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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Fallacy Of Contract In Sexual Slavery: A Response To Ramseyer's "Contracting For Sex In The Pacific War", Yong-Shik Lee, Natsu Taylor Saito, Jonathan Todres
The Fallacy Of Contract In Sexual Slavery: A Response To Ramseyer's "Contracting For Sex In The Pacific War", Yong-Shik Lee, Natsu Taylor Saito, Jonathan Todres
Michigan Journal of International Law
Over seven decades have passed since the end of the Second World War, but the trauma from the cruelest war in human history continues today, perpetuated by denial of responsibility for the war crimes committed and unjust attempts to rewrite history at the expense of dignity, life, and justice for the victims of the most serious human rights violations. The latest such attempt is a troubling recharacterization of the sexual slavery enforced by Japan during the Second World War as a legitimate contractual arrangement. A recent paper authored by J. Mark Ramseyer, entitled “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War,” …
A Different Type Of Property: White Women And The Human Property They Kept, Michele Goodwin
A Different Type Of Property: White Women And The Human Property They Kept, Michele Goodwin
Michigan Law Review
A Review of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. by Harriet A. Jacobs, and They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers.
Centering Women In Prisoners' Rights Litigation, Amber Baylor
Centering Women In Prisoners' Rights Litigation, Amber Baylor
Michigan Journal of Gender & Law
This Article consciously employs both a dignity rights-based framing and methodology. Dignity rights are those rights that are based on the Kantian assertion of “inalienable human worth.”29 This framework for defining rights spans across a number of disciplines, including medicine and human rights law.30 Disciplinary sanctions like solitary confinement or forced medication might be described as anathema to human dignity because of their degrading effect on an individual’s emotional and social well-being.
This Article relies on first-person oral histories where possible. Bioethics scholar Claire Hooker argues that including narratives in work on dignity rights “is both a moral and an …
An Incomplete Revolution: Feminists And The Legacy Of Marital-Property Reform, Mary Ziegler
An Incomplete Revolution: Feminists And The Legacy Of Marital-Property Reform, Mary Ziegler
Michigan Journal of Gender & Law
As this Article shows, the conventional historical narrative of the divorce revolution is not so much incorrect as incomplete. Histories of the divorce revolution have focused disproportionately on the introduction of no-fault rules and have correctly concluded that women's groups did not play a central role in the introduction of such laws. However, work on divorce law has not adequately addressed the history of marital-property reform or engaged with scholarship on the struggle for the Equal Rights Amendment to the federal Constitution. Putting these two bodies of work in dialogue with one another, the Article provides the first comprehensive history …
The Exit Myth: Family Law, Gender Roles, And Changing Attitudes Toward Female Victims Of Domestic Violence, Carolyn B. Ramsey
The Exit Myth: Family Law, Gender Roles, And Changing Attitudes Toward Female Victims Of Domestic Violence, Carolyn B. Ramsey
Michigan Journal of Gender & Law
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 ofintimate-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 womens movement in the 1970s is often presumed to …
The Devil Comes To Kansas: A Story Of Free Love, Sexual Privacy, And The Law, Charles J. Reid Jr.
The Devil Comes To Kansas: A Story Of Free Love, Sexual Privacy, And The Law, Charles J. Reid Jr.
