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Articles 1 - 8 of 8
Full-Text Articles in Law and Society
Consent, Legitimation, And Dysphoria, Robin West
Consent, Legitimation, And Dysphoria, Robin West
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Ideals of consent and consensuality are rapidly displacing ideals of legality as the demarcation of lawful from unlawful, legitimate from illegitimate, and good from bad. This is a particularly pronounced trend in the areas of sexual and reproductive rights and ethics. Consensual sex has almost completely displaced marital sex as the demarcation of not only criminal from laudatory sex but also good from bad sex. Likewise, the consensuality of a pregnancy is increasingly the demarcation of a celebrated rather than mourned pregnancy, rather than its marital province. This development is justly celebrated as a breakthrough in women's rights and equality, …
Discounting Women: Doubting Domestic Violence Survivors’ Credibility And Dismissing Their Experiences, Deborah Epstein, Lisa A. Goodman
Discounting Women: Doubting Domestic Violence Survivors’ Credibility And Dismissing Their Experiences, Deborah Epstein, Lisa A. Goodman
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
In recent months, we’ve seen an unprecedented wave of testimonials about the serious harms women all too frequently endure. The #MeToo moment, the #WhyIStayed campaign, and the Larry Nassar sentencing hearings have raised public awareness not only about workplace harassment, domestic violence, and sexual abuse, but also about how routinely women survivors face a Gaslight-style gauntlet of doubt, disbelief, and outright dismissal of their stories. This pattern is particularly disturbing in the justice system, where women face a legal twilight zone: laws meant to protect them and deter further abuse often fail to achieve their purpose, because women telling stories …
Interpreting Liberty And Equality Through The Lens Of Marriage, Nan D. Hunter
Interpreting Liberty And Equality Through The Lens Of Marriage, Nan D. Hunter
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
In this essay, I argue that marriage, as described and prescribed in Obergefell v. Hodges, functions as a lens that distorts the principles of liberty and equality upon which the opinion is based. The Supreme Court’s language is saturated with paeans to marriage, to the degree that the opinion seems to suggest that the moral worthiness of same-sex couples who wish to marry provides the ultimate justification for recognizing a constitutional right. The conceptual fulcrum in this analysis is dignity, which other courts have interpreted as an intrinsic human right that extends to a pluralism of family forms, but …
The Incoherence Of Marital Benefits, Robin West
The Incoherence Of Marital Benefits, Robin West
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
En route to finding the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) an unconstitutional violation of the Fifth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Windsor v. United States gave short shrift to one of Congress's primary arguments in defense of the Act: that the federal government has a compelling interest in limiting federal marriage benefits to opposite-sex couples because traditional marriage has the laudable purpose-or function-of channeling the heterosexual sex that creates children into a way of life that provides the optimal environment for the rearing of those children. In other words, DOMA aims to minimize irresponsible …
Against The New Maternalism, Naomi Mezey, Cornelia T. Pillard
Against The New Maternalism, Naomi Mezey, Cornelia T. Pillard
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
The biggest challenge for sex equality in the 21st Century is to dismantle inequality between women and men’s family care responsibilities. American law has largely accomplished formal equality in parenting by doing away with explicit gender classifications, along with many of the assumptions that fostered them. In a dramatic change from the mid-20th Century, law relating to family, work, civic participation and their various intersections is now virtually all sex-neutral. As the Supreme Court’s 2003 decision in Nevada Department of Social Services v. Hibbs demonstrates, both Congress and the Court have accepted the feminist critique of sex roles and stereotyping …
Liberalism And Abortion, Robin West
Liberalism And Abortion, Robin West
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
First in a groundbreaking book, Breaking the Abortion Deadlock: From Choice to Consent, published in 1996, then in various public fora, from academic conference panels to Christian radio call-in shows, and now in a major law review article entitled My Body, My Consent: Securing the Constitutional Right to Abortion Funding, Eileen McDonagh has sought to redefine drastically our understanding of the still deeply contested right to an abortion, and hence, of the nature of the constitutional protections which in her view this embattled right deserves. Her argument is complicated and subtle, but its basic thrust can be readily …
Legitimating The Illegitimate: A Comment On 'Beyond Rape', Robin West
Legitimating The Illegitimate: A Comment On 'Beyond Rape', Robin West
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Professor Dripps's provocative proposal, as I understand it, is that we think of sex as a commodity and rape as the theft of that commodity. Understood as such, the theft of sex accomplished through violence or the threat of violence is a twofold wrong: it violates our "negative" right to refuse to have sex with anyone for any or no reason, and violence or the threat of violence infringes our right to personal, physical security. Therefore, the violent expropriation of sex should be punished as a major felony, as is violent rape, at least in theory.
Furthermore, according to Dripps, …
Sex, Reason, And A Taste For The Absurd, Robin West
Sex, Reason, And A Taste For The Absurd, Robin West
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Like much of Richard Posner's best work, Sex and Reason does many things, and for that reason will no doubt attract a large and diverse readership. This heavily footnoted, exhaustively researched, and imminently accessible book is a welcome introduction to the interdisciplinary study of sex. For the lay reader it presents an arresting set of speculations about human sexuality, drawn from the author's evident familiarity with a sizeable library of studies representing at least half a dozen scientific and social scientific disciplines, assembled in a readable and lively way. Of more interest, perhaps, to academicians and social scientists familiar with …