Law Commons^™

A Short History Of Sex And Citizenship: The Historians' Amicus Brief In Flores-Villar V. United States, Kristin Collins

Faculty Scholarship

The historians’ amicus brief that accompanies this essay was submitted to the Supreme Court in Flores-Villar v. United States, an equal protection challenge to federal statutes that regulate the citizenship status of foreign-born children of American parents. When the parents of such children are unmarried, federal law encumbers the ability of American fathers to secure citizenship for their children, while providing American mothers with a nearly unfettered ability to do the same. The general question before the Court in Flores-Villar – and a question that the Court has addressed in sum and substance on two other occasions during the last …

Building On Best Practices–Call For Ideas And Authors, Antoinette M. Sedillo Lopez

Faculty Scholarship

The Clinical Legal Association Best Practices Implementation Committee is planning a follow-up publication to Best Practices for Legal Education by Roy Stuckey and others. The vision of the book is to build on ideas for implementing best practices, and to develop new theories and ideas on Best Practices for Legal Education.

Toward More Parsimony And Transparency In "The Essentials Of Marriage", Anita Bernstein

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

New Millennium, Same Glass Ceiling? The Impact Of Law Firm Compensation Systems On Women, Joan C. Williams, Veta Richardson

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Money, Sex, And Sunshine: A Market-Based Approach To Pay Discrimination, Deborah Thompson Eisenberg

Faculty Scholarship

The Equal Pay Act had a distinct market purpose. Congress made a policy choice to modify the existing compensation market so that employees who perform jobs requiring substantially “equal skill, effort, and responsibility” earn equal wages, regardless of sex. The Act aimed not simply to promote individual fairness, but to foster a more efficient, equitable wage market on a systemic level. Congress recognized that paying lower wages to women constituted “an unfair method of competition,” burdened “commerce and the free flow of goods in commerce,” and prevented the “maximum utilization of available labor resources.” Over time, however, the “market” in …

Overeducated Achievatrons Unite!, Joan C. Williams

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Mancession Or "Momcession"?: Good Providers, A Bad Economy, And Gender Discrimination, Joan C. Williams, Allison Tait

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Proposition 26: The Cost To All Women, Emma S. Ketteringham, Allison Korn, Lynn M. Paltrow

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Inside Out, Elizabeth F. Emens

Faculty Scholarship

Russell Robinson has done it again. With Masculinity as Prison: Sexual Identity, Race, and Incarceration, he has given us another provocative Article, which illuminates a phenomenon in the world and, indirectly, in ourselves. The Article represents much of what generally makes Robinson’s work so compelling. First, he writes about tremendously complex subjects and attends to their many complexities in remarkably lucid prose. Second, despite his critical perspective, he does not hesitate to make prescriptive arguments.

In this Article, he even ventures into the hallowed ground of constitutional argument, something he has not done since his first article on race-based …

Discrimination By Comparison, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Contemporary discrimination law is in crisis, both methodologically and conceptually. The crisis arises in large part from the judiciary's dependence on comparators – those who are like a discrimination claimant but for the protected characteristic – as a favored heuristic for observing discrimination. The profound mismatch of the comparator methodology with current understandings of identity discrimination and the realities of the modern workplace has nearly depleted discrimination jurisprudence and theory. Even in run-of-the-mill cases, comparators often cannot be found, particularly in today's mobile, knowledge-based economy. This difficulty is amplified for complex claims, which rest on thicker understandings of discrimination developed …

Some Thoughts On The State Of Women Lawyers And Why Title Vii Has Not Worked For Them, Theresa M. Beiner

Faculty Scholarship

This essay discusses why women lawyers have not been as successful in large firms in spite of graduating from law school in large numbers over the last twenty years. It begins by giving a snapshot of the state of women lawyers, including women lawyers of color. It includes stories and studies of women’s struggles at these firms. It also describes why Title VII has not worked to solve the problems associated with being a successful woman in a law firm. Finally, it suggests some potential solutions that may help women be more successful in these environments.

