Law Commons^™

Consensual Amorous Relationships Between Faculty And Students: The Constitutional Right To Privacy, Elisabeth A. Keller

Elisabeth Keller

Surveys of college students in the United States revealed that a significant number of students thought they had been victims of some form of sexual harassment. Growing awareness of the magnitude, dimensions, and effects of sexual harassment at educational institutions and the potential for institutional liability have prompted educators to adopt policies to avert such problems. The policies typically prohibit sexual harassment of employees and students and alert the university community to the serious effects of sexual harassment and the potential for student exploitation. Some universities have gone beyond establishing regulations directed at widely litigated problems of sexual harassment and …

Consensual Amorous Relationships Between Faculty And Students: The Constitutional Right To Privacy, Elisabeth A. Keller

Elisabeth Keller

Surveys of college students in the United States revealed that a significant number of students thought they had been victims of some form of sexual harassment. Growing awareness of the magnitude, dimensions, and effects of sexual harassment at educational institutions and the potential for institutional liability have prompted educators to adopt policies to avert such problems. The policies typically prohibit sexual harassment of employees and students and alert the university community to the serious effects of sexual harassment and the potential for student exploitation. Some universities have gone beyond establishing regulations directed at widely litigated problems of sexual harassment and …

Hidden In Plain Sight: Achieving More Just Results In Hostile Work Environment Sexual Harassment Cases By Re-Examining Supreme Court Precedent, Elisabeth A. Keller, Judith B. Tracy

Elisabeth Keller

Lower federal courts often fail to provide plaintiffs in sexual harassment cases the relief intended by Title VII of the Civil Rights of 1964 and mandated by the Supreme Court when it recognized the cause of action twenty years ago. There is little doubt that sexual harassment in the workplace persists. However, lower courts misapply or ignore Supreme Court reasoning that would result in fairer and more consistent dispositions in hostile work environment sexual harassment cases. This article draws directly on reasoning from the Supreme Court cases to explain the sources of the confusion in the lower courts and offers …

Hidden In Plain Sight: Achieving More Just Results In Hostile Work Environment Sexual Harassment Cases By Re-Examining Supreme Court Precedent, Elisabeth A. Keller, Judith B. Tracy

Elisabeth Keller

Lower federal courts often fail to provide plaintiffs in sexual harassment cases the relief intended by Title VII of the Civil Rights of 1964 and mandated by the Supreme Court when it recognized the cause of action twenty years ago. There is little doubt that sexual harassment in the workplace persists. However, lower courts misapply or ignore Supreme Court reasoning that would result in fairer and more consistent dispositions in hostile work environment sexual harassment cases. This article draws directly on reasoning from the Supreme Court cases to explain the sources of the confusion in the lower courts and offers …

Marriage As Partnership, Sanford N. Katz

Sanford N. Katz

In this essay honoring Professor Mary Ann Glendon, the author discusses the contract of partnerships concept of marriage as it applies to antenuptial agreements, cohabitation contracts, and property settlement agreements, the three contexts about which Professor Glendon has written in her books The New Family and the New Property (1981) and The Transformation of Family Law (1996).

Women And Law: A Comparative Analysis Of The United States And Indian Supreme Courts’ Equality Jurisprudence, Eileen Kaufman

Eileen Kaufman

No abstract provided.

Money, Sex, And Sunshine: A Market-Based Approach To Pay Discrimination, Deborah Thompson Eisenberg

Deborah Thompson Eisenberg

The Equal Pay Act had a distinct market purpose. Congress made a policy choice to modify the existing compensation market so that employees who perform jobs requiring substantially “equal skill, effort, and responsibility” earn equal wages, regardless of sex. The Act aimed not simply to promote individual fairness, but to foster a more efficient, equitable wage market on a systemic level. Congress recognized that paying lower wages to women constituted “an unfair method of competition,” burdened “commerce and the free flow of goods in commerce,” and prevented the “maximum utilization of available labor resources.” Over time, however, the “market” in …

Transversal Feminism And Transcendence, Deseriee A. Kennedy

Deseriee A. Kennedy

No abstract provided.

