Law Commons^™

Speaking Volumes: Musings On The Issues Of The Day, Inspired By The Memoir Of Mary Joe Frug, Elizabeth M. Schneider, Regina Austin

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Book Review: Decreeing Women's Equality: Using Women's History To Create Legal Parity, Denise D. J. Roy

Faculty Scholarship

This article critiques the feminist view Ute Gerhard offers in “Debating Women's Equality: Toward a Feminist Theory of Law from a European Perspective”. Throughout Debating Women's Equality, Gerhard appears to have three ambitious objectives in mind: (1) to decry the paucity of research into women's legal history while beginning to do the needed work, focusing primarily on Germany but also broadly exploring European trends, (2) to demonstrate that German/European women's legal history ultimately vindicates reliance on “equal rights” as a political strategy for women, and (3) to develop an understanding of legal equality that can serve as a meaningful tool …

Revisiting Social Group And Nexus In Gender Asylum Claims: A Unifying Rationale For Evolving Jurisprudence, Karen Musalo

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Beyond The Glass Ceiling: The Maternal Wall As A Barrier To Gender Equality, Joan C. Williams

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Beyond The Maternal Wall: Relief For Family Caregivers Who Are Discriminated Against On The Job, Joan C. Williams, Nancy Segal

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Minnesota's Sex Offender Commitment Program: Would An Empirically-Based Prevention Policy By More Effective?, Eric S. Janus

Faculty Scholarship

Minnesota’s sex offender commitment scheme is not just a bad idea; it likely has bad consequences. It is a huge and disproportionate sink for resources that ight be put to more effective use in the fight against sexual violence. Worse, its demand for resources will continue to grow, thus predetermining to a large extent how prevention and treatment dollars are spent. It is very possible that a more rational allocation of these resources would actually prevent more violence than the allocation that is automatically produced by the sex offender commitment scheme. At the very least, the fight against sexual violence …

Two "Colored" Women's Conversation About The Relevance Of Feminist Law Journals In The Twenty-First Century, Taunya Lovell Banks, Penelope Andrews

Faculty Scholarship

This is a critique by two non-white law professors in the form of a conversation about the relevance of feminist law journals on their lives and scholarship. We conclude that the impression that feminist scholarship now is accepted in mainstream law reviews may be illusory and thus there is a continuing need for feminist law journals. In the past rather than creating a new type of journal, feminist law journals tend to replicate the traditional law journal model. Only the focus is different. Twenty years later not only do race and sexuality continue to separate us, but increasingly, careerism as …

Women Law Journals In The New Millennium: How Far Have They Evolved? And Are They Still Necessary?, Katherine L. Vaughns

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Women Of Color In Law Teaching: Shared Identities, Different Experiences, Katherine L. Vaughns

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Bringing Your Part Time Policy Up To Par, Joan C. Williams

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Elusive (But Worthwhile) Quest For A Diverse Bench In The New Millennium, Theresa M. Beiner

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Proliferation, Katharine B. Silbaugh

Faculty Scholarship

In the spirit of intellectual inquiry, the editors have chosen to hold a symposium asking how the unique mission of the journal is to be justified. Self-assessment is a courageous undertaking. Here we see exemplified one of the great benefits of journals with a well-defined perspective: student editors take the mission of the journal seriously. They are not self-satisfied. They have chosen this perspective, not fallen into it, and they are willing to investigate whether it is worth their commitment. From this comes the simple answer-as long as there are students dedicated to the mission of feminist law journals, authors …

Problem-Solving Negotiation: Northern Ireland's Experience With The Women's Coalition Symposium, Jacqueline Nolan-Haley, Bronagh Hinds

Faculty Scholarship

This paper is part of a Symposium that considered the relevance of domestic conflict resolution theories in broader cultural contexts. The Northern Ireland Women's Coalition (Women's Coalition) participated in the negotiations leading up to the 1998 Good Friday/Belfast Agreement. Members of the Woman's Coalition responded to thirty years of sectarian violence with a negotiation process based on accommodation, inclusion, and relationship building, concepts that resonate with American-style problem-solving negotiation. Using the Women's Coalition as a case study, this Article suggests that there are procedural aspects of problem-solving negotiation theory that may work across domains, specifically in multi-party, intractable conflict situations, …

Book Review, Catherine Fisk

Faculty Scholarship

Reviewing Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America (2001)

Thinking About Feminism, Social Justice, And The Place Of Feminist Law Journals: A Letter To The Editor, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Dear Editors:

You, like the editors who came before you, have staked a place in an invigorating and challenging conversation about the transformative potential of feminist approaches to social justice.1 As you envision and edit your journal, fundamental questions about the purpose of feminist scholarship and the value of retaining an autonomous space for feminist jurisprudence loom large.

