Digital Commons Network^™

Law Dean’S Letter Urges Confirmation Of Biden’S Historic Scotus Pick, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Shorter Faculty Works

In a letter citing Black women’s underrepresentation on the federal bench, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, dean of the BU School of Law, and more than 200 other Black women law deans and professors urged the US Senate on Friday to confirm President Joe Biden’s nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, to the nation’s highest court “swiftly and with bipartisan support.”

Curing Corrective Rape: Socio-Legal Perspectives On Sexual Violence Against Black Lesbians In South Africa, Waruguru Gaitho

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

Corrective rape can be defined as a hate crime that entails the rape of any member of a group that does not conform to gender or sexual orientation norms, where the motive of the perpetrator is to “correct” the individual, fundamentally combining gender-based violence and homophobic violence. In the South African context, these biases intersect with systemic racism, producing a disproportionate impact on Black, queer, womxn. While the legal framework has evolved to better address sexual violence crimes, Black lesbians remain prone to falling through the legal cracks, and South African society continues to sanction the homophobia and misogyny that …

280 Characters To § 230 Immunity: Protecting Individual Sexual Assault Allegations On Twitter From Defamation Liability, Elizabeth Profaci

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

One in four female undergraduate students has been sexually assaulted. These students are three times more likely to experience sexual violence than any other group. Frustrated with the Title IX process on their campuses and the lack of discipline for their assailants, these students are unlikely to report their assault. Instead, they quietly tell their friends and other students, and in some cases, anonymously share their stories online. But instead of receiving support, these survivors are often faced with lawsuits. Accused assailants are using, or threatening to use, defamation lawsuits in an attempt to silence survivors who speak out, even …

The Importance Of Abolition Of The Carceral State For Native Survivors, Christina M. Schnalzer

American Indian Law Journal

No abstract provided.

P*Law 2022, Center For Public Service Law

2021–2022 Flyers

This document outlines the full schedule for P*LAW Week 2022 at Cardozo School of Law, presented by the Center for Public Service Law. Held virtually from January 24 to January 27, the week featured panels, workshops, and discussions on key issues in public interest law, including immigration policy, educational equity, criminal justice reform, reproductive rights, data privacy, military law, labor rights, and overdose prevention. Events brought together legal professionals, advocates, scholars, and Cardozo students to explore law’s role in advancing social justice and supporting vulnerable communities.

The New Jim And Jane Crow Intersect: Challenges To Defending The Parental Rights Of Mothers During Incarceration, Carla Laroche

Scholarly Articles

Family law scholars and advocates have expressed the importance of providing counsel to parents in the family regulation system, especially parents who are incarcerated, because of the system’s complexities. This article establishes, however, that when mothers must navigate both the family regulation and criminal legal systems, the protections appointed parents’ counsel are supposed to provide are weakened. These harms are heightened especially for Black mothers within the carceral state. As this article shows, appointed lawyers in family regulation cases cannot properly protect the due process rights of mothers who are incarcerated because of the added challenges both mothers and their …

Black Women And Voter Suppression, Carla Laroche

Scholarly Articles

Black women who are eligible to vote do so at consistently high rates during elections in the United States. For thousands of Black women, however, racism, sexism, and criminal convictions intersect to require them to navigate a maze of laws and policies that keep them from voting. With the alarming rate of convictions and incarceration of Black women, criminal law intersects with civil rights to bar their involvement in the electoral process. This voting ban is known as felony disenfranchisement, but it amounts to voter suppression.

By reconceptualizing voter suppression based on criminal convictions through the experiences of Black women’s …

‘‘Don’T Take On The Responsibilty Of Somebody Else’S Fu**Ed Up Behavior”: Responding To Online Abuse In The Context Of Barriers To Support, Chandell Gosse

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

Responsibilization, in a true circular fashion, is not only born of but also benefits institutional (e.g., social media companies and law enforcement) and cultural power structures (e.g., misogyny and patriarchy). When targets of online abuse take responsibility for the abuse launched against them, that assumption of responsibility requires energy, and that energy is taken away from efforts to hold institutions and perpetrators accountable. Responsibilization tries to tranquilize change in the service of power. The tricky thing about interrupting this process is that it requires more than just offering better support. It also requires exposing, challenging, and dismantling harmful ideologies, belief …

White Silence And Violence: Positionality And Storytelling In Women’S Rights Movements, Inka Boehm

Human Rights Brief

Our identity impacts everything about how we move through the world as individuals. In the legislative process, identity is often disregarded but has detrimental effects if ignored. Positionality describes how society shapes identities through power and privilege. This methodology requires researchers to analyze their world with their own privileges in mind and is often overlooked by policymakers.

