Law Commons^™

The Role Of Personal Laws In Creating A “Second Sex”, Rangita De Silva De Alwis, Indira Jaising

All Faculty Scholarship

The cultural construction of gender determines the role of women and girls within the family in many societies. Gendered notions of power in the family are often shrouded in religion and custom and find their deepest expression in Personal Laws. This essay examines the international law framework as it relates to personal laws and the commonality of narratives of litigators and plaintiffs in the cases from the three different personal law systems in India.

Trending @ Rwu Law: Linn F. Freedman's Post: The Goal Of Gender Equality In Cybersecurity 08/23/2016, Linn F. Freedman

Law School Blogs

No abstract provided.

Newsroom: Defending The Defenseless, 5-26-2016, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Research Brief: "Military Sexual Trauma Among Recent Veterans: Correlates Of Sexual Assault And Sexual Harassment", Institute For Veterans And Military Families At Syracuse University

Institute for Veterans and Military Families

This study examines the population prevalence of military sexual trauma among OEF/OIF-era veterans. It found that almost 41% of women and 4% of men reported a military sexual trauma, indicating a high prevalence of OEF/OIF-era veterans who have experienced an MST. In practice, servicemembers and veterans who have experienced a military sexual trauma (MST) should seek medical help, such as counseling. In policy, the Department of Defense (DoD) might continue its efforts to reduce negative repercussions often associated with reporting sexual assault or sexual harassment. Suggestions for future research include having more data on the prevalence of MST in the …

A Liberal Dilemma: Respecting Autonomy While Also Protecting Inchoate Children From Prenatal Substance Abuse., Andrew J. Weisberg, Frank E. Vandervort

Articles

Substance abuse is a significant social problem in America. It is estimated that some eighteen million Americans have an alcohol abuse problem and that almost five million have a drug abuse problem. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, substance abuse costs some $700 billion per year Substance abuse is a major contributor to child maltreatment. It is estimated that between one- and two-thirds of cases in which children enter foster care are linked to parental substance abuse. Unfortunately, this may be an underestimate as recent research suggests that many cases, particularly cases in which children have been exposed …

Hormone Check: Critique Of Olympic Rules On Sex And Gender, Erin E. Buzuvis

Faculty Scholarship

Most sports, including all Olympic sports, are divided into two categories: men's and women's. This Article first presents a history of gender testing in Olympic and international sports to illustrate why past attempts to define eligibility for women's sports have proven unfair to women with intersex conditions. It then describes the shortcomings of the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) first effort to articulate standards of eligibility for transgender athletes. In its second Part, this Article explains the more recent efforts of the IOC and the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) to define eligibility for women's sports solely on the basis …

The "Rabbi's Daughter" And The "Jewish Jane Addams": Jewish Women, Legal Aid, And The Fluidity Of Identity, 1890-1930, Felice Batlan

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The "Rabbi's Daughter" And The "Jewish Jane Addams": Jewish Women, Legal Aid, And The Fluidity Of Identity, 1890-1930, Felice Batlan

All Faculty Scholarship

This symposium article discusses an unexamined area of legal aid and legal history—the role that late nineteenth and early twentieth century Jewish women played in the delivery of legal aid as social workers, lawyers, and, importantly, as cultural and legal brokers. It presents two such women who represented different types and models of legal aid—Minnie Low of the Chicago Bureau of Personal Service, a Jewish social welfare organization, and Rosalie Loew of the Legal Aid Society of New York. I interrogate how these women negotiated their identities as Jewish professional women, what role being Jewish and female played in shaping …

Men, Women, And Optimal Violence, Mary Anne Franks

Articles

While both men and women can, and do, use violence against each other, men's violence against women is far more common, less justified, and more destructive than women's violence against men. One of the reasons for this asymmetry is that men do not fear retaliation for violence against women, whereas women do fear retaliation for their use of violence against men. The distribution of violence between the genders, then, is suboptimal. Society would be better off as a whole if more women were willing to engage in justified violence against men, and fewer men were willing to engage in unjustified …

En-Gendering Economic Inequality, Michele E. Gilman

All Faculty Scholarship

We live in an era of growing economic inequality. Luminaries ranging from the President to the Pope to economist Thomas Piketty in his bestselling book Capital in the Twenty- First Century have raised alarms about the disparity between the haves and the have-nots. Overlooked, however, in these important discussions is the reality that economic inequality is not a uniform experience; rather, its effects fall more harshly on women and minorities. With regard to gender, American women have higher rates of poverty and get paid less than comparable men, and their workplace participation rates are falling. Yet economic inequality is neither …

