Law Commons^™

The Obliging Shell: An Informal Essay On Formal Equal Opportunity, Patricia Williams

Michigan Law Review

I am struck by the Court's use of the word "equality" in the last line of its holding. It seems an extraordinarily narrow use of "equality," when it excludes from consideration so much clear inequality. It, again, resembles the process by which the Parol Evidence Rule limits the meaning of documents or words by placing beyond the bounds of reference anything that is inconsistent, or, depending on the circumstances, even that which is supplementary. It is this lawyerly language game of exclusion and omission that is the subject of the rest of this essay.

Deconstructing Gender, Joan C. Williams

Michigan Law Review

I start out, as have many others, from the deep split among American feminists between "sameness" and "difference." The driving force behind the mid-twentieth-century resurgence of American feminism was an insistence on the fundamental similarity of men and women and, hence, their essential equality.

I begin in Part I by challenging the widely influential description of gender advocated by Carol Gilligan. While Part I challenges the description of gender differences offered by Gilligan feminists, it does not deny the existence of gender differences. The chief strength of the feminism of difference is its challenge to what have been called male …