Law and Gender Commons^™

Policing The Wombs Of The World's Women: The Mexico City Policy, Samantha Lalisan

Indiana Law Journal

This Comment argues that the Policy should be repealed because it undermines

firmly held First Amendment values and would be considered unconstitutional if

applied to domestic nongovernmental organizations (DNGOs). It proceeds in four

parts. Part I describes the inception of the Policy and contextualizes it among other

antiabortion policies that resulted as a backlash to the U.S. Supreme Court’s

landmark decision in Roe v. Wade. Part II explains the Policy’s actual effect on

FNGOs, particularly focusing on organizations based in Nepal and Peru, and argues

that the Policy undermines democratic processes abroad and fails to achieve its ...

When Will Asylum Law Protect Women?: The Abusive Relationship Between Agency Decision Making And Asylum Claims Involving Domestic Violence, Hannah Cohen

Boston College Law Review

Over the past several decades, applications for asylum by women who claim membership in a particular social group related to domestic violence have been largely unsuccessful. Attitudes regarding violence against women, the asylum requirements, and the failure to explicitly include gender as a protected group under both domestic and international law contribute to the difficulty that women face in asserting these claims. In addition, the volatile nature of agency decision making, bolstered by the broad deference afforded to agencies by federal courts under Chevron and Brand X, make outcomes inconsistent and unpredictable. During the summer of 2018, Attorney General Jeff ...

Youth Suffrage: In Support Of The Second Wave, Mae C. Quinn, Caridad Dominguez, Chelsey Omega, Abrafi Osei-Kofi, Carlye Owens

Akron Law Review

The 19th Amendment is talked about as central to our nation’s suffrage story, with many situating women's suffrage work within feminist theory "wave" discourse. However, with this telling, scholars and others too frequently overlook young voters and efforts relating to their election law rights. This article seeks to remedy this oversight and complicate the voting rights canon, in addition to supporting efforts of today’s youth voting rights advocates. It does so by turning our attention to youth suffrage movements, which we argue also can be examined by way of a framework of "waves." The first to offer ...

The Female Legal Realist Inside The Common Law, Ann Bartow

Boston College Law Review

This essay, a response piece to Anita Bernstein’s thought-provoking book The Common Law Inside the Female Body, examines the powerful tool of the common law and the role that judges play in wielding it. I begin by drawing on my twenty-four years of teaching and looking at the questions that I, and my students, grapple with every year while studying the common law: Do the uncoordinated actions of individual judges, juries, and lawyers and parties generate an efficient legal system? And does that system result in some version of justice for most of the parties, most of the time ...

The Common Law As A Force For Women, Bridget J. Crawford

Boston College Law Review

This essay introduces a collection of Symposium Essays examining Anita Bernstein’s book, The Common Law Inside the Female Body (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Professor Bernstein explores the common law’s recognition of both rights and liberties, highlighting in particular negative liberties such as the right to be left undisturbed. The Symposium Essays test and explore Professor Bernstein’s thesis as applied to the right to be free from rape and unwanted pregnancies. Grounded in perspectives informed by the study of tort law, legal history, intellectual property, constitutional law, and critical race theory, these Essays—together with Professor Bernstein’s ...

Re-Reading Anita Bernstein's The Common Law Inside The Female Body From The Bottom Of The Well: Analysis Of The Central Park Five, Border Drownings, The Kavanaugh Confirmation, And The Coronavirus, Nadia B. Ahmad

Boston College Law Review

This Article provides a critique of the common law based on its impact on “the legal other” or what the late Professor Derrick Bell viewed as the faces from the bottom of the well. Professor Anita Bernstein notes common law’s liberatory capacity. While this interpretation of the common law is true to a certain extent, this reading can lead to an underestimation of the common law’s limitations. In looking at the case involving the Central Park Five, I argue that feminist jurisprudence can have an unintended disparate impact on vulnerable populations. Examples of migrant detention facilities and precarious ...

Seeking Liberty, Finding Patriarchy: The Common Law's Historical Legacy, Deborah Dinner

Boston College Law Review

Anita Bernstein’s important new book argues that the common law might be used to advance women’s liberation. In this short essay, I analyze Bernstein’s three modes of historical analysis: redeeming the common law where it enforced oppression, recovering it when it promoted women’s rights, and facilitating its evolution toward a feminist future. I argue that Bernstein’s account, though learned and compelling, sidelines the centrality of patriarchy to the common law. Adopting the liberty of the patriarch cannot realize true freedom for women. By appropriating common law doctrines, feminists risk forging a conceptual alliance with the ...

(Un)Common Law And The Female Body, Lolita Buckner Inniss

Boston College Law Review

A dissonance frequently exists between explicit feminist approaches to law and the realities of a common law system that has often ignored and even at times exacerbated women’s legal disabilities. In The Common Law Inside the Female Body, Anita Bernstein mounts a challenge to this story of division. There is, and has long been, she asserts, a substantial interrelation between the common law and feminist jurisprudential approaches to law. But Bernstein’s central argument, far from disrupting broad understandings of the common law, is in keeping with a claim that other legal scholars have long asserted: decisions according to ...