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Women, Peace, And Security: A Human Rights Agenda?, Christine M. Chinkin

Book Chapters

The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda emanates from the ground-breaking Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000) which centres upon bringing women’s experiences of armed conflict into decision and policymaking in the exercise of the Council’s primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security. The chapter asks whether, despite its location within the Security Council, WPS can be understood as an international human rights agenda as envisaged by women activists who lobbied for the adoption of Resolution 1325. It traces the antecedents of WPS through women’s peace and human rights activism throughout the twentieth century. It examines the texts …

Social Justice As Desistance: Rethinking Approaches To Gender Violence, Deborah M. Weissman

American University Law Review

Scholars and activists have directed increasing attention to the failure of the U.S. criminal legal system and the institutions of mass incarceration it has wrought and have identified the need for transformative changes in approaches to acts of harmful behaviors. Proponents of reforms have advocated for legal corrections to constrain sentencing practices, and remedy racial disparities in imprisonment to mitigate rates of incarceration and related punishments. COVID-19 release campaigns have revealed both the egregious conditions of prisons and the irrationality of punishment paradigms. Indeed, not a few abolitionists have repudiated the criminal legal system.

Who Are You Protecting?: A Feminist Analysis Of Gay And Trans Panic Defense Bans, How They Are Defined, And Who They Protect, Tyler S. Sesker

Undergraduate Honors Theses

As of April 2022, sixteen U.S. states ban Gay panic and Trans panic criminal defenses. These state-law prohibitions stemmed from several high-profile murder trials, focusing on the identity of the decedent, including the killings of Matthew Shepard and Latisha King. Between 1970 and 2020, criminal defenses interrogating the gender identity or sexual identity of victims of violence were used at least 104 times, with nearly a third of those cases resulting in reduced criminal charges and penalties. Today, in thirty-four states, the same tactics remain legal. Applying a feminist and outsider legal lens, this study engages in a textual analysis …

Weaponizing Fear, Lisa S. Washington

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Introduction To Julie Bilotta’S Story, Sheila Wildeman

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Julie Bilotta’s contribution to this special volume is a straightforward denunciation of prison-based inhumanity and institutionalized misogyny. I write to show solidarity with her and to alert the reader to some of the ways her story exposes intersectional injustice while enlivening feminist abolitionist prison resistance. I write, too, to challenge my own and others’ thinking about whether or how law (litigation, law reform) might contribute to that resistance.

In her essay, Julie offers an intimate glimpse of prisons as sites of reproductive injustice. As this special volume attests, incarceration in Canada and elsewhere produces systematic gendered harms, including lack of …

The Visibility Trap, Kate Redburn

Faculty Scholarship

Vice Patrol offers a novel history of the visibility trap. It integrates interventions in legal history, history of sexuality, and queer theory with remarkable ease. Lvovsky brings new insight to a question that has puzzled scholars across several fields: Why and how does cultural representation lead to increased state repression? Blending impressive archival research with sophisticated theoretical analysis, Lvovsky follows cultural knowledge into the legal system to offer a fresh diagnosis of the problem and how it develops. In her discovery of “epistemic gaps,” she uncovers a key mechanism of the visibility trap. Disagreements between the police and the courts, …

Leveling Up To A Reasonable Woman's Expectation Of Privacy, Victoria Schwartz

University of Colorado Law Review

Various privacy law doctrines involve a reasonable expectation of privacy or similar analyses that take into account social privacy norms. For the most part, however, neither courts nor scholars have explicitly grappled with whether courts descriptively do or normatively should consider gender in deciding what constitutes a reasonable expectation of privacy. This is despite the fact that, in various scenarios, a reasonable woman’s expectation of privacy might vary from a man’s in light of different lived experiences, biological differences, and existing societal gendered privacy norms.

This Article addresses how courts do and should take into account a reasonable woman’s expectation …

Reflective Journal: Curricular Deficits, Pedagogical Challenges And Constructing Community In A Non- Traditional Law School Class, Rita A. Sethi

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Sprinting A Marathon: Next Steps For Gender Equity In Criminal Law Employment, Maryam Ahranjani

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Trans Empancipation Through Challenging The State, Scott Skinner-Thompson

Publications

No abstract provided.

How To Bring Your Kids Up Queer: Family Law Realism, Then And Now, Kris Franklin, Noa Ben-Asher

Articles & Chapters

This essay, in honor of Paula Ettelbrick’s vast contributions to family law, examines a new site of conflict - the legal treatment of transgender children and youth - for which Ettelbrick’s work, alongside Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s seminal essay, How to Bring Your Kids up Gay (1991) are fundamental. We apply what we believe to be Ettelbrick’s emphasis on having legal structures recognize the reality and lives of queer people – what we call “family law realism” – to the current social and legal struggles that are unfortunately being fought upon the bodies of transgender identified children and youth. We recommend …

How To Bring Your Kids Up Queer: Family Law Realism, Then And Now, Kris Franklin, Noa Ben-Asher

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Paula Ettelbrick fought for us.

