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Full-Text Articles in Law

Giving Women The Benefit Of Equality: A Response To Wirenius, Tracy Higgins Jan 1992

Giving Women The Benefit Of Equality: A Response To Wirenius, Tracy Higgins

Fordham Urban Law Journal

This essay offers a feminist response to Mr. Wirenius’s provocative critique of Professor MacKinnon. Whether supporting or opposing pornography regulation, feminist legal scholars tend to approach the issue from neither of the traditional positions – First Amendment absolutist or moral censor. Rather, a feminist approach to pornography is informed by an understanding of the profound harm that pornography can and does inflict upon women. Consequently, even for feminists who many oppose pornographic regulation, the choice is not an obvious one, as it seems to be for Mr. Wirenius, between the good of civil libertarianism and the evil of totalitarianism. An …


The Miner's Canary: Tribal Control Of American Indian Education And The First Amendment, John E. Silverman Jan 1992

The Miner's Canary: Tribal Control Of American Indian Education And The First Amendment, John E. Silverman

Fordham Urban Law Journal

One legacy of America's mistreatment of its indigenous peoples has been an educational policy that has run roughshod over Native American Free Exercise rights. Today, American Indian tribes widely seek increased control over the education of their children. This position has received broad congressional and presidential support since the Nixon Administration, but more than twenty years later, Native Americans are still fighting to attain their goals. Federal statistics that rank American Indians as our least educated, most addicted, shortest-lived citizens suggest tremendous room for improvement in Indian education. Despite certain circuit court Free Exercise Clause decisions that unreasonably hold Indian …


Giving The Devil The Benefit Of Law: Pornographers, The Feminist Attack On Free Speech, And The First Amendment, John F. Wirenius Jan 1992

Giving The Devil The Benefit Of Law: Pornographers, The Feminist Attack On Free Speech, And The First Amendment, John F. Wirenius

Fordham Urban Law Journal

The battle lines over the censorship of “pornographic” materials have been shifted by a faction of the women’s movement following the publication of Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women. With Dworkin, Catharine A. MacKinnon, a vocal and influential female advocate, co-authored a prototypical ordinance to protect against the degradation of individuals, mainly women, in pornography. To these advocates, pornography causes direct harm to individuals coerced into sexual activity and indirect harm by inculcating society with the chauvinistic norms of the pornographic world. While Wirenius agrees with MacKinnon and Dworkin about the importance of pornography in First Amendment jurisprudence, he disagrees …