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Gender Matters: Teaching A Reasonable Woman Standard In Personal Injury Law, Margo Schlanger
Gender Matters: Teaching A Reasonable Woman Standard In Personal Injury Law, Margo Schlanger
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Reasonable care is, of course, a concept central to any torts class. But what is it? One very standard doctrinal move is to conceptualize reasonable care as that care shown by a "reasonable person" under like circumstances. The next step, logically, is to visualize this reasonable person. Visualization requires some important choices. For example, is the reasonable person old or young? Disabled or not? These are two questions that all the casebooks I have consulted discuss. But, oddly, no casebook of which I am aware deals with the trait that nearly invariably figures in our description of people: sex. If …
Injured Women Before Common Law Courts, 1860-1930, Margo Schlanger
Injured Women Before Common Law Courts, 1860-1930, Margo Schlanger
Articles
How did early American tort law treat women? How were they expected to behave, and how were others expected to behave towards them? What gender differences mattered, and how did courts deal with those differences? These are the issues this Article explores. My aim is to illuminate the common law of torts and its relation to and with ideas about gender difference, by focusing on three sets of cases involving injured women, spanning the time between approximately 1860 and 1930. My conclusions run counter to two approaches scholars have frequently taken in analyzing gender and the common law of torts. …