding …

Regulating Polygamy: Intimacy, Default Rules, And Bargaining For Equality, Adrienne D. Davis

Scholarship@WashULaw

Most legal scholarship about polygamy has approached it in one of two ways. Some have framed it as a question of how far constitutional protection for religious freedom and privacy rights extends, including what we might think of as “intimacy liberty,” particularly in light of Lawrence v. Texas. Others have debated decriminalization, based on the contested effects of polygamy on matters ranging from women’s subordination to fraudulent behavior to democracy. This Essay shifts attention from the constitutionality and decriminalization debates to a new set of questions: whether and how polygamy might be effectively recognized and regulated, consistent with contemporary social …

Making Up Is Hard To Do: Race/Gender/Sexual Orientation In The Law School Classroom, Adrienne D. Davis, Robert S. Chang

Scholarship@WashULaw

This exchange of letters picks up where Professors Adrienne Davis and Robert Chang left off in an earlier exchange that examined who speaks, who is allowed to speak, and what is remembered. Here, Professors Davis and Chang explore the dynamics of race, gender, and sexual orientation in the law school classroom. They compare the experiences of African American women and Asian American men in trying to perform as law professors, considering how makeup and other gender tools simultaneously assist and hinder such performances. Their exchange examines the possibility of bias that complicates the use of student evaluations in assessing teaching …

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 …

Slavery And The Roots Of Sexual Harassment, Adrienne D. Davis

Scholarship@WashULaw

In recent years, feminist scholars and activists have demonstrated the ways that U.S. slavery functioned as a system of gender supremacy. It entailed the dominance of men over women as well as whites over blacks. Adding the gender lens has shed immense light on the ways that sex, law, and power operated in the racially supremacist enslaving South. In recent years, this literature has emphasized the ways that slavery's sexual and racial subordination converged around the bodies of enslaved black women. One project within this literature characterizes slavery as a "sexual political economy" to make explicit the connections between its …

Foreword-Symposium: Straightening It Out: Joan William On Unbending Gender, Adrienne D. Davis

Scholarship@WashULaw

As most men and women acknowledge, gender is a battleground. Most of us are fairly clear on biological sex: who bears children, who ejaculates sperm, even whose (big) hands might open a stuck jar and whose (smaller ones) could pull that cufflink out of the garbage disposal. What remains less clear is how social gender roles flow from this: Does lactation result in eighteen years of primary caregiving? Should the chemical realities of testosterone shape the law governing sexual assault? 3 Should the dynamics of heterosexual relationships mirror the physics of heterosexual intercourse (penetration equals power)? Does the reality of …

Foreword-Symposium: Gender, Work & Family Project Inaugural Feminist Legal Theorylecture, Adrienne D. Davis, Joan C. Williams

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Symposium inaugurates the Annual Feminist Legal Theory Lecture Series of the Washington College of Law's Gender, Work & Family Project. Martha Fineman, in honor of her two towering achievements in feminist jurisprudence, is the first lecturer. The first achievement is her ground-breaking work on dependency, about which we will say more later. The second is her equally influential Feminist Theory Workshop, which she began at the University of Wisconsin, and has since moved to Columbia University and now to Cornell. The annual Workshop has provided the opportunity for scores of scholars to present papers related to feminist jurisprudence, helping …

Panel Two: Who's Minding The Baby?, Adrienne D. Davis, Catherine J. Ross, Marion Crain, Bonnie Thornton Dill

Scholarship@WashULaw

This publication is a transcript of remarks made by multiple law professors discussing the relationship between race, gender, and class and focusing on feminism and the challenges faced by working mothers.