Legal History Commons^™

A Different Type Of Property: White Women And The Human Property They Kept, Michele Goodwin

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. by Harriet A. Jacobs, and They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers.

Law School News: Judge Rogeriee Thompson, Legal Pioneer Dorothy Crockett Among Influential "Women Of The Century" 08/19/2020, Eryn Dion, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Men's Reproductive Rights: A Legal History, Mary Ziegler

Pepperdine Law Review

This Article offers the first legal history of men’s procreative rights, filling a gap in scholarship on assisted reproduction, constitutional law, and social movements. A rich literature addresses women’s procreative rights in contexts from abortion to infertility. By comparison, we know relatively little about the history of the debate about reproductive rights for men. This void is particularly troubling at a time when the law of reproductive rights is increasingly up for grabs, especially in the context of assisted reproduction technologies (ART). Men’s rights advocates—and the abortion-rights supporters responding to them—championed a jurisprudential approach to parenting that casts a long …

Law School News: Rwu Law Will Dedicate Classroom To Ri's First African-American Woman Lawyer 9-4-2019, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Second Redemption, Third Reconstruction, Richard A. Primus

Articles

In The Accumulation of Advantages, the picture that Professor Owen Fiss paints about equality during and since the Second Reconstruction is largely a picture in black and white. That makes some sense. The black/white experience is probably the most important throughline in the story of equal protection. It was the central theme of both the First and Second Reconstructions. In keeping with that orientation, the picture of disadvantage described by Fiss’s theory of cumulative responsibility is largely drawn from the black/white experience. Important as it is, however, the black/white experience does not exhaust the subject of constitutional equality. So in …

Roger Williams University School Of Law And The Women's Law Society Present Women In Robes 10-4-2018, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Women In Robes 10/04/2018, Roger Williams University School Of Law, Women's Law Society

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Reconceptualizing The Eighth Amendment: Slaves, Prisoners, And Cruel And Unusual Punishment, Alexander A. Reinert

Articles

The meaning of the Eighth Amendment’s Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause has long been hotly contested. For scholars and jurists who look to original meaning or intent, there is little direct contemporaneous evidence on which to rest any conclusion. For those who adopt a dynamic interpretive framework, the Supreme Court’s “evolving standards of decency” paradigm has surface appeal, but deep conflicts have arisen in application. This Article offers a contextual account of the Eighth Amendment’s meaning that addresses both of these interpretive frames by situating the Amendment in eighteenth and nineteenth-century legal standards governing relationships of subordination.

In particular, I …

Gendered Law In American History (2016), Richard Chused, Wendy Williams

Books

Gendered Law in American History is a remarkable compendium of over thirty years of research and teaching in the field. It explores an array of social, cultural, and legal arenas from the turn of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth centuries, including concepts of citizenship at the founding of the republic, the development of married women’s property laws, divorce, child custody, temperance, suffrage, domestic and racial violence before and after the Civil War, protective labor legislation, and the use of legal history testimony in legal disputes. It is both an invaluable reference tool and an important new teaching …

The "Rabbi's Daughter" And The "Jewish Jane Addams": Jewish Women, Legal Aid, And The Fluidity Of Identity, 1890-1930, Felice Batlan

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The "Rabbi's Daughter" And The "Jewish Jane Addams": Jewish Women, Legal Aid, And The Fluidity Of Identity, 1890-1930, Felice Batlan

All Faculty Scholarship

This symposium article discusses an unexamined area of legal aid and legal history—the role that late nineteenth and early twentieth century Jewish women played in the delivery of legal aid as social workers, lawyers, and, importantly, as cultural and legal brokers. It presents two such women who represented different types and models of legal aid—Minnie Low of the Chicago Bureau of Personal Service, a Jewish social welfare organization, and Rosalie Loew of the Legal Aid Society of New York. I interrogate how these women negotiated their identities as Jewish professional women, what role being Jewish and female played in shaping …

The "Rabbi's Daughter" And The "Jewish Jane Addams": Jewish Women, Legal Aid, And The Fluidity Of Identity, 1890-1930, Felice Batlan

Felice J Batlan

A Postcolonial Theory Of Spousal Rape: The Carribean And Beyond, Stacy-Ann Elvy

Stacy-Ann Elvy

Many postcolonial states in the Caribbean continue to struggle to comply with their international treaty obligations to protect women from sexual violence. Reports from various United Nations programs, including UNICEF, and the annual U.S. State Department Country Reports on Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Barbados, Dominica, Jamaica, and Saint Lucia (“Commonwealth Countries”), indicate that sexual violence against women, including spousal abuse, is a significant problem in the Caribbean. Despite ratification of various international instruments intended to eliminate sexual violence against women, such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, Commonwealth Countries have retained the …