Gendering Consitutional Design In Post-Conflict Societies, Dina Francesca Haynes, Fionnuala Ni Aolain, Naomi Cahn

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

This article commences with a discussion of transitional constitutional
design and the ways in which the branches of government
relate to one another, focusing on the consequences of these structures
for women. We are convinced that an analysis of the rights-bearing
portions of a constitution alone is insufficient to fully capture the way
in which power is structured and experienced. Consistent with other
scholars, we start from the view that “constitutions are derived from
a social contract between the constituents who will be governed and
the political actors who will govern; they explain how the society
and government will operate …

Securing Gender-Based Persecution Claims: A Proposed Amendment To Asylum Law, Lucy Akinyi Orinda

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Protecting Women: Preserving Autonomy In The Commodification Of Motherhood, M. Elliott Neal

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton And The Notion Of A Legal Class Of Gender, Tracy A. Thomas

Akron Law Faculty Publications

In the mid-nineteenth century, Elizabeth Cady Stanton used narratives of women and their involvement with the law of domestic relations to collectivize women. This recognition of a gender class was the first step towards women’s transformation of the law. Stanton’s stories of working-class women, immigrants, Mormon polygamist wives, and privileged white women revealed common realities among women in an effort to form a collective conscious. The parable-like stories were designed to inspire a collective consciousness among women, one capable of arousing them to social and political action. For to Stanton’s consternation, women showed a lack of appreciation of their own …

Law, History, And Feminism, Tracy A. Thomas

Akron Law Faculty Publications

This is the introduction to the book, Feminist Legal History. This edited collection offers new visions of American legal history that reveal women’s engagement with the law over the past two centuries. It integrates the stories of women into the dominant history of the law in what has been called “engendering legal history,” (Batlan 2005) and then seeks to reconstruct the assumed contours of history. The introduction provides the context necessary to appreciate the diverse essays in the book. It starts with an overview of the existing state of women’s legal history, tracing the core events over the past two …

Un Women: Keeping The Gender Equality Flag Flying, Ufuoma Barbara Akpotaire

Ufuoma Barbara Akpotaire

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about my dinner with Marie Wilson and about the role of women in International Economic Development. In keeping with that theme, I was excited to read about the launch of U.N. Women on Thursday last week.

What is U.N. Women you might ask, and why do we need another agency pushing for gender equality? It is pretty simple actually. What U.N. Women does is that it combines four pre-existing U.N. agencies into one task force, i.e. the U.N. Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), the Division for the Advancement of Women (DAW), the Office …

Law, History, And Feminism, Tracy A. Thomas

Tracy A. Thomas

This is the introduction to the book, Feminist Legal History. This edited collection offers new visions of American legal history that reveal women’s engagement with the law over the past two centuries. It integrates the stories of women into the dominant history of the law in what has been called “engendering legal history,” (Batlan 2005) and then seeks to reconstruct the assumed contours of history. The introduction provides the context necessary to appreciate the diverse essays in the book. It starts with an overview of the existing state of women’s legal history, tracing the core events over the past two …

Elizabeth Cady Stanton And The Notion Of A Legal Class Of Gender, Tracy A. Thomas

Tracy A. Thomas

In the mid-nineteenth century, Elizabeth Cady Stanton used narratives of women and their involvement with the law of domestic relations to collectivize women. This recognition of a gender class was the first step towards women’s transformation of the law. Stanton’s stories of working-class women, immigrants, Mormon polygamist wives, and privileged white women revealed common realities among women in an effort to form a collective conscious. The parable-like stories were designed to inspire a collective consciousness among women, one capable of arousing them to social and political action. For to Stanton’s consternation, women showed a lack of appreciation of their own …

Hiv And Women: Incongruent Policies, Criminal Consequences, Aziza Ahmed

Aziza Ahmed

The new agency UN WOMEN must play an active role in the standardization of laws and policies at the global and national level where their incongruence has negative and often criminal consequences for the health and lives of women and girls. This article focuses in on three such examples: opt-out testing for HIV, criminalization of vertical transmission, and the new World Health Organization guidelines on breastfeeding.

Women And Jurisprudence, Ma. Elodia Robles Sotomayor

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

Deconstructing Cedaw's Article 14: Naming And Explaining Rural Difference, Lisa R. Pruitt

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Stalled: Gender Diversity On Corporate Boards, Barbara Black

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

In this essay, prepared for the University of Dayton College of Law’s Symposium on Perspectives on Gender and Business Ethics: Women in Corporate Governance, held on February 25, 2011, I discuss the lack of progress in achieving gender diversity on corporate boards.

