Law Commons^™

The Case For Reforming The Program's Spouse Benefits While "Saving Social Security", Peter W. Martin

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

The Social Security Act currently provides secondary benefits to the wives or widows of covered workers who retire, become disabled, or die. To qualify, a woman must have been married to the worker for a short period and must be old (sixty-two, dropping to sixty in the case of a widow, fifty in the case of a disabled widow) or caring for children under sixteen. If a wife’s or widow’s primary retired-worker or disability benefits equal or exceed her secondary benefit entitlement, she receives only the primary benefits. However, if her secondary benefit amount is greater she receives both her …

Judicial Innovation And Sexual Harassment Doctrine In The U.S. Court Of Appeals., Laura P. Moyer, Holley Takersley

Faculty Scholarship

The determination that sexual harassment constituted “discrimination based on sex” under Title VII was first made by the lower federal courts, not Congress. Drawing from the literature on policy diffusion, this article examines the adoption of hostile work environment standards across the U.S. Courts of Appeals in the absence of controlling Supreme Court precedent. The results bolster recent findings about the influence of female judges on their male colleagues and suggest that in addition to siding with female plaintiffs, female judges also helped to shape legal rules that promoted gender equality in the workplace.

The Legal Revolution In American Women’S Rights—And The Problems That Remain, Sonia Pressman Fuentes

Avon Global Center for Women and Justice and Dorothea S. Clarke Program in Feminist Jurisprudence

No abstract provided.

Abandoning Women To Their Rights: What Happens When Feminist Jurisprudence Ignores Birthing Rights, Rebecca A. Spence

Student Articles and Papers

The goals of the Article are twofold. First, this Article will demonstrate that while birthing rights issues have been familiar areas of concern for feminist scholarship on women's rights to privacy and equality, neglecting to integrate this work into the law school classroom fails to promote effective legal advocacy for pregnant women. The violation of women's rights during childbirth is a more common problem than reported legal opinions indicate, and few lawyers are prepared to protect clients prospectively or to vindicate women's rights post-childbirth.

Virginia's "War On Women": How Forcing Women To Have An Ultrasound Before Abortion Is Unconstitutional, Alison B. Linas

Law Student Publications

This comment will discuss how the ultrasound bill, like similar ones in other states, is unconstitutional for two reasons....Part II of this comment will focus on the Supreme Court's role in shaping abortion policy....Part III will describe Virginia’s new ultrasound requirement and how the above-mentioned Supreme Court decisions affect the new bill’s legality. Part III(A) will lay out the relevant portions of the bill and discuss its legislative history. Part III(B) will analyze the bill through Casey’s undue burden lens....Part III(C) will argue that requiring a woman to have a mandatory medical procedure effectively prevents her from refusing medical care, …

The Calculus Of Accommodation: Contraception, Abortion, Same-Sex Marriage, And Other Clashes Between Religion And The State, Robin F. Wilson

Scholarly Articles

This Article considers a burning issue in society today— whether, and under what circumstances, religious groups and individuals should be exempted from the dictates of civil law. The “political maelstrom” over the Obama administration’s sterilization and contraceptive coverage mandate is just one of many clashes between religion and the state. Religious groups and individuals have also sought religious exemptions to the duty to assist with abortions or facilitate samesex marriages. In all these contexts, religious objectors claim a special right of entitlement to follow their religious tenets, in the face of equally compelling claims that religious accommodations threaten access and …

Gender-Based Perceptions Of The 2001 Anthrax Attacks: Implications For Outreach And Preparedness, Christopher Salvatore, Brian J. Gorman

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Extensive research dealing with gender-based perceptions of fear of crime has generally found that women express greater levels of fear compared to men. Further, studies have found that women engage in more self-protective behaviors in response to fear of crime, as well as have different levels of confidence in government efficacy relative to men. The majority of these studies have focused on violent and property crime; little research has focused on gender-based perceptions of the threat of bioterrorism. Using data from a national survey conducted by ABC News / Washington Post, this study contrasted perceptions of safety and fear in …

Women And Girls Fleeing Conflict: Gender And The Interpretation And Application Of The 1951 Refugee Convention, Valerie Oosterveld

Law Publications

No abstract provided.

Estimating Gender Disparities In Federal Criminal Cases, Sonja Starr

Law & Economics Working Papers

This paper assesses gender disparities in federal criminal cases. It finds large gender gaps favoring women throughout the sentence length distribution (averaging over 60%), conditional on arrest offense, criminal history, and other pre-charge observables. Female arrestees are also significantly likelier to avoid charges and convictions entirely, and twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted. Prior studies have reported much smaller sentence gaps because they have ignored the role of charging, plea-bargaining, and sentencing fact-finding in producing sentences. Most studies control for endogenous severity measures that result from these earlier discretionary processes and use samples that have been winnowed by …

Minority Over-Representation In The Criminal Justice System―The Impact On African American Women, Families And Their Communities And Important Emerging Interventions, Brenda V. Smith

Presentations

sponsored by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) in partnership with Mental Health Systems, Inc.