As a pragmatic and radical litigator, Ettelbrick spent years trying to use a frequently uncomprehending and often outright hostile court system to protect LGBTQ+ Americans. While her work took her into the many areas of law that touched queer lives, a special focus and passion of her advocacy was reserved for queer families.

Paula also tried to warn us.

In the absence of legal recognition for the families we construct, queer lives are rendered not just invisible but virtually nonexistent; we become legal strangers to our loved ones in ways that violently obliterate our …

Intimate Images And Authors’ Rights: Non- Consensual Disclosure And The Copyright Disconnect, Meghan Sali

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

This article responds to a brand of legal realpolitik that says using property law to respond to the non-consensual distribution of intimate images (NCDII) is appropriate and even necessary, because its remedial frameworks are well developed and provide the relief that is often most sought after by targets of an assault: the immediate removal of photos from online platforms. While some targets are not considered the ‘‘authors’’ of their intimate images, most of the images that are the subject of NCDII are selfies, taken by the target themselves. In these cases, that person rightfully owns the copyright in those images …

How To Resolve Capital Cases Through Pretrial Mediation, Clare Haugh

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

Adam Lawson sat in shackles, cradling his head in his hands, rocking back and forth. He was waiting in the State Attorney's Office in Jacksonville, Florida, preparing to meet the Liles family, whose matriarch had been the victim of a home invasion and homicide he committed over a year earlier. Mr. Lawson was charged with capital murder, and his case was the third in a series of attempted mediations in death-eligible criminal cases by the State Attorney for Florida's Fourth Judicial Circuit.

Race And Washington’S Criminal Justice System 2021: Report To The Washington Supreme Court, Task Force 2.0 Research Working Group

Seattle University Law Review

This report is an update on the 2011 Preliminary Report on Race and Washington’s Criminal Justice System. This update does not include as context the history of race discrimination in Washington, and readers are encouraged to view the 2011 report for its brief historical overview.14 The 2011 report began with that historical overview because the criminal justice system does not exist in a vacuum. Instead, it exists as part of a legal system that for decades actively managed and controlled where people could live, work, recreate, and even be buried.

Members of communities impacted by race disproportionality in Washington’s criminal …

Denouncing The Revival Of Pre-Roe V. Wade Abortion Bans In A Post-Dobbs World Through The Void Ab Initio And Presumption Of Validity Doctrines, Nora Greene

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

The United States Supreme Court voted to overturn Roe v. Wade in a leaked draft of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Written by Justice Alito and joined by four of the other conservative justices, the decision describes Roe as “egregiously wrong from the start” and blatantly overrules the landmark holding and its prodigy, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. In their state codes, nine states—Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas Michigan, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Texas, West Virginia, and Wisconsin— have unrepealed criminal abortion bans enacted before Roe. These bans prohibit abortion at any point in pregnancy unless to preserve the life of the pregnant person …

Are High Levels Of Educator Bias Associated With The Disproportionate Discipline Of Black Students?, Melissa Ann Ramos

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Data on school discipline inequities have shown disproportionate numbers of Black students suspended and expelled compared to their non-Black counterparts. Despite the implementation of evidence-based solutions such as positive behavior supports and intervention, educator professional development, and restorative practices aimed at closing the racial discipline gap, little to no change has occurred. Critical Race Theory is used as a lens for viewing racial hierarchies as a socially constructed tool to oppress people of color. This oppression can be seen in various aspects of society and in education, especially in school discipline. It is fueled by biases, both implicit and explicit. …

Against Domestic Violence: Public And Private Prosecution Of Batterers, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Publications

No abstract provided.

A Pathway To Protect The Privacy Of Domestic Abuse Survivors In Washington, Bisma Shoaib

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

There’S No “Gender” In Team: Developing State Policies For The Inclusion Of The Transgender Interscholastic Athlete, Brianna Weppler

Touro Law Review

The transgender athlete is a relatively new concept challenging the norm of gender division in sports. Multiple states across the United States have yet to update their policies to include the transgender athlete in interscholastic athletics. State policies that do include transgender student athletes are currently being challenged on the grounds that they violate Title IX of the Educational Amendments to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This review considers the different state policies dictating the inclusion of transgender student athletes in school sports. After evaluating the impact of omitting transgender students from participating on sports teams, this review maintains that …