Law and Gender Commons^™

Comments On Proposed Treasury Regulations Defining Terms Relating To Marital Status, Anthony C. Infanti, The American Bar Association

Articles

These comments respond to proposed Treasury Regulations defining terms relating to marital status in the Internal Revenue Code following the Supreme Court's decision in the Windsor and Obergefell cases. The comments applaud the Internal Revenue Service for reading gendered terms relating to marital status in a gender-neutral fashion. For a number of reasons, however, the comments recommend that the final regulations omit the proposed rule for determining an individual’s marital status and, in its place, codify the current deference to local law in determining marital status for federal tax purposes. Most importantly, the comments further recommend that the final regulations …

Declining Controversial Cases: How Marriage Equality Changed The Paradigm, Elena Baylis

Articles

Until recently, state attorneys general defended their states’ laws as a matter of course. However, one attorney general’s decision not to defend his state’s law in a prominent marriage equality case sparked a cascade of attorney general declinations in other marriage equality cases. Declinations have also increased across a range of states and with respect to several other contentious subjects, including abortion and gun control. This Essay evaluates the causes and implications of this recent trend of state attorneys general abstaining from defending controversial laws on the grounds that those laws are unconstitutional, focusing on the marriage equality cases as …

Controversies In Tax Law: A Matter Of Perspective (Introduction), Anthony C. Infanti

Book Chapters

This volume presents a new approach to today’s tax controversies, reflecting that debates about taxation often turn on the differing worldviews of the debate participants. For instance, a central tension in the academic tax literature — which is filtering into everyday discussions of tax law — exists between “mainstream” and “critical” tax theorists. This tension results from a clash of perspectives: Is taxation primarily a matter of social science or social justice? Should tax policy debates be grounded in economics or in critical race, feminist, queer, and other outsider perspectives?

To capture and interrogate what often seems like a chasm …

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 …

Normalizing Disability In Families, Mary Crossley

Articles

In “Selection against Disability: Abortion, ART, and Access,” Alicia Ouellette probes a particularly vexing point of intersection between ART (assisted reproductive technology) and abortion: how negative assumptions about the capacities of disabled persons and the value of life with disability infect both prospective parents’ prenatal decisions about what pregnancies to pursue and fertility doctors’ decisions about providing services to disabled adults. This commentary on Ouellette’s contribution to the symposium titled “Intersections in Reproduction: Perspectives on Abortion and Assisted Reproductive Technologies" first briefly describes Ouellette’s key points and her article’s most valuable contributions. It then suggests further expanding the frame of …

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

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 …

Victims Of Our Own Success: The Perils Of Obergefell And Windsor, Anthony C. Infanti

Articles

This short essay was spurred by the numerous celebrations of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Obergefell v. Hodges legalizing same-sex marriage in all fifty states. Though the essay acknowledges the importance of both Obergefell and the Supreme Court’s earlier decision in United States v. Windsor, it highlights the significant perils that these decisions entail for the LGBT community. In the essay, I use tax as a lens for describing some of the lesser-known perils associated with these decisions in the hopes of making those perils more concrete and easily understood by a wide audience of (tax and nontax) …

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 …

Towards An Outcrit Pedagogy Of Anti-Subordination In The Classroom, Sheila I. Velez Martinez

Articles

This article discusses how traditional teaching practices can reinforce systemic discrimination, exclusion, subordination and oppression within the classroom in particular detriment to women and students of color. The article traces the discussions about pedagogy in Outcrit literature and proposes that Outcrit scholars teaching techniques within the classroom should reflect anti-subordination praxis in teaching. Drawing from the work of Freire, Bell and others, the article proposes that teaching from an anti-subordination perspective requires a praxis of collaborative, non-hierarchical teaching that calls for an epistemological shift. A pedagogy that frees the student to think independently and leads to an experience where there …

Foreword Snx 2014: Challenges To Justice Education: South-North Perspectives, Sheila I. Velez Martinez

Articles

“Towards an Education for Justice: South North Perspectives” was the theme of the XI LatCrit South North Exchange on Theory, Culture and Law, convened at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia in 2014. Scholars, students and activists from more than 10 countries encompassing the Global South and Global North engaged in a critical and animated exchange on the changing space of legal studies and how this change can be stirred towards acknowledging the need to integrate a concern for justice as part of legal education. The premise of the Conference was that the dominant model of legal education, …