Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons^™

Dealing With Dangerous Women: Sexual Assault Under Cover Of National Security Laws In India, Surabhi Chopra Prof.

Surabhi Chopra Prof.

DEALING WITH DANGEROUS WOMEN: SEXUAL ASSAULT UNDER COVER OF NATIONAL SECURITY LAWS IN INDIA

This article examines violence against women suspected of being security threats in India’s internal conflict zones, one of the very few scholarly works to do so.

I focus on two cases in particular. In 2004, Thangjam Manorama was arrested by paramilitaries on suspicion of belonging to a violent separatist group, and found raped and murdered several hours later. I look at her family’s attempts to hold the armed forces accountable for her death. I also look at the ongoing criminal prosecution of Soni Sori, an indigenous …

The Ncaa's Transgender Student-Athlete Policy: How Attempting To Be More Inclusive Has Led To Gender And Gender Identity Discrimination, Elliot S. Rozenberg

Elliot S Rozenberg

No abstract provided.

Corporate Boardroom Diversity: Why Are We Still Talking About This?, Lawrence J. Trautman

Lawrence J. Trautman Sr.

What exactly is board diversity and why does it matter? How does diversity fit in an attempt to build the best board for any organization? What attributes and skills are required by law and what mix of experiences and talents provide the best corporate governance? Even though most companies say they are looking for diversity, why has there been such little progress? Are required director attributes, which are a must for all boards, consistent with future diversity gains and aligned with achieving high performance and optimal board composition? My goal is to provide answers to these questions, and to discuss …

In The Name Of The Child: Race, Gender, And Economics In Adoptive Couple V. Baby Girl, Bethany Berger

Bethany Berger

On June 25, 2013, the Supreme Court decided Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, holding that the Indian Child Welfare Act did not permit the Cherokee father in that case to object to termination of his parental rights. The case is ostensibly about a dispute between prospective adoptive parents and a biological father. This Article demonstrates that it is about a lot more than that. It is a microcosm of anxieties about Indian-ness, race, and the changing nature of parenthood. While made in the name of the child, moreover, the decision supports practices and policies that do not forward and may …

Sex Is Less Offensive Than Violence: A Call To Update Obscenity Jurisprudence, Rachel Simon

Rachel Simon

This article addresses the gender bias presented by the disparate treatment of sex and violence under current obscenity jurisprudence. Under the controlling standard set forth by the Supreme Court in Miller v. California, sexual works may readily be regulated as obscenity, while violent works unequivocally may not. This article posits that this disparate treatment is the product of entrenched stereotypes about the way men and women “should” react to sex and violence, and notes the hypocrisy of failing to apply the same reasoning to assessments of violent versus sexual material.

First, reliance on “community standards” to define what material …

Regulating The Family: The Impact Of Pro-Family Policy Making Assessments On Women And Non-Traditional Families, Robin S. Maril

Robin S. Maril

Beginning in the 1980s, pro-family advocates lobbied the Reagan administration to take a stronger, more direct role in enforcing traditional family norms through agency rulemaking. In 1986 the White House Working Group on the Family published a report entitled, The Family: Preserving America’s Future, detailing what its authors perceived to be the biggest threats to the “American household of persons related by blood, marriage or adoption – the traditional . . . family.” These threats included a lax sexual culture carried over from the 1960s, resulting in rising divorce rates, children born “out of wedlock,” and increased acceptance of “alternative …

A Noble Cause: A Case Study Of Discrimination, Symbols, And Reciprocity, In: Diversity And European Human Rights, Yofi Tirosh

Yofi Tirosh

This chapter is part of a volume dedicated to rewriting human rights cases issued by the European Court of Human Rights. It uses the case of De La Cierva Osorio De Moscoso v. Spain (1999) as a platform to discuss the inherent tension typifying signs such as nobility titles – as merely symbolic or as carrying substantive content. The problem of one’s ownership of signs is especially acute in the case of women. I will argue that the distinction between form and substance collapses in this case, as in many other cases that involve allocation of allegedly merely symbolic signifiers …

Rights, Race, And Manhood: The Spanish American War And Soldiers’ Quests For First Class American Citizenship, Julie Novkov

Julie Novkov

Unlike the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Spanish American War and the Philippine Resistance were not accompanied by significant rights advances for people of color. Rather, rights continued to flow in retrograde, with increased political and cultural repression. Men of color contributed substantially and formally to the war effort, with companies of black and Filipino soldiers serving in combat and many individual Latinos, Native Americans, and Asian men and male descendants of Asians serving as well. Nonetheless, they were unable to leverage service into successful claims to the rights of manhood. This paper explores these dynamics in the context of …

