Law Commons^™

Redefining Harm, Reimagining Remedies And Reclaiming Domestic Violence Law, Margaret Johnson

Margaret E Johnson

Women subjected to domestic violence are disserved by the civil domestic violence laws that should effectively address and redress their harms. The Civil Protective Order [CPO] laws should remedy all domestic abuse and not solely physical violence or criminal acts. All forms of abuse, including psychological, emotional, economic and physical abuse, cause severe emotional distress, physical harm, isolation, sustained fear, intimidation, poverty, degradation, humiliation, and coerced loss of autonomy. Moreover, all abuse is interrelated, because, as researchers have demonstrated, most domestic violence is the fundamental operation of systemic oppression through the exertion of power and control. Given the effectiveness of …

Place Matters: Domestic Violence And Rural Difference, Lisa R. Pruitt

Lisa R Pruitt

This Article considers the phenomenon of domestic violence in relation to the rural-urban axis. Written for a symposium commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Feminism and Legal Theory Project at the University of Wisconsin, it assesses the difference that rurality makes to the occurrence, investigation, prosecution, and judicial decision-making regarding this crime. Among the factors analyzed are spatial or geographic isolation, along with the social isolation and lack of anonymity it fosters; severe economic disadvantage; the entrenched nature of rural patriarchy; and legal actors who are often ill-informed about domestic violence and constrained by limited resources. These rural differences are …

Bare Justice: A Feminist Theory Of Justice And Its Application To Post-Genocide Rwanda, Megan M. Carpenter

Law Faculty Scholarship

Within this Article I seek to develop a feminist legal theory of justice, by questioning the ability of traditional legal strategies to facilitate justice and identifying underlying principles that contribute to a more inclusive and holistic form of justice. Secondly, I apply this theory to the situation of women victims of sexual violence in post-genocide Rwanda, in an effort to explore how these principles can contribute to a realization of justice that empowers women.

In Part II of this Article, I seek to develop a set of principles underlying a feminist reconceptualization of justice. This endeavour is a three-step process: …

The Invisible Pregnant Athlete And The Promise Of Title Ix, Deborah Brake

Articles

The question of how law should respond to women who become pregnant, and whether to specially accommodate pregnancy or analogize it to other conditions, features prominently in virtually every area of sex equality law. In debates over women's equality in the workplace, for example, it has been the defining issue for the development of and debate over various models of equality in feminist legal theory. Until recently, however, the issue has been all but absent in debates and discussion about Title IX and its promise of sex equality in sports. This changed suddenly in 2007, when ESPN televised a program …

Reasonableness And Objectivity: A Feminist Discourse Of The Fourth Amendment, Dana Raigrodski

Articles

This article suggests that a critical reexamination of the Fourth Amendment and its jurisprudence through feminist lenses can shed new light and add to our understanding of it. These insights, in turn, can and should generate a positive feminist Fourth Amendment jurisprudence—a distinctive feminist voice to be integrated systematically into the law of search and seizure, leading to a transformation of the Fourth Amendment itself. Applying feminist theories to particular issues and normative layers of current Fourth Amendment jurisprudence may help guide us through the more difficult task of imagining a feminist jurisprudence of search and seizure law.

Helping Out In The Family Firm: The Legal Treatment Of Unpaid Market Labor, Lisa Philipps

Articles & Book Chapters

This article investigates the work of individuals who help out informally with a family member's job, often without pay. Examples include the relative who works in the back room of the family business, the executive spouse who hosts corporate functions, the political wife who campaigns with her husband, or the child who does chores on the family farm. The term "unpaid market labor" (UML) is used here to describe the ways that family members collaborate directly in paid activities that are legally and socially attributed to others. The practical legal problems that can arise in relation to UML are illustrated …