Law Commons^™

Book Review J. Shoshanna Ehrilich, Regulating Desire: From The Virtuous Maiden To The Purity Princess, Maya Manian

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

In this effective and engaging book, J. Shoshanna Ehrlich uncovers the hidden agendas underlying the long history of the law's regulation of female adolescent sexuality. Ehrlich persuasively demonstrates that a multitude of laws purporting to protect public health in one form or another in fact "encode the value of female virtue into law based upon a set of assumptions about their sexuality" (3). The book spans a wide time period, moving chronologically through a series of legal reform movements targeting young women's sexuality, from the 1838 effort to criminalize seduction to the modem-day movement promoting abstinence-only sex education. Although the …

Stories Of Teaching Race, Gender, And Class: A Narrative, Brenda V. Smith

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This Essay transcribes and discusses Smith's keynote speech at the New England Clinical Conference at Harvard Law School in November, 2015. Smith's speech discusses the intersection between race, gender, and class, highlighting them as sites of vulnerability through a personal storytelling lens. By sharing her individual experiences, Smith hopes to draw attention to insecurities and threats faced by many individuals who refuse to speak out.

The Feminist Case For Acknowledging Women's Acts Of Violence, Jamie Abrams

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This Article makes a feminist case for acknowledging women’s acts of violence as consistent with — not threatening to — the goals of the domestic violence movement and the feminist movement. It concludes that broadly understanding women’s use of strength, power, coercion, control, and violence, even illegitimate uses, can be framed consistent with feminist goals. Beginning this conversation is a necessary — if uncomfortable — step to give movement to the movement to end gendered violence.

The domestic violence movement historically framed its work on a gender binary of men as potential perpetrators and women as potential victims. This binary …

Stories Of Teaching Race, Gender, And Class: A Narrative, Brenda V. Smith

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This Essay arises out of the keynote speech that I gave at the New England Clinical Conference at Harvard Law School in November 2015. The conference theme was, “Teaching Race, Gender and Class: Learning from Our Students, Communities and Each Other.” The primary planners and hosts for the conference were clinical teachers and programs in the Northeast, but participants came from around the country to talk about the importance of addressing race, gender and class in this moment of black lives mattering. They wanted to talk about the way that these issues of race, gender and class had always been …

Minors, Parents, And Minor Parents, Maya Manian

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

As numerous scholars have noted, the law takes a strikingly incoherent approach to adolescent reproduction. States overwhelmingly allow a teenage girl to independently consent to pregnancy care and medical treatment for her child, and even to give up her child for adoption, all without notice to her parents, but require parental notice or consent for abortion. This Article argues that this oft-noted contradiction in the law on teenage reproductive decision-making is in fact not as contradictory as it first appears. A closer look at the law’s apparently conflicting approaches to teenage abortion and teenage childbirth exposes common ground that scholars …

The Global Struggle For Lgbtq Rights: Legal, Political, And Social Dimensions, Macarena Saez

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Debunking The Myth Of Universal Male Privilege, Jamie Abrams

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Existing legal responses to sexual assault and harassment in the military have stagnated or failed. Current approaches emphasize the prevalence of sexual assault and highlight the masculine nature of the military’s statistical composition and institutional culture. Current responses do not, however, incorporate masculinities theory to disentangle the experiences of men as a group from men as individuals. Rather, embedded within contestations of the masculine military culture is the unstated assumption that the culture universally privileges or benefits the individual men that operate within it. This myth is harmful because it tethers masculinities to military efficacy, suppresses the costs of male …