The Common Law Inside A Social Hierarchy: Power Or Reason?, Katharine Silbaugh

Boston College Law Review

Anita Bernstein argues that the common law gives women, too, the right to say no to what they do not want. She demonstrates that the common law is a far-reaching defense of condoned self-regard, a system that allows individuals to place their own interests above the interests of others, particularly when seeking to exclude others. She, therefore, places in the common law a right to protection from rape and a near-absolute right to expel a pregnancy. Bernstein reasons that women’s exclusion from the common law right to say no was a mistake produced by their absence from the judiciary ...

There's Feminism In Those Judgments, Anita Bernstein

Boston College Law Review

This Essay enlists the other contributions to this Symposium to honor the extraordinary transnational phenomenon of Feminist Judgments, a growing set of multi-authored volumes that find progressive potential in decisional law. Although The Common Law Inside the Female Body is a very different work, this Essay identifies common ground between this book and Feminist Judgments. The modus operandi of Feminist Judgments is to rewrite published judicial decisions to steer their results or their rationales in a feminist direction; The Common Law Inside the Female Body celebrates judge-made law as it is, in an unaltered state. That difference noted, the Feminist ...

A Review Of The D.C. League Of Women Voters Project To Educate Sister Leagues Around The Country, Anne Anderson, Linda Beebe

University of the District of Columbia Law Review

The League of Women Voters of the District of Columbia ("LWVDC"), a chapter of the League of Women Voters of the United States ("LWVUS" or the "League"), has long been a staunch supporter of equality for the District of Columbia ("D.C." or the "District") by advocating for voting rights in Congress, promoting local control of local affairs, and supporting a Constitutional amendment when it was proposed. Statehood for the People of D.C., as it is currently constructed, is a newer idea that has been shrouded in much confusion and misunderstanding for people in other parts of the country ...

Indian Child Welfare Act Annual Case Law Update And Commentary, Kathryn Fort, Adrian T. Smith

American Indian Law Journal

Annually there is an average of 200 appellate cases dealing with the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) —though this includes published and unpublished opinions.[1] Since our first annual review of the case law in 2017, the numbers remain stable. There are approximately thirty reported state appellate court cases involving ICWA each year. This annual review is the only systematic look at the ICWA cases on appeal, including an analysis of who is appealing, what the primary issues are on appeal, and what topical trends are.

This article provides a comprehensive catalogue of published ICWA cases from across all fifty ...

Gender And Judicial Decision-Making, Alexandra Just

Undergraduate Theses

This study employs a unique two-tiered approach, involving both quantitative and qualitative methodology to analyze the influences – specifically, a judge’s gender – on the judicial decision-making process. First, a quantitative bivariate regression analysis was conducted to determine whether a Federal District Court judge’s gender had a statistically significant influence on the ideological direction of case outcomes (which is either liberal, meaning the decision was in favor of the petitioner, or conservative, meaning the decision was against the petitioner). Data was analyzed using the statistical program SPSS and was pulled from the 2016 Carp-Manning database, which contains over 110,000 ...

Sex-Segregation, Economic Opportunity, And Roberts V. U.S. Jaycees, Elizabeth Sepper

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

No abstract provided.

Gender-Stereotyping Theory, Freedom Of Expression, And Identity, Carlos A. Ball

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

This Article argues that the expressive components of gender-stereotyping theory serve to delink the equality protections afforded by that theory from fixed and predetermined identity categories in helpful and positive ways. Many have viewed American antidiscrimination law as being normatively grounded in the notion that there are certain identities that, because of their stable and immutable characteristics, deserve equality-based protections. Gender-stereotyping theory can help make the normative case for a more pluralistic understanding of equality, one that is grounded in the need to protect the fluid and multiple ways in which gender is performed or expressed rather than focusing, as ...

Redefining Reproductive Rights And Justice, Leah Litman

Michigan Law Review

Review of Reproductive Rights and Justice Stories edited by Melissa Murray, Katherine Shaw, and Reva B. Siegel.

The Violence Against Women's Act: From The Criminalization Of Domestic Violence Through Modern Political Challenges, Carrie Anderson

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

The Violence Against Women’s Act, or VAWA, is a landmark piece of federal legislation to combat domestic violence in the United States. It passed in 1994 following various state efforts to stop intimate partner violence. Broad federal legislation was needed to end domestic violence because of the unique nature of the crime including the strong connection between victims and perpetrators, the vast scale of the problem, and the reoccurring nature of domestic violence (Fagan, p. 28-29, 1996). VAWA has been expanded through reauthorization efforts in 2000, 2005, and 2013. Reform efforts have focused on increasing protections for victims especially ...

This Is What Democracy Looks Like: Title Ix And The Legitimacy Of The Administrative State, Samuel R. Bagentos

Michigan Law Review

Review of R. Shep Melnick's The Transformation of Title IX: Regulating Gender Equality in Education.

Lessons Learned, Lessons Offered: Creating A Domestic Violence Drug Court, Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez, Dr. Stacy Speedlin Gonzalez

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

Abstract forthcoming.

Can We Have Our Cake And Eat It Too?: What Masterpiece Cakeshop And Religious Refusals Mean For Texas’S Adoption Bill, Nadeen Abou-Hossa

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

Abstract forthcoming.