Not surprisingly, The Bluebook will provide little guidance on these topics. Instead, consistent with the feminist enterprise,2 you will need to search out sources, both within and outside of the law school library, to spark your critical thinking. Ideally these will ensure …

Un/Braiding Stories About Law, Sexuality And Morality, Margaret E. Montoya

Faculty Scholarship

Traditional doctrine insists that we tame sexual desire by pretending that goodness and Godliness is defined by celibacy and abstinence, but the Church is simply wrong to insist that we accept a theology that negates and silences and suppresses a central part of our lives. To the extent that we believe in a life after death, many of us have won a chance at Heaven not by denying and suppressing our sexuality but by struggling to develop our capacity to experience joy through sexual desire and to honor the responsibility of not generating misery for ourselves and others through that …

Placing The Adoptive Self, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

[A]doption law and practices are guided by enormous cultural changes in the composition and the meaning of family. As families become increasingly blended outside the context of adoption – with combinations of blood relatives, step-relatives, de facto relatives, and ex-relatives sitting down together for Thanksgiving dinner as a matter of course – birth families and adoptive families knowing one another may not seem so very strange or threatening at all. There will simply be an expectation across communities that ordinary families will be mixed and multiple. With that in mind, we should hesitate before establishing embeddedness as the source of …

Afterword: The Perils And Pleasure Of Activist Scholarship, Elizabeth M. Schneider

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Women's Rights: Reframing The Issues For The Future, Ariana Dubler, Anika Rahman, Kathy Rodgers, Jane M. Spinak

Faculty Scholarship

Good morning and welcome, everyone, to our panel on Women's Rights: Refraining the Issues for the Future. I am Kathy Rodgers. I'm from the class of 1973 of Columbia Law School, and I'm looking around this room – this is not what room A and B looked like back then! Everybody has a microphone, which is great, because we hope to have some good interactive discussion with all of you this morning.

I am also, in addition to being a Columbia Law alum, the president of NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund here in New York. For over thirty-two years, …

On Discipline And Canon, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

While the title of the panel I participated in was "Why Do We Eat Our Young?", I think I prefer: "On Discipline and Canon," or to rework the title of the panel in the program, "Why Do We Eat Our Girlfriends?"

In my short remarks, I would like to raise a set not of answers, but of questions that over the last year or so a few of us have been discussing outside of our published work. These questions seem apt both for this panel and for this conference. Last November a group of really wonderful women at the University …

Learning From Conflict: Reflections On Teaching About Race And Gender, Susan Sturm, Lani Guinier

Faculty Scholarship

In 1992 had been teaching for four years at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. I taught voting rights and criminal procedure, subjects related to what I had done as a litigator. Preparing for class meant reading many of the same cases I had read preparing for trial. Some were even cases I had tried. Teaching offered me a fresh chance to read those cases with new interest. I could see the subtle linkages between cases that I had not previously noticed. From the distance of the academy, I observed the evolution of the doctrine without feeling overcome by the …

Where Will Women Lawyers Be In 25 Years?, Frances E. Bivens, Joan Guggenheimer, Nancy Northrup, Susan Sturm, Judith Reinhardt Thoyer

Faculty Scholarship

Barbara Black said in her unbelievably moving remarks that Columbia has opened up its institutional heart to women. I thought that was a wonderful expression and, as a relative newcomer to Columbia, I have to agree. What does this mean? It means that women have become part of the cultural fabric of the Columbia Law School. We are not an accent. We are not an accessory. We are woven into the day-to-day fabric of the school. And this means being able both to participate in the old traditions and to reshape them to make some new traditions and then have …