Michigan Journal of Gender & Law
On Sunday, September 19, 1886, Moses Harman, the editor of the radical newspaper Lucifer the Light-Bearer, presided over an inherently contradictory event-a free-love marriage ceremony between his associate editor, the thirty-seven-year-old Edwin Walker, and Moses' own daughter, the sixteen-year-old Lillian. The case that the two Harmans and Walker wished to present aimed to transform marriage from a public to a private relationship and from a permanent and exclusive one to a temporary one that permitted potentially many partners. State v. Walker and its parties have received some scholarly notice, but the truly radical quality of the arguments Moses, Edwin, and …
Against The New Maternalism, Naomi Mezey, Cornelia T. L. Pillard
Against The New Maternalism, Naomi Mezey, Cornelia T. L. Pillard
Michigan Journal of Gender & Law
Parenting is a major preoccupation in law and culture. As a result of efforts of the American women's movement over the past forty years, the legal parent is, for the first time in history, sex-neutral. Our law has abandoned restrictions on women's education, employment, and civic participation that sprang from and reinforced beliefs about the primacy of motherhood as women's best destiny. On the flip side, U.S. law now also generally rejects formal constraints on men's family roles by requiring sex-neutrality of laws regulating custody, adoption, alimony, spousal benefits, and the like. The official de-linking of presumptive parenting roles from …
Beyond The Binary: What Can Feminists Learn From Intersex Transgender Jurisprudence, Julie Greenberg, Marybeth Herald, Mark Strasser
Beyond The Binary: What Can Feminists Learn From Intersex Transgender Jurisprudence, Julie Greenberg, Marybeth Herald, Mark Strasser
Michigan Journal of Gender & Law
Our panel will be discussing recent developments in the intersex and transsexual communities. The transsexual community began to organize in the 1970s, but did not fully develop into a vibrant movement until the 1990s. The intersex movement was born in the mid-1990s and has rapidly developed a strong and influential voice. Recently, both movements have undergone profound changes and each has provided new and unique theoretical perspectives that can potentially benefit other social justice groups. The purpose of our dialogue today is to describe these developments and explore how feminists could potentially benefit from the theoretical frameworks that are being …
Custody, Maintenance, And Succession: The Internalization Of Women's And Children's Rights Under Customary Law In Africa, Allison D. Kent
Custody, Maintenance, And Succession: The Internalization Of Women's And Children's Rights Under Customary Law In Africa, Allison D. Kent
Michigan Journal of International Law
In this Note, the author examines the process of international human rights norm internalization into areas traditionally governed exclusively by customary law, and the resulting evolution of customary law. Assuming, arguendo, that customary law is to be modified, I argue that a societal norm internalization approach is the most effective means to bring customary law into conformity with international human rights law. After a brief discussion of the fieldwork on which I rely, this Note describes the historical influence of colonialism on the development of customary law in Africa, with a particular focus on the repugnancy clauses of the …
Cambridge Law School For Women: The Evolution And Legacy Of The Nation's First Graduate Law School Exclusively For Women, Nina A. Kohn
Cambridge Law School For Women: The Evolution And Legacy Of The Nation's First Graduate Law School Exclusively For Women, Nina A. Kohn
Michigan Journal of Gender & Law
Although several scholars have briefly discussed CLSW in conjunction with work on other subjects, this Article presents the first comprehensive history of the school. The Article begins in Section Two by exploring how and why CLSW came into being in 1915 after two young Radcliffe suffragists led an unsuccessful campaign for admission to Harvard Law School. Section Three examines the design, pedagogical foundations, and day-to-day workings of the school during its first two years. Sections Four and Five explore the historical events that led to CLSW's closure in 1917. These sections also document and discuss the school's subsequent, and previously …
Whatever Happened To G.I. Jane?: Citizenship, Gender, And Social Policy In The Postwar Era, Melissa E. Murray
Whatever Happened To G.I. Jane?: Citizenship, Gender, And Social Policy In The Postwar Era, Melissa E. Murray
Michigan Journal of Gender & Law
In this Article, it is argued that the GI Bill is consistent with the social welfare policies of the New Deal period, in particular the Social Security Act of 1935, and so should be examined within the analytical framework established by scholars like Linda Gordon and Theda Skocpol in their studies of the Social Security Act's social welfare programs. Although the Bill is gender-neutral on its face, it was framed by normative assumptions about military participation and work that ensured that it was socially understood to benefit male veterans.
