Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 12 of 12

Full-Text Articles in Civil Rights and Discrimination

Law's Expressive Value In Combating Cyber Gender Harassment, Danielle Keats Citron Dec 2009

Law's Expressive Value In Combating Cyber Gender Harassment, Danielle Keats Citron

Michigan Law Review

The online harassment of women exemplifies twenty-first century behavior that profoundly harms women yet too often remains overlooked and even trivialized. This harassment includes rape threats, doctored photographs portraying women being strangled, postings of women's home addresses alongside suggestions that they are interested in anonymous sex, and technological attacks that shut down blogs and websites. It impedes women's full participation in online life, often driving them offline, and undermines their autonomy, identity, dignity, and well-being. But the public and law enforcement routinely marginalize women's experiences, deeming the harassment harmless teasing that women should expect, and tolerate, given the internet's Wild …


Rights, Race, And Manhood: The Spanish American War And Soldiers’ Quests For First Class American Citizenship, Julie Novkov Jun 2009

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 Mar 2009

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, …


Critical Tax Theory: An Introduction, Anthony C. Infanti, Bridget J. Crawford Jan 2009

Critical Tax Theory: An Introduction, Anthony C. Infanti, Bridget J. Crawford

Book Chapters

Our book Critical Tax Theory: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press 2009) highlights and explains the major themes and methodologies of a group of scholars who challenge the traditional claim that tax law is neutral and unbiased. The contributors to this volume include pioneers in the field of critical tax theory, as well as key thinkers who have sustained and expanded the investigation into why the tax laws are the way they are and what impact tax laws have on historically disempowered groups. This volume will provide an accessible introduction to this new and growing body of scholarship. It will be …


Gender Outlaws Before The Law: The Courts Of The Borderlands, Aeyal M. Gross Jan 2009

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 …


Social Factoring The Numbers With Assisted Reproduction, Bridget J. Crawford Jan 2009

Social Factoring The Numbers With Assisted Reproduction, Bridget J. Crawford

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

In late winter 2009, the airwaves came alive with stories about Nadya Suleman, the California mother who gave birth to octuplets conceived via assisted reproductive technology. Nadya Suleman and her octuplets are the vehicles through which Americans express their anxiety about race, class and gender. Expressions of concern for the health of children, the mother’s well-being, the future of reproductive medicine or the financial drain on taxpayers barely conceal deep impulses towards racism, sexism and classism. It is true that the public has had a longstanding fascination with multiple births and with large families. This is evidenced by a long …


The State As Batterer: Learning From Family Law To Address American's Family-Like Racial Dysfunction, Angela Mae Kupenda Jan 2009

The State As Batterer: Learning From Family Law To Address American's Family-Like Racial Dysfunction, Angela Mae Kupenda

Journal Articles

The women's movement for equality bootstrapped to the movement for equality for Blacks. Now the reverse can happen. This Article uses family law and the plight of some battered women, as a lens to address analogous racial conflicts in the broader American family.


Reproducing Gender On Law School Faculties, Ann C. Mcginley Jan 2009

Reproducing Gender On Law School Faculties, Ann C. Mcginley

Scholarly Works

This article demonstrates that there is a gender divide on law school faculties. Women work in inferior sex-segregated jobs and teach a disproportionate percentage of female-identified courses. More than 80% of law school deans are men. Men teach the more prestigious male-identified courses. Women suffer from differential expectations from colleagues and students and often bear the brunt of their colleagues' bullying behaviors at work. Using masculinities studies and other social science research to identify gendered structures, practices, and behaviors that harm women law professors, this article provides a theoretical framework to explain why women in the legal academy do not …


Stereotype Threat: A Case Of Overclaim Syndrome?, Amy L. Wax Jan 2009

Stereotype Threat: A Case Of Overclaim Syndrome?, Amy L. Wax

All Faculty Scholarship

The theory of Stereotype Threat (ST) predicts that, when widely accepted stereotypes allege a group’s intellectual inferiority, fears of confirming these stereotypes cause individuals in the group to underperform relative to their true ability and knowledge. There are now hundreds of published studies purporting to document an impact for ST on the performance of women and racial minorities in a range of situations. This article reviews the literature on stereotype threat, focusing especially on studies investigating the influence of ST in the context of gender. It concludes that there is currently no justification for concluding that ST explains women’s underperformance …


Evaluating Policy Solutions To Sex-Based Pay Discrimination: Women Workers, Lawmakers, And Cultural Change, Vicky Lovell Jan 2009

Evaluating Policy Solutions To Sex-Based Pay Discrimination: Women Workers, Lawmakers, And Cultural Change, Vicky Lovell

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.


Women’S Unequal Citizenship At The Border: Lessons From Three Nonfiction Films About The Women Of Juárez, Regina Austin Jan 2009

Women’S Unequal Citizenship At The Border: Lessons From Three Nonfiction Films About The Women Of Juárez, Regina Austin

All Faculty Scholarship

There is no better illustration of the impact of borders on women’s equal citizenship than the three documentaries reviewed in this essay. All three deal with the femicides that befell the young women of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico between 1993 and 2005. Juarez is just across the border from El Paso, Texas. Performing the Border (1999) stimulates the viewer’s imagination regarding the ephemeral nature of borders and their impact on the citizenship of women who live at the intersection of local, regional, national and international legal regimes. Señorita Extraviada (2001) is an intimate portrait of the victims which illustrates why the …


The Irrational Woman: Informed Consent And Abortion Decision-Making, Maya Manian Dec 2008

The Irrational Woman: Informed Consent And Abortion Decision-Making, Maya Manian

Maya Manian

In Gonzales v. Carhart, the Supreme Court upheld a federal ban on a type of second-trimester abortion that many physicians believe is safer for their patients. Carhart presented a watershed moment in abortion law, because it marks the Supreme Court’s first use of the anti-abortion movement’s “woman-protective” rationale to uphold a ban on abortion and the first time since Roe v. Wade that the Court denied women a health exception to an abortion restriction. The woman-protective rationale asserts that banning abortion promotes women’s mental health. According to Carhart, the State should make the final decisions about pregnant women’s healthcare, because …