Legal History Commons^™

Law And The Creation Of Meaning: A Brief Reflection On The Work Of Jane Larson, Gerald Torres

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Women's Rights On The Right: The History And Stakes Of Modern Pro-Life Feminism, 1968 To The Present, Mary Ziegler

Scholarly Publications

Recently, pro-life advocates have popularized claims that abortion harms rather than helps women. The best known of these arguments are the woman-protective arguments—contentions, such as those endorsed in Gonzales v. Carhart, justifying abortion restrictions on the basis of the physical or psychological harms supposedly produced by the procedure. Woman-protective claims, however, represent only one part of a much larger strategy that this Article calls pro-life feminism. The Article follows pro-life activists’ use of the term “feminist” or “feminism.” As the Article makes clear, activists on competing sides of the abortion issue have contested the meaning of “true” feminism. Taking …

An Incomplete Revolution: Reexaming The Law, History, And Politics Of Marital Property, Mary Ziegler

Scholarly Publications

Did the divorce revolution betray the interests of American women? While there has been considerable disagreement about the impact of divorce reform on women’s standard of living, many agree that judicial practices involving the division of marital property and the allocation of alimony have systematically disadvantaged women. Most often, in the courts and the academy, commentators see these practices as evidence of the need for family law reform.

These conclusions rely on a shared account of the history of divorce reform. According to this account, the transformation of divorce law in the 1970s and 1980s was a “silent revolution,” a …

Save Our Children: Overcoming The Narrative That Gays And Lesbians Are Harmful To Children, 21 Duke J. Gender L. & Pol'y 125 (2013), Anthony Niedwiecki

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

This paper focuses on how gay rights activists had no real choice but to use the court system to advance marriage rights for same-sex couples because they were unable to use the political process to effectively rebut the claim that gays and lesbians were harmful to children. Part I begins with an overview of the ways in which the initiative process has been used to limit gay rights and prevent marriage equality. It then details how, in contrast to the political process, courts have been more receptive to advancing marriage rights for same-sex couples. Part II details Walter Fisher's narrative …

Roe's Race: The Supreme Court Decision, Legal History, And The Racial Politics Of Abortion, Mary Ziegler

Scholarly Publications

Questions of race and abortion have shaped current legal debates about defunding Planned Parenthood and banning race-selection abortion. In these discussions, abortion opponents draw a close connection between the eugenic or population-control movements of the twentieth century and the contemporary abortion-rights movement. In challenging legal restrictions on abortion, abortion-rights activists generally insist that their movement and its predecessors have primarily privileged reproductive choice.

Notwithstanding the centrality of race to abortion politics, there has been no meaningful history of the racial politics of abortion that produced or followed Roe v. Wade. This Article bridges this gap in the abortion discussion by …

International Law Weekend, American Branch Of The International Law Association Perspectives On Crimes Of Sexual Violence In International Law, Susana Sacouto

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Unprotected Sex: The Pregnancy Discrimination Act At 35, Deborah L. Brake, Joanna L. Grossman

Articles

Thirty-five years ago, Congress passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act to overturn a Supreme Court decision refusing to recognize pregnancy discrimination as a form of discrimination based on sex. Now, three and a half decades later, women whose work lives are impacted by pregnancy are again finding themselves unprotected from discrimination. Lower court rulings have eviscerated the Act’s protections at the same time that an expansion of worker rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act should redound to the benefit of pregnant women by expanding the pool of comparators who receive accommodations. By following trends in discrimination law generally - equating …

The Exit Myth: Family Law, Gender Roles, And Changing Attitudes Toward Female Victims Of Domestic Violence, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Publications

This Article presents a hypothesis suggesting how and why the criminal justice response to domestic violence changed, over the course of the twentieth century, from sympathy for abused women and a surprising degree of state intervention in intimate relationships to the apathy and discrimination that the battered women' movement exposed. The riddle of declining public sympathy for female victims of intimate-partner violence can only be solved by looking beyond the criminal law to the social and legal changes that created the Exit Myth.

While the situation that gave rise to the battered women's movement in the 1970s is often presumed …

A Bibliography Of Title Ix Of The Education Amendments Of 1972, Christine Iaconeta Dulac

Faculty Publications

It has been thirty-five years since the passage of Title IX of the Education Amendment of 1972. Title IX provides that no person shall be excluded from participation in any educational program or activity that receives federal funding. This legislation is credited with bolstering the participation rates of girls and women in athletics. Although athletics are not explicitly addressed in the statutory language, Title IX requires schools to offer male and female students equal opportunities to play sports, to give male and female athletes their fair share of athletic scholarship money, and to treat male and female athletes equally in …

Pauli Murray And The Twentieth-Century Quest For Legal And Social Equality, Serena Mayeri

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Creditors And The Feme Covert, James Oldham

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

As is well-known, the Court of King’s Bench in Marshall v. Rutton (1800), under Chief Justice Lloyd Kenyon, overruled earlier King’s Bench decisions by Lord Mansfield that had allowed creditors to prevail in suits against married women in an expanding set of factual circumstances. As Kenyon confessed in Marshall, he had never been satisfied with the Mansfield decisions, and had wished that a case “should come to take away all the difficulties.” The Marshall case fulfilled his wish. Kenyon, however, was not the powerful leader of King’s Bench that Mansfield had been, and but for fortuities of judicial turnover, …