Women In Robes, Sital Kalantry

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This article presents statistics on the number of women in the judiciary and argues for gender parity to further equality, enhance courts' legitimacy, and strengthen the rule of law.

Engaging With Tradition: Mechanisms, Strategies, And Tactics, Michael Edwards

Center for Gender & Sexuality Law

The relationships between tradition and social justice are complex and contingent, conditioned by many factors including social context, individual attachments and mechanisms of transmission and re-enactment. These relationships may be positive, negative or neutral from the perspective of LGBT concerns, and they may be approached in a variety of different ways according to the goals and circumstances at hand. The Engaging Tradition Project aims to explore these patterns in order to establish when and why tradition forms a barrier to the achievement of gender and sexual justice, and to identify how tradition can be deployed in positive ways by activists …

What's Best For Women: Examining The Impact Of Legal Approaches To Prostitution In Cross-National Perspective And Rhode Island, Malinda Bridges

Honors Projects

This research analyzes legal approaches to prostitution on a cross-national level in order to determine if legal methods that regulate prostitution have an effect on prostitution. In order to examine these concepts, legel approaches were first identifed in the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden. Following this analysis, the effects of these legal approaches are reported. Instead of working from a strictly sociological standpoint, this project focused greatly on the legal aspects that affect prostitution.

Deciphering A Duality: Understanding Conflicting Standards In Sex & Violence Censorship In U.S. Obscenity Law, Rushabh P. Bhakta

Political Science Honors Projects

This research examines the division in US obscenity law that enables strict sex censorship while overlooking violence. By investigating the social and legal development of obscenity in US culture, I argue that the contemporary duality in obscenity censorship standards arose from a family of forces consisting of faith, economy, and identity in early American history. While sexuality ingrained itself in American culture as a commodity in need of regulation, violence was decentralized from the state and proliferated. This phenomenon led to a prioritization of suppressing sexual speech over violent speech. This paper traces the emergence this duality and its source.

Changing Social Security To Achieve Long-Term Solvency And Make Other Improvements: Background Factors, Issues, Options, Peter W. Martin

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

For years those responsible for Social Security and policy analysts have acknowledged that the present statutory framework for determining and financing program benefits is unsustainable. Nonetheless, despite the work of Presidential commissions, countless Congressional hearings, proposals for reform advanced by individuals and groups across the political spectrum, changes to Social Security that would restore its fiscal balance into the foreseeable future have repeatedly been deferred or deflected by the nation's law-makers.

This paper aims to assist analysis of and reflection on the range of options for ensuring Social Security's future while not adding yet another solvency proposal to the already …

Teaching Social Justice Lawyering: Systematically Including Community Legal Education In Law School Clinics, Margaret Martin Barry, A. Rachel Camp, Margaret E. Johnson, Catherine F. Klein, Lisa V. Martin

All Faculty Scholarship

There is a body of literature on clinical legal theory that urges a focus in clinics beyond the single client to an explicit teaching of social justice lawyering. This Article adds to this emerging body of work by discussing the valuable role community legal education plays as a vehicle for teaching skills and values essential to single client representation and social justice lawyering. The Article examines the theoretical underpinnings of clinical legal education, community organizing and community education and how they influenced the authors’ design and implementation of community legal education within their clinics. It then discusses two projects designed …

The Aals Section On Women In Legal Education: The Past And The Future, Elizabeth M. Schneider

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Functional Parenting And Dysfunctional Abortion Policy: Reforming Parental Involvement Legislation, Maya Manian

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Abortion-related parental involvement mandates raise important family law issues about the scope of parents’ power over their children’s intimate decisions. While there has been extensive scholarly attention paid to the problems with parental involvement laws, relatively little has been said about strategies for reforming these laws. This article suggests using insights from family law relating to functional parenthood and third party caregiving as a basis for crafting more capacious methods of ensuring adult guidance for teenage girls facing an unplanned pregnancy. Recent developments in family law bolster the case for reforming parental involvement legislation to allow teenagers to consult with …

The Report Of The Military Leadership Diversity Commission: An Inadequate Basis For Lifting The Exclusion Of Women From Direct Ground Combat, Kingsley R. Browne

Law Faculty Research Publications

The recommendation of the Military Leadership Diversity Commission to lift the exclusion of women from ground combat is deeply irresponsible and cannot be taken seriously. The CommissionÕs lodestar was diversity, not military effectiveness, and it failed to take into consideration a wealth of information bearing on its recommendation. The CommissionÕs recommendation was based primarily on sources that cannot be considered authoritative, and the CommissionÕs analysis of the sources that it did consult was superficial and in conflict with some of the facts, as opposed to the Òspin,Ó contained in these very sources. The Commission substantially downplayed the sex difference in …

