Law Commons^™

A Difficult Conversation: Corporate Directors On Race And Gender, Kimberly D. Krawiec, John M. Conley, Lissa L. Broome

Faculty Scholarship

This symposium essay summarizes our ongoing ethnographic research on corporate board diversity, discussing the central tension in our respondents’ views – their overwhelmingly enthusiastic support of board diversity coupled with an inability to articulate coherent accounts of board diversity benefits that might rationalize that enthusiasm. As their reactions make clear, frank dialogue about race and gender – even a seemingly benign discussion of diversity’s benefits – can be a difficult conversation.

The Danger Of Difference: Tensions In Directors’ View Of Corporate Board Diversity, Kimberly D. Krawiec, John M. Conley, Lissa L. Broome

Faculty Scholarship

This Article describes the results from fifty-seven interviews with corporate directors and a limited number of other persons (including institutional investors, search firm personnel, and the like) regarding their views on corporate board diversity. It highlights numerous tensions in these views. Most directors, for instance, proclaim that diverse boards are good, but very few directors can articulate their reasons for this belief. Some directors have suggested that diverse boards work better than non-diverse boards, but gave relatively few concrete examples of specific instances where a female or minority board member made a special contribution related to that director’s race or …

Feminist Legal Scholarship: A History Through The Lens Of The California Law Review, Katharine T. Bartlett

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay describes the evolution of feminist legal scholarship, using six articles published by the California Law Review as exemplars. This short history provides a window on the most important contributions of feminist scholarship to understandings about gender and law. It explores alternative formulations of equality, and the competing assumptions, ideals, and implications of these formulations. It describes frameworks of thought intended to compensate for the limitations of equality doctrine, including critical legal feminism, different voice theory, and nonsubordination theory, and the relationships between these frameworks. Finally, it identifies feminist legal scholarship that has crossed the disciplinary bound-aries of law. …

From Multiculturalism To Technique: Feminism, Culture And The Conflict Of Laws Style, Karen Knop, Ralf Michaels, Annelise Riles

Faculty Scholarship

The German chancellor, the French president and the British prime minister have each grabbed world headlines with pronouncements that their state’s policy of multiculturalism has failed. As so often, domestic debates about multiculturalism, as well as foreign policy debates about human rights in non-Western countries, revolve around the treatment of women. Yet there is also a widely noted brain drain from feminism. Feminists are no longer even certain how to frame, let alone resolve, the issues raised by veiling, polygamy and other cultural practices oppressive to women by Western standards. Feminism has become perplexed by the very concept of “culture.” …

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 …

Dangerous Categories: Narratives Of Corporate Board Diversity, Lissa Lamkin Broome, John M. Conley, Kimberly D. Krawiec

Faculty Scholarship

In this article, we report the results of a series of interviews with corporate directors about racial, ethnic, and gender diversity on corporate boards. On the one hand, our respondents were clear and nearly uniform in their statements that board diversity was an important goal worth pursuing. Yet when asked to provide examples or anecdotes illustrating why board diversity matters, many subjects acknowledged difficulty in illustrating theory with reference to practice.

This expressed reluctance to come to specific terms with general claims about the value of director diversity inspired our title phrase: dangerous categories. That is, while "diversity" evokes universal …

“Equal Citizenship Stature”: Justice Ginsburg’S Constitutional Vision, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

In this essay, Professor Siegel examines the nature and function of constitutional visions in the American constitutional order. He argues that Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg possesses such a vision and that her vision is defined by her oft-stated commitment to “full human stature,” to “equal citizenship stature.” He then defends Justice Ginsburg’s characteristically incremental and moderate approach to realizing her vision. He does so in part by establishing that President Barack Obama articulated a similar vision and approach in his Philadelphia speech on American race relations and illustrated its capacity to succeed during the 2008 presidential election.

Narratives Of Diversity In The Corporate Boardroom: What Corporate Insiders Say About Why Diversity Matters, Kimberly D. Krawiec, Lissa Lamkin Broome, John M. Conley

Faculty Scholarship

Over the last generation, the concept of diversity has become commonplace and taken-for-granted in discourses ranging from law to education to business. In higher education, for example, it is hard to imagine a faculty job search or a student admissions discussion that was not heavily laden with talk of diversity, in the sense of the representative inclusion of women and racial and ethnic minorities in a group or organization. In this paper we present the results of an interview-based study of the discourse of diversity in a particular business setting: the corporate boardroom. Our principal observation is that—thirty-one years after …

State Domas, Neutral Principles, And The Möbius Of State Action, Darrell A. H. Miller

Faculty Scholarship

This essay uses the Mobius strip as a mathematical metaphor for how state "defense of marriage amendments" (DOMAs) can twist the Shelley v. Kraemer contribution to state action doctrine. It argues that Shelley's core insight -- that judicial enforcement of private agreements can constitute state action and must meet federal Fourteenth Amendment commands -- can be used by state judiciaries to hold that state judicial enforcement of private agreements between same sex-couples is a species of state action forbidden by state DOMA. As explored in this essay, the potential doctrinal contortion of Shelley by state DOMAs is at once a …

Comparing Race And Sex Discrimination In Custody Cases, Katharine T. Bartlett

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.