Law Commons^™

Taking Care, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

Care must be taken when human needs are expressed in the odd dialect of legal rights. This delicate act of translation – from private need to public obligation – demands acute sensitivity to the ways in which public responsibility inaugurates a new and complex encounter with a broad array of public preferences that deprive dependent subjects of primary stewardship over the ways in which their needs are met. Both Martha Fineman and Joan Williams have taken on the difficult project of making the ethical and political case for transforming dependency and care – from private or domestic need to public …

Theorizing Yes: An Essay On Feminism, Law, And Desire, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

In this Essay, Professor Franke observes that, unlike feminists from other disciplines, feminist legal theorists have neglected to formulate a positive theory of female sexuality. Instead, discussions of female sexuality have been framed as either a matter of dependency or danger. Professor Franke begins her challenge to this scheme by asking why legal feminism has accepted unquestionably the fact that most women reproduce in their lifetimes. Why have not social forces that incentivize motherhood – a dynamic she terms repronormativity – been exposed to as exacting a feminist critique as have heteronormative forces that normalize heterosexuality? Furthermore, she continues by …

Lucas Rosa V. Park West Bank And Trust Company, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

In July of 1998 something rather mundane happened: Lucas Rosa walked into Park West Bank in Holyoke, Massachusetts and asked for a loan application. Since it was a warm summer day, and because she wanted to look credit-worthy, Rosa wore a blousey top over stockings. Suddenly, the mundane transformed into the exceptional: When asked for some identification, Rosa was told that no application would be forthcoming until and unless she went home, changed her clothes and returned attired in more traditionally masculine/male clothing. Rosa, a biological male who identifies herself as female was, it seems, denied a loan application on …

Amicus Curiae Brief Of Now Legal Defense And Education Fund And Equal Rights Advocates In Support Of Plaintiff-Appellant And In Support Of Reversal, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund ("NOW LDEF") is a leading national non-profit civil rights organization that performs abroad range of legal and educational services in support of efforts to eliminate sex-based discrimination" and secure equal rights. NOW LDEF was founded in 1970 by leaders of the National Organization for Women as a separate organization. NOW LDEF has appeared as amicus in numerous cases involving sex stereotyping as a form of sex discrimination, including Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, and Fisher v. Vassar College.

Equal Rights Advocates ("ERA") is one of the oldest public interest law firms specializing in …

Divorce, Children's Welfare, And The Culture Wars, Elizabeth S. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

Are children harmed when their parents divorce? If so, should parents' freedom to end marriage be restricted? These questions have generated uncertainty and controversy in the decades since legal restraints on divorce have been lifted. During the 1970s and 80s, the traditional conviction that parents should stay together "for the sake of the children" was supplanted by a view that children are usually better off if their unhappy parents divorce. By this account, divorcing parents should simply try to accomplish the change in status with as little disruption to their children's lives as possible. This stance has been challenged sharply …

Feminism At The Millennium, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

Sexism of all kinds – subtle and blatant, criminal and legal, commercial and private – is the topic of the three books under review. The books initially sort themselves out by discipline: Everyday Sexism and Subtle Sexism are anthologies whose editors and contributors are primarily sociologists; Speaking of Sex is written by a law professor and offers a more focused argument about the persistence of gender inequalities. Distinctions in authorship aside, the three books pose a pair of similar and painfully familiar questions: Why is so much still organized to the disadvantage of women, and what can (feminist) academics contribute …

The Role And Reality Of Emotions In Law, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

It is a great pleasure to participate in the celebration and exploration of Susan Bandes' The Passions of Law in this symposium on emotion and gender jurisprudence. It may be worth reminding today's law students that when Professor Bandes and I were classmates at the University of Michigan Law School in the mid-1970s, there were no such conferences. Jurisprudence existed, but the concept of gender had not yet emerged; we were still too busy defining feminism. Emotions were something we dutifully suppressed as we tried to assimilate into the legal profession.

This is not to say we were wholly unaffected …