Sacrifice And Civic Membership: The Case Of World War I, Julie Novkov

Julie Novkov

In the Civil War and World War II, many men of color gained rights while women's rights were in retrograde. While World War I is not a perfect mirror image of the Civil War and World War II, it may make sense to think of World War I as reversing the polarities that were in operation in the two other major conflicts. To understand this dynamic, this paper will explore the kinds of claims that men of color and women made for rights based in forms of civic service and sacrifice, how those claims were met by various state actors, …

Gender Outlaws Before The Law: The Courts Of The Borderlands, Aeyal M. Gross

Aeyal M. Gross

This Article considers four trials held in the United States, United Kingdom, and Israel, in which gender outlaws were accused and convicted in a criminal court for fraudulent gender presentations. These trials raise questions at a number of junctures that touch on the regulation and politics of sex, gender, and sexuality. I argue that these cases manifest not only the unresolved tension between sexual and gender identities, but also the internal conflicts within the identities themselves, as well as the difficulty of maintaining boundaries amongst them. Furthermore, I argue that, contrary to the rhetoric used by the various courts, the …

Sacrifice And Civic Membership: Who Earns Rights, And When?, Julie Novkov

Julie Novkov

This paper considers two moments that scholars generally agree featured advances for African Americans’ citizenship – the end of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and World War II and its immediate aftermath – and reads these moments through lenses of race and gender. I consider the conjunction of acknowledged sacrifices and contributions to the state, the rights advances achieved, and the gendered and racialized conceptions of citizen service emerging out of both post-war periods. This conjunction suggests that the kind of citizenship that people of color gained during and after wartime crises depended upon gendered and racialized hierarchies that valued …

Gender Equity In College Athletics: Women Coaches As A Case Study, Deborah L. Rhode, Christopher J. Walker

Christopher J. Walker

As Title IX celebrates its thirty-fifth anniversary, many have noted its enormous positive effect on women's sports. But an unintended and too-often neglected byproduct is that as opportunities for female students have increased, opportunities for female professionals have declined. This Article focuses on the barriers that still confront women in college athletics, particularly those who seek professional positions in coaching and administration. Part I presents a brief overview of Title IX, which makes clear its limitations in securing gender equity. Part II.A discusses the declining representation and lower success rate of women coaches, while Part II.B explores the areas of …

Gender Matters: Making The Case For Trans Inclusion, Nancy J. Knauer

Nancy J. Knauer

The transgender communities are producing an important and nuanced critique of our gender system. For community members, the project is self-constitutive and, therefore, has an immediacy that also marks the efforts of other marginalized groups who have attempted to make sense of the world through description, interrogation, and, ultimately, a program for transformation. The transgender project also has universalizing elements because, existing within the gender system, each one of us embodies a particular gender articulation. It is through this articulation that we define ourselves in relation to the gender we were assigned at birth, the gender we choose, the gender …

The Personal Is Political--And Economic: Rethinking Domestic Violence, Deborah M. Weissman

Deborah M. Weissman

This Article seeks to expand the scope of the domestic violence discourse within the context of the theory and practice of legal strategies. The intent is to shift the analytical parameters beyond the criminal justice system to include the political economy of everyday experiences of households. Such a paradigm shift examines the conditions of the private sphere as a function of the circumstances of public realms. It considers domestic violence by linking it to the structural transformations of the U.S. economy during recent years. It assesses domestic violence from the perspective of the daily life of men and women who …

Confronting Conventional Thinking: The Heuristics Problem In Feminist Legal Theory, Nancy Levit

Nancy Levit

The thesis of The Heuristics Problem is that the societal problems about which identity theorists are most concerned often spring from and are reinforced by thinking riddled with heuristic errors. This article first investigates the ways heuristic errors influence popular perceptions of feminist issues. Feminists and critical race theorists have explored the cognitive bias of stereotyping, but have not examined the ways probabilistic errors can have gendered consequences. Second, The Heuristics Problem traces some of the ways cognitive errors have influenced the development of laws relating to gender issues. It explores instances in judicial decisions in which courts commit heuristic …

A New Image In The Looking Glass: Faculty Mentoring, Invitational Rhetoric, And The Second-Class Status Of Women In U.S. Academia, Carlo A. Pedrioli

Carlo A. Pedrioli

This article maintains that because Title VII alone does not have the ability to further the progress women have made in academic hiring, retention, and promotion, looking to remedies in addition to Title VII will be advantageous in helping to improve the status of women in U.S. academia. The article suggests as an additional remedy the implementation of faculty mentoring opportunities for junior female faculty members. A key way of initiating and furthering such mentoring opportunities is a type of discourse called invitational rhetoric, which is “an invitation to understanding as a means to create...relationship[s] rooted in equality, immanent value, …