Law Commons^™

Children's Equality: Strategizing A New Deal For Children, Nancy E. Dowd

UF Law Faculty Publications

It is the ultimate gift to have one’s work trigger feedback, critique and challenge that expands and deepens the project. Professors Cooper, Huntington, McGinley, Silbaugh, and Woodhouse all have been sources of inspiration for me; their Articles and Essays in response to Reimagining Equality contribute both to my thinking and to the core focus of the book, the well-being, development and equality of all children, but also to the broad focus of this special issue on children and poverty. I am particularly grateful for their challenges and critiques, and their shared focus on the strategies I explore in the book, …

Children's Equality: The Centrality Of Race, Gender, And Class, Nancy E. Dowd

UF Law Faculty Publications

Hierarchies among children dramatically impact their development. Beginning before birth, and continuing during their progression to adulthood from birth to age 18, structural and cultural barriers separate and subordinate some children, while they privilege others. The hierarchies replicate patterns of inequality along familiar lines, particularly those of race, gender, and class, and the intersections of those identities. These barriers, and co-occurring support of privilege for other children, emanate from policies, practices, and structures of the state, including education, health, policing and juvenile justice, and limited social welfare. Reimagining Equality: A New Deal for Children of Color takes on the task …

The Politics Of Pregnancy Accommodation, Stephanie Bornstein

UF Law Faculty Publications

How can antidiscrimination law treat men and women “equally” when it comes to the issue of pregnancy? The development of U.S. law on pregnancy accommodation in the workplace tells a story of both legal disagreements about the meaning of “equality” and political disagreements about how best to achieve “equality” at work for women. Federal law has prohibited sex discrimination in the workplace for over five decades. Yet, due to long held gender stereotypes separating work and motherhood, the idea that prohibiting sex discrimination requires a duty to accommodate pregnant workers is a relatively recent phenomenon—and still only partially required by …

The Violent State: Black Women's Invisible Struggle Against Police Violence, Michelle S. Jacobs

UF Law Faculty Publications

Black women have a very specific history with the state and law enforcement that is not replicated among other women’s communities, and it is that unique situation that is the focus of this Article. Part I of this Article explores the historical roots of Black women’s interaction with the state. Part II of this Article is broken into two sections. The first will cover police killings of Black women. The second part of the section will explore the conditions under which Black women are physically assaulted by the police. Part III of the Article seeks to highlight when the police …

The Case For Trauma-Informed, Gender-Specific Prevention/Early Intervention Programming In Reducing Female Juvenile Delinquency In Florida, Joan D. Flocks, Emily Calvin, Simone Chriss, Marina Prado-Steiman

UF Law Faculty Publications

This article describes the statutory recognition of the need for prevention/early intervention juvenile services in Florida that are both trauma-informed and gender-specific. It examines how childhood trauma can impact at-risk children and the gendered aspects of such trauma. The article then describes the PACE Center for Girls, a Florida-based school, currently undergoing a comprehensive evaluation, which attempts to incorporate elements that fulfill statutory recommendations into its programming.

Work Wives, Laura A. Rosenbury

UF Law Faculty Publications

Traditional notions of male and female roles remain tenacious at home and work even in the face of gender-neutral family laws and robust employment discrimination laws. This Article analyzes the challenge of gender tenacity through the lens of the “work wife.” The continued use of the marriage metaphor at work reveals that the dynamics of marriage flow between home and work, creating a feedback loop that inserts gender into both domains in multiple ways. This phenomenon may reinforce gender stereotypes, hindering the potential of law to achieve gender equality. But such gender tenacity need not always lead to subordination. The …

Working Relationships, Laura A. Rosenbury

UF Law Faculty Publications

In this Essay written for the symposium on "For Love or Money? Defining Relationships in Law and Life," I extend my previous consideration of friendship to the specific context of the workplace, analyzing friendship through the lens of the ties that arise at work instead of those assumed to arise within the home. Many adults spend half or more of their waking hours at work, in the process forming relationships with supervisors, co-workers, subordinates, customers, and other third parties. Although such relationships are at times primarily transactional, at other times they take on intimate qualities similar to those of family …

Asking The Man Question: Masculinities Analysis And Feminist Theory, Nancy E. Dowd

UF Law Faculty Publications

Masculinities scholarship is an essential piece of feminist analysis and of critical equality analysis. It requires that we "ask the man question" to further unravel inequalities. This symposium marks one of several movements toward examining and considering what masculinities scholarship can offer. In this introduction, I suggest a framework of masculinities analysis and describe its relationship to feminist theory. First, I consider why we should ask the "man question," and how we should ask it. Second, I explore how masculinities analysis might be useful in our examination of the "man question." Masculinities work can be used to understand more clearly …

Sex In And Out Of Intimacy, Laura A. Rosenbury, Jennifer E. Rothman

UF Law Faculty Publications

The state has long attempted to regulate sexual activity by channeling sex into various forms of state-supported intimacy. Although commentators and legal scholars of diverse political perspectives generally believe such regulation is declining, the freedom to engage in diverse sexual activities has not been established as a matter of law. Instead, courts have extended legal protection to consensual sexual acts only to the extent such acts support other state interests, most often marriage and procreation. Although Lawrence v. Texas altered some aspects of that vision, it reinscribed others by suggesting that sexual activity should be protected from state interference only …

The Gender Bend: Culture, Sex, And Sexuality – A Latcritical Human Rights Map Of Latina/O Border Crossings, Berta E. Hernández-Truyol

UF Law Faculty Publications

In the course of studying and theorizing about Latinas/os and their location in law and culture, critical theory has been simultaneously liberating and restraining, confining, and coercive. Critical theorists have made substantial inroads in recognizing the intersectionality, multidimensionality, multiplicity, and interconnectivities of the intersections of race and sex. These paradigms are central to an analysis of the Latina/o condition within the Estados Unidos (United States). However, much work remains to be done in other areas - such as culture, language, sexuality, and class - that are key to Latinas'/os' self-determination and full citizenship.

