Law Commons^™

Marriage And The Court: San Francisco's Role In The Debate, Kathleen Morris

Publications

No abstract provided.

Engendering A Clinic: Lessons Learned From A Domestic Violence Clinical Course In Qatar, Stephen A. Rosenbaum, Mary Pat Treuthart

Publications

Domestic violence, a serious problem around the world, remains a hidden concern among the Islamic Gulf States. Yet signs indicate the situation is changing. A team of American lawyers and professors, responding to student initiative and the Qatari development strategy, recently initiated Qatar’s first law school clinic, focusing exclusively on domestic violence. By highlighting the students’ experience, this article outlines the issues involved and the problems that were encountered, and resolved, during the development of this clinic. The students first studied the issue of domestic violence, then made presentations to the larger community to raise awareness of the topic. Subsequent …

Save Our Children: Overcoming The Narrative That Gays And Lesbians Are Harmful To Children, Anthony S. Niedwiecki

Publications

This paper focuses on how gay rights activists had no real choice but to use the court system to advance marriage rights for same-sex couples because they were unable to use the political process to effectively rebut the claim that gays and lesbian were harmful to children. Part I begins with an overview of the ways in which the initiative process has been used to limit gay rights and prevent marriage equality. It then details how, in contrast to the political process, courts have been more receptive to advancing marriage rights for same-sex couples. Part II details Walter Fisher's narrative …

The Exit Myth: Family Law, Gender Roles, And Changing Attitudes Toward Female Victims Of Domestic Violence, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Publications

This Article presents a hypothesis suggesting how and why the criminal justice response to domestic violence changed, over the course of the twentieth century, from sympathy for abused women and a surprising degree of state intervention in intimate relationships to the apathy and discrimination that the battered women' movement exposed. The riddle of declining public sympathy for female victims of intimate-partner violence can only be solved by looking beyond the criminal law to the social and legal changes that created the Exit Myth.

While the situation that gave rise to the battered women's movement in the 1970s is often presumed …

Re-Problematizing Anger In Domestic Violence Advocacy, Deborah Cantrell

Publications

Feminist advocacy commits wholeheartedly to a woman’s autonomous choices about how to respond to domestic violence, prioritizing a woman’s own lived experiences and her own assessments of her needs and goals over other supposedly “objective” assessments. Feminists robustly privilege individual choices of women in part as a way of revealing anti-woman bias in the dominant, patriarchal legal system as well to reject male constructions of feminine behavior. In feminist domestic violence advocacy, scholars and advocates have argued that a woman’s autonomous choices include capacious choices about the kinds of emotions that a woman might express about being subjected to abuse. …

Prostitution 3.0?, Scott R. Peppet

Publications

This Article presents an entirely novel approach to prostitution reform focused on incremental market improvement facilitated by information law and policy. Empirical evidence from the economics and sociology of sex work shows that new, Internet-enabled, indoor forms of prostitution may be healthier, less violent, and more rewarding than traditional street prostitution. This Article argues that these existing "Prostitution 2.0" innovations have not yet improved sex markets sufficiently to warrant legalization. It suggests that creating a new "Prostitution 3.0" that solves the remaining problems of disease, violence, and coercion in prostitution markets is possible, but would require removing legal barriers to …

Neofeminism, Aya Gruber

Publications

Today it is prosaic to say that "feminism is dead." Far from being moribund, feminist legal theory is breaking from its somewhat dogmatic past and forging ahead with new vigor. Many modern feminist legal scholars seek innovative ways to better the legal, social, and economic status of women while simultaneously questioning some of the more troubling moves of second-wave feminism, such as the tendency to essentialize the woman's experience, the turn to authoritarian state policies, and the characterization of women as pure objects or agents. These "neofeminists" prioritize women's issues but maintain a strong commitment to distributive justice and recognize …