Law Commons^™

Rhetoric Of Silence: Some Reflections On Law, Literature, And Social Violence, James A. Epstein

Vanderbilt Law Review

Martha Minow suggests the importance of looking outside of court-rooms and the law to find ways of speaking about social and family violence. Her article underscores the difficulties of breaking silence, and yet the power to impose silence is integral to violence itself. We are called upon, however, not only to speak, but to listen. Respectful listening indeed may be a prerequisite to attempting to frame words and actions of intervention and resistance. We are called upon to speak, but we are hard pressed to summon public language that does justice to private pain and anguish.

Robert Cover, in his …

Words And The Door To The Land Of Change: Law, Language, And Family Violence, Martha Minow

Vanderbilt Law Review

Can words stem violence? More specifically, can anything anyone says halt the physical devastation inflicted daily behind the closed doors of family dwellings? Some people strike, beat, or burn their children. Some people assault their lovers, some their spouses; usually, men batter women.' Can words, uttered by anyone else, stop this violence?

Words of journalists expose family violence to public view. Words of legislatures and judges forbid and punish family abuse. Words of historians, novelists, television scriptwriters, social workers, feminist theorists, and songwriters depict and decry domestic violence against a backdrop of societal silence about it. But are there words …

The Constitutionality Of Pregnancy Clauses In Living Will Statutes, Elizabeth C. Benton

Vanderbilt Law Review

In 1976 the New Jersey Supreme Court allowed parents to remove a life support system from the body of their daughter after doctors deemed her vegetative state irreversible." The case, In re Quinlan, received extensive national media attention and pitted concerns about the quality of life and personal autonomy against respect for the sanctity of life. This conflict has intensified as medical technology has progressed so that patients who otherwise would die faster, natural deaths now are sustained indefinitely. Some patients and families see this life support as medical heroism, while others view it as painful,futile prolongation of death. One …

Economics, Feminism, And The Reinvention Of Alimony: A Reply To Ira Ellman, June Carbone

Vanderbilt Law Review

Divorce reform and gender roles are inextricably linked. When Lenore Weitzman chronicled the devastating consequences of divorce for most women, she described a legal system that, in an effort to be gender neutral in a formal sense, made no allowance for the domestic role women continue to perform. Herma Hill Kay, in reviewing Weitzman-inspired proposals to expand the scope of the financial awards made at divorce, nonetheless warned against encouraging "future couples entering marriage to make choices that will be economically disabling for women, thereby perpetuating their traditional financial dependence upon men and contributing to their inequality with men at …

Books Received, Law Review Staff

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

In Common Law in Southern Africa, Kutner surveys the judgments that are published in South African Law Reports and the official law reports of other southern African states from 1947 to the present. English language commentaries on the cases and statutes discussed in the text are cited in the notes. A Table of Statutes, Table of Cases, Conflict of Laws Index and Torts Index also are provided.