"Just Like One Of The Family": Domestic Violence Paradigms And Combating On-The-Job Violence Against Household Workers In The United States, Kristi L. Graunke
"Just Like One Of The Family": Domestic Violence Paradigms And Combating On-The-Job Violence Against Household Workers In The United States, Kristi L. Graunke
Michigan Journal of Gender & Law
This Article argues that the immense problem of on-the-job abuse experienced by domestic workers demands a multifaceted plan of attack. The proposed responses specifically draw upon the capacities, strengths, and resources of women, particularly comparatively privileged women, as both activists and employers of domestic workers. By describing the circumstances of domestic work in the United States from the nation's inception to the present, Part I demonstrates the prevalence and intractability of on-the-job physical and sexual abuse and argues that other women, as employers of domestic workers, have historically played a complex role in participating in, condoning, or failing to acknowledge …
Women In The Courts: An Old Thorn In Men's Sides, Nikolaus Benke
Women In The Courts: An Old Thorn In Men's Sides, Nikolaus Benke
Michigan Journal of Gender & Law
This article was inspired by the work of a series of state task forces on women in the courts. It examines the subject from a historical perspective, comparing ancient Rome, mainly during the period from the first century B.C. to the third A.D., with the United States, from its prerevolutionary beginnings to the present. The article's focus is gender bias against women acting in official court functions.
Women And Law In Classical Greece, Craig Y. Allison
Women And Law In Classical Greece, Craig Y. Allison
Michigan Law Review
A Review of Women in Law in Classical Greece by Raphael Sealey
Women And The Law Of Property In Early America, David H. Bromfield
Women And The Law Of Property In Early America, David H. Bromfield
Michigan Law Review
A Review of Women and the Law of Property in Early America by Marylynn Salmon
Discrimination, Jobs, And Politics: The Struggle For Equal Employment Opportunity In The United States Since The New Deal, James L. Thompson
Discrimination, Jobs, And Politics: The Struggle For Equal Employment Opportunity In The United States Since The New Deal, James L. Thompson
Michigan Law Review
A Review of Discrimination, Jobs, and Politics: The Struggle for Equal Employment Opportunity in the United States since the New Deal by Paul Burstein
Where They Are Now: The Story Of The Women Of Harvard Law 1974, Lissa M. Cinat
Where They Are Now: The Story Of The Women Of Harvard Law 1974, Lissa M. Cinat
Michigan Law Review
A Review of Where They Are Now: The Story of the Women of Harvard Law 1974 by Jill Abramson and Barbara Franklin
From False Paternalism To False Equality: Judicial Assaults On Feminist Community, Illinois 1869-1895, Frances Olsen
From False Paternalism To False Equality: Judicial Assaults On Feminist Community, Illinois 1869-1895, Frances Olsen
Michigan Law Review
This essay will examine the "equal treatment" versus "special treatment" for women issue as it arose in Illinois in the late nineteenth century. In 1869 the Illinois Supreme Court barred Myra Bradwell from the practice of law on the basis that she was a married woman, and in 1870 it reaffirmed its exclusion of women in In re Bradwell, the state decision the United States Supreme Court upheld in Bradwell v. Illinois. This denial of equal treatment to women, especially the concurring opinion by United States Supreme Court Justice Bradley, appears to many to represent paternalism at its …
Fornication, Cohabitation, And The Constitution, Michigan Law Review
Fornication, Cohabitation, And The Constitution, Michigan Law Review
Michigan Law Review
This Note begins with the indisputable assumption that laws prohibiting fornication and cohabitation are nowhere explioitly forbidden by the Constitution. If a right to engage in consensual adult heterosexual activity exists, it will most convincingly be inferred from the Court's cases establishing a right of "privacy." The Note first seeks to discover an adequate definition of privacy which might lead to a decision whether "privacy" encompasses the right .to fornicate or cohabit (a right which, for brevity's sake, we will somewhat imprecisely call the right to, sexual privacy), but it finds no such definition. The Note therefore proceeds to investigate …