Law Commons^™

Constitutional Parentage, Joanna L. Grossman

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

Domestic Violence Asylum And The Perpetuation Of The Victimization Narrative, Natalie Nanasi

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Pitiful. Helpless. Powerless. The words often used to describe survivors of domestic violence conjure a vivid and specific image of a woman lacking both strength and agency. These (mis)conceptions stem from the theories of “Battered Woman Syndrome” and “learned helplessness,” developed in 1979 by psychologist Lenore Walker, who hypothesized that intimate partner abuse ultimately causes a woman to resign herself to her fate and cease efforts to free herself from violence or dangerous situations.

Although widely criticized, learned helplessness has permeated the legal establishment, for example, serving as the foundation for mandatory arrest and “no drop” policies in the criminal …

Close Encounters: A Feminist Legal Theory Analysis Of The State Treatment Of Female Child Sexual Abuse Victims, Jessica Dixon Weaver

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This article explores the way in which the law currently deals with sexual violence against female children in the home – evaluating the ways in which the state has access to the private realm of the family and the ways in which civil and criminal legal systems deal with this type of trauma to girls across a spectrum of time. Research shows that the child protection system only captures a small percentage of sexual abuse right after it happens. However, research also shows that female child sex abuse survivors appear in statistically significant numbers among other groups – drug and …

Cruel Techniques, Unusual Secrets, William W. Berry, Meghan J. Ryan

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

In the recent case of Glossip v. Gross, the Supreme Court denied a death row petitioner’s challenge to Oklahoma’s lethal injection protocol. An important part of Justice Alito’s majority opinion highlighted the existence of a relationship between the constitutionality of a punishment and the requirement of a constitutional technique available to administer the punishment.

Far from foreclosing future challenges, this principle ironically highlights the failure of the Court to describe the relationship under the Eighth Amendment between three distinct categories of punishment: (1) the type of punishment imposed by the court — i.e., death penalty, life without parole, life with …