Women And Justice For The Poor: A History Of Legal Aid, 1863–1945, Felice J. Batlan

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Postcolonial Theory Of Spousal Rape: The Carribean And Beyond, Stacy-Ann Elvy

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Many postcolonial states in the Caribbean continue to struggle to comply with their international treaty obligations to protect women from sexual violence. Reports from various United Nations programs, including UNICEF, and the annual U.S. State Department Country Reports on Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Barbados, Dominica, Jamaica, and Saint Lucia (“Commonwealth Countries”), indicate that sexual violence against women, including spousal abuse, is a significant problem in the Caribbean. Despite ratification of various international instruments intended to eliminate sexual violence against women, such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, Commonwealth Countries have retained the …

For Nontraditional Names' Sake: A Call To Reform The Name-Change Process For Marrying Couples, Meegan Brooks

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

In a large number of states, women are encouraged to take their husbands’ surnames at marriage by being offered an expedited name-change process that is shorter, less expensive, and less invasive than the statutory process that men must complete. If a couple instead decides to take an altogether-new name at marriage, the vast majority of states require that each spouse complete the longer statutory process. This name-change system emerged from a long history of naming as a way for men to dominate women. This Note emphasizes the need for name-change reform, arguing that the current system perpetuates antiquated patriarchal values …

An Incomplete Revolution: Feminists And The Legacy Of Marital-Property Reform, Mary Ziegler

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

As this Article shows, the conventional historical narrative of the divorce revolution is not so much incorrect as incomplete. Histories of the divorce revolution have focused disproportionately on the introduction of no-fault rules and have correctly concluded that women's groups did not play a central role in the introduction of such laws. However, work on divorce law has not adequately addressed the history of marital-property reform or engaged with scholarship on the struggle for the Equal Rights Amendment to the federal Constitution. Putting these two bodies of work in dialogue with one another, the Article provides the first comprehensive history …

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

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

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 ofintimate-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 womens movement in the 1970s is often presumed to …

Surrender And Subordination: Birth Mothers And Adoption Law Reform, Elizabeth J. Samuels

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

For more than thirty years, adoption law reform advocates have been seeking to restore for adult adoptees the right to access their original birth certificates, a right that was lost in all but two states between the late 1930s and 1990. The advocates have faced strong opposition and have succeeded only in recent years and only in eight states. Among the most vigorous advocates for access are birth mothers who surrendered their children during a time it was believed that adoption would relieve unmarried women of shame and restore them to a respectable life. The birth mother advocates say that …

Introduction: Reflections Of Women In Legal Education: Stories From Four Decades Of Section Chairs, Linda Jellum, Nancy Levit

UMKC Law Review

An introduction is presented in which the editors discuss stories of women legal educators, who have served as Chair of the Association of American Law Schools' (AALS) Women in Legal Education Section in the U.S. and what that service meant to them over the years.

Women's Legal History Symposium Introduction: Making History, Felice J. Batlan

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay introduces the Chicago-Kent Symposium on Women's Legal History: A Global Perspective. It seeks to situate the field of women's legal history and to explore what it means to begin writing a transnational women's history which transcends and at times disrupts the nation state. In doing so, it sets forth some of the fundamental premises of women's legal history and points to new ways of writing such histories.

The Devil Comes To Kansas: A Story Of Free Love, Sexual Privacy, And The Law, Charles J. Reid Jr.

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

On Sunday, September 19, 1886, Moses Harman, the editor of the radical newspaper Lucifer the Light-Bearer, presided over an inherently contradictory event-a free-love marriage ceremony between his associate editor, the thirty-seven-year-old Edwin Walker, and Moses' own daughter, the sixteen-year-old Lillian. The case that the two Harmans and Walker wished to present aimed to transform marriage from a public to a private relationship and from a permanent and exclusive one to a temporary one that permitted potentially many partners. State v. Walker and its parties have received some scholarly notice, but the truly radical quality of the arguments Moses, Edwin, and …

