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Full-Text Articles in Law
Converging Trajectories: Interest Convergence, Justice Kennedy, And Jeannie Suk's "The Trajectory Of Trauma", Jennifer S. Hendricks
Converging Trajectories: Interest Convergence, Justice Kennedy, And Jeannie Suk's "The Trajectory Of Trauma", Jennifer S. Hendricks
Publications
This essay responds to Jeannie Suk's recent article in the Columbia Law Review, The Trajectory of Trauma: Bodies and Minds of Abortion Discourse. Suk argues that feminists are responsible for legitimizing a paternalistic attitude towards women that came home to roost in Gonzales v. Carhart. This essay argues that Suk's critique of feminist paternalism needs to be supplemented with a discussion of traditional paternalism and its influence on how feminist advocacy enters the law. In particular, it suggests that Derrick Bell's theory of interest convergence provides a useful framework for understanding the cultural, legal, and rhetorical evidence adduced …
Body And Soul: Equality, Pregnancy, And The Unitary Right To Abortion, Jennifer S. Hendricks
Body And Soul: Equality, Pregnancy, And The Unitary Right To Abortion, Jennifer S. Hendricks
Publications
This Article explores equality-based arguments for abortion rights, revealing both their necessity and their pitfalls. It first uses the narrowness of the "health exception" to abortion regulations to demonstrate why equality arguments are needed--namely because our legal tradition's conception of liberty is based on male experience, no theory of basic human rights grounded in women's reproductive experiences has developed. Next, however, the Article shows that equality arguments, although necessary, can undermine women's reproductive freedom by requiring that pregnancy and abortion be analogized to male experiences. As a result, equality arguments focus on either the bodily or the social aspect of …