Law and Gender Commons^™

Valuing All Identities Beyond The Schoolhouse Gate: The Case For Inclusivity As A Civic Virtue In K-12, Sacha M. Coupet

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Increasing social and political polarization in our society continues to exact a heavy toll marked by, among other social ills, a rise in uncivility, an increase in reported hate crimes, and a more pronounced overall climate of intolerance—for viewpoints, causes, and identities alike. Intolerance, either a cause or a consequence of our fraying networks of social engagement, is rampant, hindering our ability to live up to our de facto national motto, “E Pluribus Unum,” or “Out of Many, One” and prompting calls for how best to build a cohesive civil society. Within the public school—an institution conceived primarily …

Sadomasochism: Descent Into Darkness, Annotated Accounts Of Cases, 1996-2014, Robert Peters

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

A collection of accounts of sadomasochistic sexual abuse from news reports and scholarly and professional sources about the dark underbelly of sadomasochism and the pornography that contributes to it. It focuses on crimes and other harmful sexual behavior related to the pursuit of sadistic sexual pleasure in North America and the U.K. It is intended to be a resource to educate people about how sadomasochism can lead to harmful and even deadly sadistic sexual behavior.

Concord With Which Other Families: Marriage Equality, Family Demographics, And Race, Nancy Polikoff

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

The Functions Of Family Law, Serena Mayeri

All Faculty Scholarship

Melissa Murray's Family Law's Doctrines provides a fascinating case study of legal parentage cases involving assisted reproductive technology, where judges applied relatively new laws to even newer circumstances never contemplated by the laws' drafters. The Uniform Parentage Act (UPA) was a modernizing statute intended to resolve legal questions generated by new societal developments: namely, the rise of nonmarital heterosexual relationships producing children, and the use of artificial insemination within heterosexual marital relationships.

In the decades after its adoption in California, the UPA confronted a brave new world. Two developments further transformed the reality of family life: assisted reproductive technologies such …

Unbending Gender: Why Family And Work Conflict And What To Do About It (Panel Two: Who's Minding The Baby?), Nancy Dowd, Adrienne Davis, Marion Crain, Bonnie Dill, Catherine Ross, Joan Williams

Nancy Dowd

A central characteristic of our current gender arrangements is that they pit ideal worker women against marginalized caregiver women in a series of patterned conflicts I call gender wars. One version of these are the mommy wars that we see often covered in the press between employed mothers and mothers at home. Employed mothers at times participate in the belittlement commonly felt by homemakers. Also mothers at home, I think, at times participate in the guilt-tripping that's often felt by mothers who are employed. These gender wars are a central but little understood characteristic of the gender system that grew …

The House Of Windsor: Accentuating The Heteronormativity In The Tax Incentives For Procreation, Anthony C. Infanti

Articles

Following the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Windsor, many seem to believe that the fight for marriage equality at the federal level is over and that any remaining work in this area is at the state level. Belying this conventional wisdom, this essay continues my work plumbing the gap between the promise of Windsor and the reality that heteronormativity has been one of the core building blocks of our federal tax system. Eradicating embedded heteronormativity will take far more than a single court decision (or even revenue ruling); it will take years of work uncovering the subtle …

Put The Town On Notice: School District Liability And Lgbt Bullying Notification Laws, Yariv Pierce

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Congress could mitigate the problem of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) student bullying by requiring that teachers and school officials report all bullying incidents to their school district administrators. Many school districts are not aware of the prevalence of LGBT bullying and the extent to which each school protects, or fails to protect, its LGBT students compared to other harassed students. LGBT students often encounter difficulty demonstrating that their school district has a policy or custom of deliberate indifference toward their equal treatment when a school does not equally protect an LGBT student from peer-to-peer bullying because of the …

Towards Determining Legal Parentage By Agreement In Israel, Yehezkel Margalit

Hezi Margalit

In Israel as in other parts of the world, families, parenthood, and relations between parents and children have changed dramatically over the past few decades. So, too, developments in modern medicine have enhanced the ability to separate sexuality from fertility and parenthood. Many researchers feel that the legal system has not kept pace with these changes, and that traditional models of familial relationships no longer provide adequate tools for dealing with them. In order to bridge the gap between a desired social status and current law, a growing number of parents seek to regulate the status, rights, and obligations of …

Determining Legal Parenthood By Agreement As A Possible Solution To The Challenges Of The New Era, Yehezkel Margalit

Hezi Margalit

Over the past decades, we witnessed changes in the matrimonial and parenting institutions. Medical innovations have further created ethical-legal dilemmas. It is, therefore, essential to create a theory and framework that will determine ways to deal with the resulting dilemma in a fully developed manner. This paper surveys the current, conflicting shifts in family structure and the definition of legal parenthood. In it, I deal with the importance and various aspects of defining legal parenthood. I will also focus on the singularity of this dilemma as it is increasingly apparent in the various fertility treatments. I present the sociological-legal roots …

Displaced Mothers, Absent And Unnatural Fathers: Lgbt Transracial Adoption, Kim H. Pearson

