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University of Michigan Law School

2012

Legal History

Gender and law

Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in Law

The Devil Comes To Kansas: A Story Of Free Love, Sexual Privacy, And The Law, Charles J. Reid Jr. Jan 2012

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 Jan 2012

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 …


Under Color Of Law: Siliadin V. France And The Dynamics Of Enslavement In Historical Perspective, Rebecca J. Scott Jan 2012

Under Color Of Law: Siliadin V. France And The Dynamics Of Enslavement In Historical Perspective, Rebecca J. Scott

Book Chapters

When is it appropriate to apply the term ‘slavery’—a concept that appears to rest on a property right—to patterns of exploitation in contemporary society, when no state extends formal recognition to the possibility of the ownership of property in a human being? Historians, who generally position themselves as enemies of anachronism, may be particularly resistant to the use of an ancient term to describe a twenty-first century reality. And jurists have often been understandably reluctant to employ a word whose historical meaning was so closely tied to a specific property relationship that has long since been abolished in Europe and …