Respectable Queerness, Yuvraj Joshi

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Chief Justice Christine M. Durham: Trailblazer, Pioneer, Exemplar, André Douglas Pond Cummings

Faculty Scholarship

In 1978, Christine M. Durham was appointed, in a historic moment, to serve as trial judge to the third judicial district court in the state of Utah by then Governor Scott Matheson. Lost in the appropriate fanfare connected to her groundbreaking appointment as the first woman to serve as a general jurisdiction judge in the state of Utah, was the fact that she would also become the youngest person ever appointed to a judicial post in that great state. Just four years later, this young thirty-something female judge would be elevated by Matheson to sit on the Supreme Court of …

Against The New Maternalism, Naomi Mezey, Cornelia T. Pillard

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The biggest challenge for sex equality in the 21st Century is to dismantle inequality between women and men’s family care responsibilities. American law has largely accomplished formal equality in parenting by doing away with explicit gender classifications, along with many of the assumptions that fostered them. In a dramatic change from the mid-20th Century, law relating to family, work, civic participation and their various intersections is now virtually all sex-neutral. As the Supreme Court’s 2003 decision in Nevada Department of Social Services v. Hibbs demonstrates, both Congress and the Court have accepted the feminist critique of sex roles and stereotyping …

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

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The German Chancellor, the French President, and the British Prime Minister have each grabbed world headlines with pronouncements that their states' policies of multiculturalism have 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 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." This impasse is detrimental both to women's equality and …

Civil Rights Reform And The Body, Tobias Barrington Wolff

All Faculty Scholarship

Discrimination on the basis of gender identity or expression has emerged as a major focus of civil rights reform. Opponents of these reforms have structured their opposition around one dominant image: the bathroom. With striking consistency, opponents have invoked anxiety over the bathroom -- who uses bathrooms, what happens in bathrooms, and what traumas one might experience while occupying a bathroom -- as the reason to permit discrimination in the workplace, housing, and places of public accommodation. This rhetoric of the bathroom in the debate over gender-identity protections seeks to exploit an underlying anxiety that has played a role in …

First Amendment Privacy And The Battle For Progressively Liberal Social Change, Anita L. Allen

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Law And Literature Approach To Stumped By Debora Threedy, Kristin (Brandser) Kalsem

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

In this response, I will begin by identifying questions and issues about Stumped that might present themselves from law in literature and law as literature perspectives. This analysis will be followed by a discussion of the play from a particular law and narrative approach, one that ideologically is allied with feminist jurisprudence and critical race studies. Finally, I will conclude by examining the play in connection with scholarship on the cultural study of law, specifically emphasizing ways in which law and literature mutually constitute one another as opposed to being distinct categories of knowledge.

Study Guide For United In Anger: A History Of Act Up, Matt Brim

Open Educational Resources

The United in Anger Study Guide facilitates classroom and activist engagement with Jim Hubbard’s 2012 documentary, United in Anger: A History of ACT UP. The Study Guide contains discussion sections, projects and exercises, and resources for further research about the activism of the New York chapter of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). The Study Guide is a free, interactive, multimedia resource for understanding the legacy of ACT UP, the film’s role in preserving that legacy, and its meaning for viewers' lives.

Remediating Discrimination Against African American Females At The Intersection Of Title Ix And Title Vi, Alfred Dennis Mathewson

Faculty Scholarship

In Part I, I present a brief treatment of intersectionality in anti-discrimination law focusing on the distinction between cause of action and remedy. Harm caused by gender or racial discrimination may give rise to causes of action based on equal protection principles." In Part II, I go further and argue that the primary intersectionality problem presented by Title IX is one of remedy. I conclude that the differences in the remedial effects of Title IX result, in part, from unremedied racial discrimination, a conclusion that begins with Professor Jerome Dees's argument that Brown v. Board of Education and anti-discrimination laws …

Sex On The Bench: Do Women Judges Matter To The Legitimacy Of International Courts?, Nienke Grossman

All Faculty Scholarship

This article seeks to advance our understanding of international courts' legitimacy and its relationship to who sits on the bench. It asks whether we should care that few women sit on international court benches. After providing statistics on women's participation on eleven of the world's most important courts and tribunals, the article argues that under-representation of one sex affects normative legitimacy because it endangers impartiality and introduces bias when men and women approach judging differently. Even if men and women do not think differently, a sex un-representative bench harms sociological legitimacy for constituencies who believe they do nonetheless. For groups …

How The Expressive Power Of Title Ix Dilutes Its Promise, Dionne L. Koller

All Faculty Scholarship

Title IX is widely credited with shaping new norms for the world of sports by requiring educational institutions to provide equal athletic opportunities to women. The statute and regulations send a message that women are entitled to participate in sports on terms equal to men. For several decades, this message of equality produced dramatic results in participation rates, as the number of women interested in athletics grew substantially. Despite these gains, however, many women and girls, especially those of color and lower socio-economic status, still do not participate in sports, or remain interested in participating, in numbers comparable to their …