White Male Heterosexist Norms In The Confirmation Process, Theresa M. Beiner

Faculty Scholarship

Justice Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearing took a controversial turn when commentators picked up on a reference in the New York Times to a portion of a speech she gave in 2001. In that speech, then Judge Sotomayor opined that, "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life." That statement, along with her participation in the per curiam decision in Ricci v. DeStefano, caused a minor storm during her confirmation. More recently, former Harvard Dean and former …

Feminism, Power, And Sex Work In The Context Of Hiv/Aids: Consequences For Women's Health, Aziza Ahmed

Faculty Scholarship

This paper examines the involvement of feminists in approaches to sex work in the context of HIV/AIDS. The paper focuses on two moments where feminist disagreement produced results in favor of an "anti-trafficking" approach to addressing the vulnerability of sex workers in the context of HIV. The first is the UNAIDS Guidance Note on Sex Work and the second is the "anti-prostitution pledge" found in the Presidents Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. This article also examines the anti-sex work position articulated by abolitionist feminists and demonstrates the unintended consequences of the abolitionist position on women's health. By examining the actual …

Witchcraft Accusations And Human Rights: Case Studies From Malawi, Chi Adanna Mgbako, Katherine Glenn

Faculty Scholarship

This Article explores potential community-based interventions to assist victims of witchcraft accusations, based on forty-five case studies from an experimental mobile legal-aid clinic in Malawi, a country in southeastern Africa where witchcraft accusations are widespread and often irreparably harm those accused. In Malawi, the accused are mainly older women who are often blamed for bewitching young children.

The North Carolina Association Of Women Attorneys: Creating Camaraderie, Nurturing Leaders, And Protecting The Rights Of Women, Carolyn Mcallaster, Jennifer Brobst

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Judging Women, Mitu Gulati, Stephen J. Choi, Mirya Holman, Eric A. Posner

Faculty Scholarship

Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s assertion that female judges might be “better” than male judges has generated accusations of sexism and potential bias. An equally controversial claim is that male judges are better than female judges because the latter have benefited from affirmative action. These claims are susceptible to empirical analysis. Primarily using a dataset of all the state high court judges in 1998-2000, we estimate three measures of judicial output: opinion production, outside state citations, and co-partisan disagreements. We find that the male and female judges perform at about the same level. Roughly similar findings show up in data from the …

Hiv And Women: Incongruent Policies, Criminal Consequences, Aziza Ahmed

Faculty Scholarship

UN Women must take an aggressive role in the standardization of laws and policies at the global and national level where their incongruence has negative and often criminal consequences for the health and lives of women and girls. This article focuses in on three such examples: opt-out testing for HIV, criminalization of vertical transmission, and the new World Health Organization guidelines on breastfeeding.

When Men Are Harmed: Feminism, Queer Theory, And Torture At Abu Ghraib, Aziza Ahmed

Faculty Scholarship

In this Article I explore the assertions of "anti-imperialist" feminist scholars who critique "imperial feminism" for its support of the war on terror (WOT). I bring into this analysis the proposition by queer theorists that feminist reliance on male/ female subordination has the potential to not only obscure harm in times of war but also to perpetuate it. As a case study, I focus on the Abu Ghraib prison photos that depict, in part, female soldiers torturing male Iraqi prisoners. In conducting this analysis, I reveal the analytical limitations of dominance and cultural feminists, particularly with regard to male harm …

Deliverable Male, Katharine B. Silbaugh

Faculty Scholarship

Williams pays particular attention to the way men negotiate a masculine self-image that sits uneasily with the reality of family care. How should this tension be managed? Williams favors some form of preserving masculine self-image by reframing the subject to one of worker empowerment rather than family care. This strategy aims at political efficacy and coalition building. Asking men to imitate women’s successes, it might be argued, is interesting but too threatening to be attractive. This Essay nonetheless leans in that direction.

This Essay will first look at the evidence for the decline in men’s status. Williams investigates the evidence …

Does Critical Mass Matter? Views From The Board Room, Lissa Lamkin Broome, John M. Conley, Kimberly D. Krawiec

Faculty Scholarship

In this Article, we report and analyze the results of forty-six wide-ranging interviews with corporate directors and other relevant insiders on the general topic of whether and how the racial, ethnic, and gender composition of corporate boards matters. In particular, we explore their views on the concept of “critical mass” — that is, the theory that women and racial or ethnic minorities are unlikely to have an impact in the boardroom until they grow from a few tokens into a considerable minority of the board.

In contrast to other recent qualitative research on corporate boards, we find more limited support …

Regulatory Fictions: On Marriage And Countermarriage, Elizabeth F. Emens

Faculty Scholarship

Debates about marriage currently capture much public attention. Scholars have pushed beyond the question of whether gays are worthy of marriage to ask whether marriage is worthy of gays. The present moment of questioning marriage in its current form may be brief Thus, we should take this opportunity to imagine the widest possible range of alternatives to our current marriage regime – what I call countermarriage regimes. This Essay draws on two unlikely sources of legal innovation to expand our thinking about marriage alternatives: literature and anti-gay law. Literature offers an array of countermarriage regimes, including exploding marriage, three-strikes marriage, …