Cognizant of, and notwithstanding such limitations, this …

Friends With Benefits, Laura A. Rosenbury

UF Law Faculty Publications

Family law has long been intensely interested in certain adult intimate relationships, namely marriage and marriage-like relationships, and silent about other adult intimate relationships, namely friendship. This Article examines the effects of that focus, illustrating how it frustrates one of the goals embraced by most family law scholars over the past forty years: the achievement of gender equality, within the family and without.

Part I examines the current scope of family law doctrine and scholarship, highlighting the ways that the home is still the organizing structure for family. Despite calls for increased legal recognition of diverse families, few scholars have …

Race, Gender, And Work/Family Policy, Nancy E. Dowd

UF Law Faculty Publications

Family leave is not an end in itself, but rather is part of a much bigger picture: work/family policy. The goal of work/family policy is to achieve a good society by supporting families. Ideally, families enable children to develop to their fullest capacity and to contribute to their communities and society. Public rhetoric in the United States has always strongly supported families. Our policies, however, have not. In the area of work/family policy, the United States continues to lag behind every other advanced industrialized country, as well as many developing countries, in the degree to which we provide affirmative support …

Crossing Borderlands Of Inequality With International Legal Methodologies - The Promise Of Multiple Feminisms, Berta E. Hernández-Truyol

UF Law Faculty Publications

This work provides insights into the gendered developments of international law. It explores the roles played by the gendered rule of law and by the conflation of economic, social, political, religious, cultural, and historic realities in the marginalization of women in the international, regional, and domestic spheres worldwide. The first section presents the myriad locations of women's persistent inequality. The next sets forth feminist theory that has been the basis of both the celebration of women's progress and the denunciation of women's subordination. The last part makes suggestions for the articulation of a methodology that follows the complex paths of …

Latinas, Culture And Human Rights: A Model For Making Change, Saving Soul, Berta E. Hernández-Truyol

UF Law Faculty Publications

This essay provides an overview of progresses achieved for women in the Americas by virtue of the use of the human rights model to further women's rights and attain betterment of their lives. Specifically, this work reviews the location of Latinas both within and outside the United States fronteras. As women of color within larger U.S. society and as women within their comunidad Latina, Latinas experience different multifaceted subordinations. A human rights model that recognizes the multidimensional nature of gendered racial discrimination and of racialized gender discrimination can serve to improve the lives of Latinas as well as non-Latina women …

Unbending Gender: Why Family And Work Conflict And What To Do About It (Panel Two: Who's Minding The Baby?), Nancy E. Dowd, Adrienne Davis, Marion Crain, Bonnie Dill, Catherine Ross, Joan Williams

UF Law Faculty Publications

A central characteristic of our current gender arrangements is that they pit ideal worker women against marginalized caregiver women in a series of patterned conflicts I call gender wars. One version of these are the mommy wars that we see often covered in the press between employed mothers and mothers at home. Employed mothers at times participate in the belittlement commonly felt by homemakers. Also mothers at home, I think, at times participate in the guilt-tripping that's often felt by mothers who are employed. These gender wars are a central but little understood characteristic of the gender system that grew …

Borders (En)Gendered: Normativities, Latinas, And A Latcrit Paradigm, Berta E. Hernández-Truyol

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Essay, developed in a prologue and three parts, adopts Latinas'/os' world traveling as a metaphor for Latina/o multidimensionality and as a springboard for LatCrit theorizing. The Prologue is a brief diary entry of unfin de semana viajando mundos - a weekend of actual traveling between New York and Miami; law and familia; profesora and learner; colleague and hija; español and English; norte y sur; normativa and other; indigenous and alien. This abbreviated record of a Latina's life reveals, exposes, and unveils Latinas'/os' daily crossdressing simply by virtue of their latinidad. This Prologue thus serves as a concrete backdrop for …

Sex, Culture, And Rights: A Re/Conceptualization Of Violence For The Twenty-First Century, Berta E. Hernández-Truyol

UF Law Faculty Publications

The central theme of this Article, "Sex, Culture, and Rights: A Re/conceptualization of Violence," is that a re/vision of acts that constitute violence against women is necessary for gender equality -- both domestically and internationally -- to become a reality. This reconceptualization must address not only the normative concept of violence, i.e., the use of physical force, but it must also transform and reposition the idea of violence within a broader framework that includes, considers and aims to eradicate (1) psychological, social and political subordination of women; (2) male dominant (and female subservient) cultural and traditional practices; as well as …

Concluding Remarks - Making Women Visible: Setting An Agenda For The Twenty-First Century, Berta E. Hernández-Truyol

UF Law Faculty Publications

The Women's Rights as International Human Rights Symposium (Symposium), sponsored by the International Women's Human Rights Project of the Center for Law and Public Policy at St. John's University, focused on the roles played by rules of law and by the conflation of economic, social, political, religious, cultural, and historic forces in the marginalization of women in the public and private sectors in both the international and domestic systems. The traditional exclusion of women from the articulation, development, implementation, and enforcement of rights has rendered gender issues invisible and thereby shielded gender-based abuses from much needed scrutiny. The flawed public/private …