Against The New Maternalism, Naomi Mezey, Cornelia T. L. Pillard

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Parenting is a major preoccupation in law and culture. As a result of efforts of the American women's movement over the past forty years, the legal parent is, for the first time in history, sex-neutral. Our law has abandoned restrictions on women's education, employment, and civic participation that sprang from and reinforced beliefs about the primacy of motherhood as women's best destiny. On the flip side, U.S. law now also generally rejects formal constraints on men's family roles by requiring sex-neutrality of laws regulating custody, adoption, alimony, spousal benefits, and the like. The official de-linking of presumptive parenting roles from …

Women's Legal History Symposium Introduction: Making History, Felice J. Batlan

Felice J Batlan

This essay introduces the Chicago-Kent Symposium on Women's Legal History: A Global Perspective. It seeks to situate the field of women's legal history and to explore what it means to begin writing a transnational women's history which transcends and at times disrupts the nation state. In doing so, it sets forth some of the fundamental premises of women's legal history and points to new ways of writing such histories.

Beyond The Binary: What Can Feminists Learn From Intersex Transgender Jurisprudence, Julie Greenberg, Marybeth Herald, Mark Strasser

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Our panel will be discussing recent developments in the intersex and transsexual communities. The transsexual community began to organize in the 1970s, but did not fully develop into a vibrant movement until the 1990s. The intersex movement was born in the mid-1990s and has rapidly developed a strong and influential voice. Recently, both movements have undergone profound changes and each has provided new and unique theoretical perspectives that can potentially benefit other social justice groups. The purpose of our dialogue today is to describe these developments and explore how feminists could potentially benefit from the theoretical frameworks that are being …

Critical Tax Theory: An Introduction, Anthony C. Infanti, Bridget J. Crawford

Book Chapters

Our book Critical Tax Theory: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press 2009) highlights and explains the major themes and methodologies of a group of scholars who challenge the traditional claim that tax law is neutral and unbiased. The contributors to this volume include pioneers in the field of critical tax theory, as well as key thinkers who have sustained and expanded the investigation into why the tax laws are the way they are and what impact tax laws have on historically disempowered groups. This volume will provide an accessible introduction to this new and growing body of scholarship. It will be …

Tax As Urban Legend, Anthony C. Infanti

Articles

In this essay, I review UC-Berkeley history professor Robin Einhorn's book, American Taxation, American Slavery. In this provocatively-titled book, Einhorn traces the relationship between democracy, taxation, and slavery from colonial times through the antebellum period. By re-telling some of the most familiar set piece stories of American history through the lens of slavery, Einhorn reveals how the stories that we tell ourselves over and over again about taxation and politics in America are little more than the stuff of urban legend.

In the review, I provide a brief summary of Einhorn's discussion of the relationship between slavery and colonial taxation, …

Servitude, Liberté Et Citoyenneté Dans Le Monde Atlantique Des Xviiie Et Xixe Siècles: Rosalie De Nation Poulard…, Rebecca J. Scott, Jean Hebrard

Articles

On December 4, 1867, the ninth day of the convention to write a new post-Civil War constitution for the state of Louisiana, delegate Edouard Tinchant rose to propose that the convention should provide “for the legal protection in this State of all women” in their civil rights, “without distinction of race or color, or without reference to their previous condition.” Tinchant’s proposal plunged the convention into additional debates ranging from voting rights and equal protection to recognition of conjugal relationships not formalized by marriage.

This article explores the genesis of Tinchant’s conceptions of citizenship and women’s rights through three generations …

Custody, Maintenance, And Succession: The Internalization Of Women's And Children's Rights Under Customary Law In Africa, Allison D. Kent

Michigan Journal of International Law

In this Note, the author examines the process of international human rights norm internalization into areas traditionally governed exclusively by customary law, and the resulting evolution of customary law. Assuming, arguendo, that customary law is to be modified, I argue that a societal norm internalization approach is the most effective means to bring customary law into conformity with international human rights law. After a brief discussion of the fieldwork on which I rely, this Note describes the historical influence of colonialism on the development of customary law in Africa, with a particular focus on the repugnancy clauses of the …

Untying The Knot: An Analysis Of The English Divorce And Matrimonial Causes Court Records, 1858-1866, Danaya C. Wright

ExpressO

This paper is an analysis of the petitions, answers, affidavits, and court docket for the first nine years of the English divorce and matrimonial causes court. It examines in detail the child custody, alimony, gender, and class components of the court’s first nine years. After analyzing the petitions and court docket along gender lines for the different causes of action (divorce, separation, annulment, and restitution of conjugal rights), and their success rate by gender and by age of the marriage, it then breaks down marriages by age and speculates on a variety of causes for the different results and considers …