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

While some might believe that Black versus gay discourse only surfaces in highly politicized settings like the military and marriage, it holds sway in the area of LGBT transracial adoption. LGBT transracial adoptions are a relatively small percentage of all adoptions, which include private adoptions, LGBT second-parent adoptions, and step-parent adoptions, but they are an important site for interrogating the Black versus gay discourse because adoption and custody decisions often address parent-child transmission. When claims intersect, as they do in a case where a White LGBT foster parent and a Black maternal grandmother dispute the adoption of a Black child, …

The New Illegitimacy: Winning Backward In The Protection Of The Children Of Lesbian Couples, Nancy Polikoff

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Fear Of The Queer Child, Clifford Rosky

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

This article is about the fear of the queer child — the fear that exposing children to homosexuality and gender variance makes them more likely to develop homosexual desires, engage in homosexual acts, deviate from traditional gender norms, or identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. This fear is thousands of years old, but it has undergone a remarkable transformation in the last half-century, in response to the rise of the LGBT movement. For centuries, the fear had been articulated specifically in sexual terms, as a belief that children would be seduced into queerness by adults. Since the 1970s, it …

Tango Or More - From California's Lesson 9 To The Constitutionality Of A Gay-Friendly Curriculum In Public Elementary Schools, Amy Lai

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

In August 2009, a group of parents in California filed a lawsuit, Balde v. Alameda Unified School District, in the Superior Court of California, County of Alameda. They alleged that the Alameda Unified School District refused them the right to excuse their children from a new curriculum, Lesson 9, that would teach public elementary school children about gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) families. The proposed curriculum included short sessions about GLBT people, incorporated into more general lessons about family and health, once a year from kindergarten through fifth grade. Kindergarteners would learn the harms of teasing, while fifth graders …

When Sixteen Ain't So Sweet: Rethinking The Regulation Of Adolescent Sexuality, Nicole Phillis

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Legally speaking, sexual maturity poses a significant enough liberty interest for a minor to make medical decisions regarding contraceptive medicine or to choose motherhood without parental involvement, but not quite enough for her to obtain an abortion independently. The law incentivizes teenage motherhood by only granting decisional autonomy to those minors who choose to have a child; the minor female's right to procreate vests regardless of her individual maturity. The law discourages teenage abortions by using the choice to terminate a pregnancy to trigger a presumption of immaturity; the minor female's abortion right is pitted against personal autonomy via parental …

Defining Sex: On Marriage, Family, And Good Public Policy, Mark Strasser

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Transgendered individuals and their families face legal risks that most families do not, at least in part, because state laws are often unclear about whether or under what conditions transgendered individuals are permitted to marry the individuals whom they love. Challenges to the validity of marriages involving the transgendered may arise under a variety of circumstances, ranging from cases in which individuals may have hidden or may not even have known that they were transgendered until after their marriages, to cases in which the individuals had already transitioned and had explained their personal histories to their partners before they were …

The Rise, Fall And Rise Again Of The Genetic Foundation For Legal Parentage Determination, Yehezkel Margalit

Hezi Margalit

Recently, we have witnessed dramatic changes in the formation of the family and parenthood. One of the results of those shifts is a growing number of children growing up outside of the traditional marriage framework. Therefore, the dilemma of determining a child's parentage, which was usually resolved by a legal fiction as to the child's legal parents, is becoming increasingly problematic. It is appropriate that any discussion of the establishment of legal parentage should start with a study of the rise of the most popular modern model, the genetic model.

It is relevant to point out that from the beginning …

Protect Our Children, Jenny Meyen, Donna M. Hughes Dr.

Donna M. Hughes

Rhode Island Left Out Of Fbi Initiative, Donna M. Hughes Dr.

Donna M. Hughes

Pornography As Trafficking, Catharine A. Mackinnon

Michigan Journal of International Law

In material reality, pornography is one way women and children are trafficked for sex. To make visual pornography, the bulk of the industry's products, real women and children, and some men, are rented out for use in commercial sex acts. In the resulting materials, these people are then conveyed and sold for a buyer's sexual use. Obscenity laws, the traditional legal approach to the problem, do not care about these realities at all. The morality of what is said and shown remains their focus and concern. The injuries inflicted on real people to make the materials, or because they are …

Paradoxes Of Health And Equality: When A Boy Becomes A Girl, Noa Ben-Asher

ExpressO

This paper is about an unusual child custody dispute between the parents of a six-year-old child and the child welfare services of Franklin County, Ohio. The conflict emerged when the child’s parents complied with their male child’s professed desire to be treated as a girl by attempting to enroll the child in the first grade as a girl. The paper treats this case as an exemplary test-case of contemporary co-dependence between scientific-medical discourse and liberal-rights discourse. The paper analyzes the positions of the two sides of the custody dispute according to the classic modern distinction between mind and body. On …

Unbending Gender: Why Family And Work Conflict And What To Do About It (Panel Two: Who's Minding The Baby?), Nancy E. Dowd, Adrienne Davis, Marion Crain, Bonnie Dill, Catherine Ross, Joan Williams

UF Law Faculty Publications

A central characteristic of our current gender arrangements is that they pit ideal worker women against marginalized caregiver women in a series of patterned conflicts I call gender wars. One version of these are the mommy wars that we see often covered in the press between employed mothers and mothers at home. Employed mothers at times participate in the belittlement commonly felt by homemakers. Also mothers at home, I think, at times participate in the guilt-tripping that's often felt by mothers who are employed. These gender wars are a central but little understood characteristic of the gender system that grew …