Debunking The Myth Of Universal Male Privilege, Jamie Abrams

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Existing legal responses to sexual assault and harassment in the military have stagnated or failed. Current approaches emphasize the prevalence of sexual assault and highlight the masculine nature of the military’s statistical composition and institutional culture. Current responses do not, however, incorporate masculinities theory to disentangle the experiences of men as a group from men as individuals. Rather, embedded within contestations of the masculine military culture is the unstated assumption that the culture universally privileges or benefits the individual men that operate within it. This myth is harmful because it tethers masculinities to military efficacy, suppresses the costs of male …

Aftermath Of The Hobby Lobby Decision: Implications For Women In The Workforce, Hirsh Shah

Auctus: The Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Scholarship

Hobby Lobby is a chain of 640 arts and crafts stores owned by the Green family, based in Oklahoma City. This company is required to follow the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which mandates that larger employers—those with more than 50 employees—have to include coverage for the full range of preventative care, including contraceptives, in their female employees’ health insurance plans. However, the Green family holds deeply religious views and did not want to include four of the twenty contraceptives covered by the ACA, including long acting reversible contraception and emergency contraception, in their female employee coverage. The family believed that …

Justice, Reconciliation, And The Masculinist Way: What Role For Women In Truth And Reconciliation Commissions?, Penelope Andrews

Articles & Chapters

During periods of armed conflict, women and girls are frequently subjected to violence because of their gender. National governments have attempted to address this issue through transitional justice mechanisms like truth and reconciliation commissions. The record of women’s input and participation in these processes, however, is rather poor. In this article, I highlight the role of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (SATRC) and the opportunity the SATRC missed in failing to comprehensively confront andexamine the systemic nature of violence against women under apartheid. Many transitional justice mechanisms, the SATRC being one of the more vivid examples, have adopted a …

Women On State Boards And Commissions: Is Idaho Where It Wants To Be?, Brenda Bauges

Articles

No abstract provided.

'Such Slow Murder': Feminism, Moral Panic And Homicidal Women, Katherine Biber, Arlie Loughnan, Julia Quilter

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Maternal infanticide is an issue of perennial interest to sociohistorical scholars, criminologists and feminist researchers. In this wide-ranging book, Annie Cossins argues that infanticide is a uniquely ‘feminine’ form of criminality insofar as it draws social and legal attention to women’s bodies.

Mapping The Trafficking Of Women Across Colonial Southeast Asia, 1600s-1930'S, Julia T. Martinez

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

While slavery in the seventeenth century included a substantial traffic in Asian women, it was only in the late nineteenth century that the rise in trafficking in women in Asia came to the attention of international humanitarians who sought to combat this new form of post-abolition slavery. The increasing emphasis on women as slaves, held for the purposes of sexual exploitation, was to a large extent brought to public attention as the result of the enactment of the British Contagious Diseases Ordinance of 1870, which required that women working in prostitution be registered and counted. It was European colonialism in …

London Women In The Colonies, Ian C. Willis

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Book Review Anne Philp, Caroline's Diary, A Woman's World in Colonial Australia, Anchor Books Australia, NSW, 2015, x + 269 pages; ISBN 9780992467135.

This is a book where Anne Philp has created a narrative around the personal diaries of English woman Caroline Husband who came to New South Wales in the mid-19th century. Her father, lawyer James Husband, fell on hard times and fled his Hampstead Hill house in England with debt collectors in pursuit, and was followed to Australia by his wife and seven children. Caroline has documented her thoughts, her experiences and her feelings of her life adventure …

Women In Prison: Liberty, Equality, And Thinking Outside The Bars, Debra Parkes

All Faculty Publications

This article considers the potential of rights-based advocacy to respond to the troubling reality of a growing women's prison population, and it makes an attempt to sketch out an approach to advocacy and scholarship that seeks both liberty and substantive equality for criminalized and imprisoned women. It proceeds in four parts. First, it documents some of the legislative and policy changes made to sentencing and penal law in the last decade. Next, it identifies some of the ways that these changes have an impact on women and on particular groups of women. It then suggests some ways that academics, lawyers, …

Technology, Gender And Fashion, Jeanne L. Schroeder

Articles

No abstract provided.

Lifetime Disadvantage, Susan Bisom-Rapp, Malcolm Sargeant

Faculty Scholarship

Lifetime Disadvantage, Discrimination and the Gendered Workforce fills a gap in the literature on discrimination and disadvantage suffered by women at work by focusing on the inadequacies of the current law and the need for a new holistic approach. Each stage of the working life cycle for women is examined with a critical consideration of how the law attempts to address the problems that inhibit women's labor force participation. By using their model of lifetime disadvantage, the authors show how the law adopts an incremental and disjointed approach to resolving the challenges, and argue that a more holistic orientation towards …