I first review the numbers that demonstrate that progress is stalled, despite the attention and resources devoted to the issue by a number of well-respected organizations, legal scholars and institutional investors. I argue that, because this is an issue of equal opportunity, it is not really necessary to make a business case to justify increased efforts toward board …

Women And Children Last: The Prosecution Of Sex Traffickers As Sex Offenders And The Need For A Sex Trafficker Registry, Geneva Brown

Law Faculty Publications

Sex trafficking is a moral and legal tragedy that affects thousands in the United States and abroad. The U.S. State Department estimates that human traffickers bring between 14,500 and 17,500 persons annually into the United States for various avenues of exploitation, including involuntary servitude and forced prostitution. Human traffickers are highly organized into criminal syndicates that reap exponential profits exploiting vulnerable women and children. Individual states struggle to prosecute traffickers and must rely on federal prosecution of trafficking enterprises. International cooperation with local law enforcement is essential in combating trafficking, especially in the sex trade. This Article proposes that an …

The Gendered Lives Of Legal Aid: Lay Lawyers, Social Workers, And The Bar, 1863-1960, Felice J. Batlan

All Faculty Scholarship

The Gendered Life of Legal Aid, 1863-1960 (manuscript in process) will be the first monograph on the history of civil legal aid in the United States. By closely examining the history of legal aid in New York, Chicago, and Boston, it presents a number of arguments with wide-ranging implications and it is animated by a host of conflicts. These include the relationship between legal aid and citizenship, the changing status of domestic relations law, the interactions between lawyers and social workers and their different understandings of the role and nature of law, what services legal aid should provide, and even …

Inter-American System, Claudia Martin

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

An Equal Rights Amendment To Make Women Human, Ann Bartow

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Though the Fourteenth Amendment' provides women with partial legal armament (a dull sword, a small shield), equal protection requires something twice as powerful in the form of a Twenty-Eighth Amendment that would expressly vest women with equal rights under the law. The Fourteenth Amendment has completed only half of the job.

The Ongoing Debate About Mediation In The Context Of Domestic Violence: A Call For Empirical Studies Of Mediation Effectiveness, Susan Landrum

Susan Landrum

For approximately three decades, scholars, mediators, and domestic violence victims’ advocates have debated whether mediation is an appropriate way to approach family law issues where the parties have a history of domestic violence. Those debates have addressed whether mediation is ever appropriate where there is a history of domestic violence and, if so, when it may be used and how the mediation process can provide for victims’ safety and fair mediation outcomes. There has also been much discussion about the need for mediator and attorney training on domestic violence issues, the proper design of effective screening processes, and the form …

The Maria Da Penha Case And The Inter-American Commission On Human Rights: Contributions To The Debate On Domestic Violence Against Women In Brazil, Paula Spieler

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

This article aims to demonstrate the contributions of the Maria da Penha case and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) Report of 2001 to the debate on domestic violence against women in Brazil, with special emphasis to the adoption of the Maria da Penha Law. The IACHR was the first international human rights organ to bring to light the problem. Beside contributing to internal changes, this case has great relevance as it was the first one of domestic violence analyzed by the Inter-American Commission. It revealed the systematic pattern of violence against women in the country.

Human Rights and …

Examining Exclusion In Woman-Inventor Patenting: A Comparison Of Educational Trends And Patent Data In The Era Of Computer Engineer Barbie, Annette I. Kahler

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

The Limits Of Constructivism: Can Rawls Condemn Female Genital Mutilation?, Andrew Koppelman

Faculty Working Papers

The strategy for coping with value pluralism that Rawls has proposed is to permit political decisions, at least with respect to basic rights, to depend only on those goods that can be inferred from the bare requirements of respectful relations between persons. His account offers such a parsimonious conception of the good that it cannot cognize some atrocities. I focus on one extreme human rights case: the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM), which, it is well established, violates basic human rights. Doubtless Rawls was appalled by the practice. Yet his theory cannot generate a basis for condemning it. A …

Some Thoughts On The State Of Women Lawyers And Why Title Vii Has Not Worked For Them, Theresa M. Beiner

Faculty Scholarship

This essay discusses why women lawyers have not been as successful in large firms in spite of graduating from law school in large numbers over the last twenty years. It begins by giving a snapshot of the state of women lawyers, including women lawyers of color. It includes stories and studies of women’s struggles at these firms. It also describes why Title VII has not worked to solve the problems associated with being a successful woman in a law firm. Finally, it suggests some potential solutions that may help women be more successful in these environments.

The Limits Of Reproductive Rights In Improving Women's Health, Rachel Rebouché

UF Law Faculty Publications

South Africa's Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act (CTOPA) is heralded as one of the most progressive abortion laws in the world. The law permits unfettered access to government-funded abortion services for all women through the twelfth week of gestation, stating in its preamble that "every woman [has] the right to choose whether to have an early, safe and legal termination of pregnancy according to her individual beliefs." Despite increased availability of legal abortions' (and the inclusion of rights to reproductive health care and decision-making in South Africa's Constitution), the number of illegal terminations in South Africa does not appear …