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

Law and Gender Commons

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

Articles 1 - 4 of 4

Full-Text Articles in Law and Gender

Encouraging Maternal Sacrifice: How Regulations Governing The Consumption Of Pharmaceuticals During Pregnancy Prioritize Fetal Safety Over Maternal Health And Autonomy, Greer Donley Jan 2015

Encouraging Maternal Sacrifice: How Regulations Governing The Consumption Of Pharmaceuticals During Pregnancy Prioritize Fetal Safety Over Maternal Health And Autonomy, Greer Donley

Articles

Pregnant women are routinely faced with the stressful decision of whether to consume needed medications during their pregnancies. Because the risks associated with pharmaceutical drug consumption during pregnancy are largely unknown, pregnant women both inadvertently consume dangerous medications and avoid needed drugs. Both outcomes are harmful to pregnant women and their fetuses. This unparalleled lack of drug safety information is a result of ill-conceived, paternalistic regulations in two areas of the law: regulations governing ethical research in human subjects and regulations that dictate the required labels on drugs. The former categorizes pregnant women as “vulnerable” and thus precludes them from …


Sex And The Shari’A: Defining Gender Norms And Sexual Deviancy In Shi’I Islam, Haider Ala Hamoudi Jan 2015

Sex And The Shari’A: Defining Gender Norms And Sexual Deviancy In Shi’I Islam, Haider Ala Hamoudi

Articles

This paper demonstrates that modern authoritative jurists working within the Shi’i tradition have developed their rules respecting sex regulation to serve three primary commitments. The first of these is that there is an intense and near debilitating desire on the part of human beings generally, though mostly men, for a great deal of sex. This desire must be satisfied, but it also must be tightly controlled. This is because of the second commitment, which is that excessive licentiousness is a form of secular distraction from a believer’s central obligation to worship God. Finally, and perhaps the most interesting, is the …


Evolving Standards Of Domination: Abandoning A Flawed Legal Standard And Approaching A New Era In Penal Reform, Spearit Jan 2015

Evolving Standards Of Domination: Abandoning A Flawed Legal Standard And Approaching A New Era In Penal Reform, Spearit

Articles

This Article critiques the evolving standards of decency doctrine as a form of Social Darwinism. It argues that evolving standards of decency provided a system of review that was tailor-made for Civil Rights opponents to scale back racial progress. Although as a doctrinal matter, evolving standards sought to tie punishment practices to social mores, prison sentencing became subject to political agendas that determined the course of punishment more than the benevolence of a maturing society. Indeed, rather than the fierce competition that is supposed to guide social development, the criminal justice system was consciously deployed as a means of social …


On Not 'Having It Both Ways' And Still Losing: Reflections On Fifty Years Of Pregnancy Litigation Under Title Vii, Deborah L. Brake Jan 2015

On Not 'Having It Both Ways' And Still Losing: Reflections On Fifty Years Of Pregnancy Litigation Under Title Vii, Deborah L. Brake

Articles

This article, published in the B.U. Law Review Symposium issue, “The Civil Rights Act of 1964 at 50: Past, Present and Future,” reflects on the past fifty years of conflict and struggle over how to treat pregnancy discrimination under Title VII. Pregnancy has played a pivotal role in debates among feminist legal scholars and women’s rights advocates about the limitations of both the equal treatment and special treatment anti-discrimination frameworks. The article’s title references the much-discussed Wendy W. Williams cautionary note that if we cannot have it “both ways” we need to decide which way we want to have it …