Law Commons^™

(G)Local Intersectionality, Martha F. Davis

Washington and Lee Law Review

Intersectionality theory has been slow to take root as a legal norm at the national level, even as scholars embrace it as a potent analytical tool. Yet, in recent years, intersectionality has entered law and policy practices through an unexpected portal: namely, local governments’ adoption of international norms. A growing number of local governments around the world explicitly incorporate intersectionality into their law and practice as part of implementing international antidiscrimination norms from human rights instruments like the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of …

Foreword: Centering Intersectionality In Human Rights Discourse, Johanna Bond

Washington and Lee Law Review

In the last decade, intersectionality theory has gained traction as a lens through which to analyze international human rights issues. Intersectionality theory is the notion that multiple systems of oppression intersect in peoples’ lives and are mutually constitutive, meaning that when, for example, race and gender intersect, the experience of discrimination goes beyond the formulaic addition of race discrimination and gender discrimination to produce a unique, intersectional experience of discrimination. The understanding that intersecting systems of oppression affect different groups differently is central to intersectionality theory. As such, the theory invites us to think about inter-group differences (i.e., differences between …

“Time Is A-Wasting”: Making The Case For Cedaw Ratification By The United States, Rangita De Silva De Alwis, Melanne Verveer

All Faculty Scholarship

Since President Carter signed the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (the “CEDAW” or the “Convention”) on July 17, 1980, the United States has failed to ratify the Convention time and again. As one of only a handful of countries that has not ratified the CEDAW, the United States is in the same company as Sudan, Somalia, Iran, Tonga, and Palau. When CEDAW ratification stalled yet again in 2002, then-Senator Joseph Biden lamented that “[t]ime is a-wasting.”

Writing in 2002, Harold Koh, former Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, bemoaned America’s …

The Changing Landscape Of Women’S Rights Activism In China: The Continued Legacy Of The Beijing Conference, Rangita De Silva De Alwis, Katherine A. Schroeder

All Faculty Scholarship

The Beijing Conference was a watershed moment in the history of the global women’s movement and had an unprecedented impact in the Global North and South on lawmaking, institution building, and movement building. This Article details the development of women’s activism in China since the Beijing Conference and how a changing legal landscape impacts this activism. While its progress is emblematic of the inconsistencies in the progression of women’s rights activism since the Beijing Conference, China’s efforts have been significant and varied and represent a model for other countries seeking to reform women’s rights legislation. This Article identifies important lines …

When Law Is Complicit In Gender Bias: Ending De Jure Discrimination Against Women As An Important Target Of Sustainable Development Goal 5, Rangita De Silva De Alwis

All Faculty Scholarship

Ending all forms of discrimination against women and girls is not only a basic human right, but also crucial to accelerating sustainable development. The very first target of Goal 5. 1.1 calls to end all forms of discrimination against all women and girls everywhere and the indicator for the goal is: “Whether or not legal frameworks are in place to promote, enforce and monitor equality and non-discrimination on the basis of sex”. In many countries around the world the legal frameworks themselves allow for both direct (de jure) and indirect (de facto) discrimination against women. This essay identifies some areas …

Gender Equity Through Human Rights: Local Efforts To Advance The Status Of Women And Girls In The United States, Human Rights Institute

Human Rights Institute

Because human rights are experienced close to home, local governments have jurisdiction over a range of human rights issues, including those related to employment, education, housing, and public safety. Indeed, local agencies and officials are essential to the promotion and protection of human rights in the United States. They work every day to create conditions under which individuals and communities can flourish, and they are well-situated to build and advance a culture of human rights, based on dignity, freedom from discrimination, and opportunity.

With a focus on women’s rights, this resource provides an overview of core human rights principles and …

Glocalizing Law And Culture: Towards A Cross-Constitutive Paradigm, Berta E. Hernández-Truyol

Berta E. Hernández-Truyol

This lecture addresses the relationship between law and culture in three general parts. The first part consists of a brief review of the theories addressing the relationship of law and culture, mainly the mirror theory. But I will suggest that there is more to the relationship of law and culture than one being an inert reflection of the other; hence my proposal for what I call, as a working concept, a cross-constitutive paradigm of law and culture. The second part reviews the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women ("CEDAW''), a law that seeks to effect …

Voiceless Victims: Sex Slavery And Trafficking Of African Women In Western Europe, Melanie R. Wallace

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Reconciling Indigenous And Women's Rights To Land In Sub-Saharan Africa, Aparna Polavarapu

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Female Genital Mutilation And Female Genital Cutting, Hope Lewis

Hope Lewis

Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) or Female Genital Cutting (FGC) refers to a range of harmful traditional practices performed on infants, girls, and women in certain ethnic groups. This article, published in The Encyclopedia of Human Rights (David Forsythe, et al, ed., Oxford University Press, 2009) discusses the practices in the context of international human rights law. FGM-FGC, violates a number of international human rights standards, including the right to bodily integrity, the right to life, the right to the highest attainable standard of health, the rights of children, and the rights of women and girls to equality and non-discrimination. Nevertheless, …

Unsex Cedaw, Or What's Wrong With Women's Rights, Darren Rosenblum

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Part I discusses why CEDAW continues to be relevant as the primary source of international law on sex discrimination. Until the advent of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), CEDAW was the most widely-subscribed international treaty. Some of the draft language of CEDAW reflects the tension between category and identity and how "women" won the debate. Part II contrasts CEDAW with the Convention for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD). It points to the identitarian focus of CEDAW as a core reason for its failures. Had CEDAW reflected a category focus, as CERD did, it would more …

Female Genital Mutilation And Female Genital Cutting, Hope Lewis

Hope Lewis

Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) or Female Genital Cutting (FGC) refers to a range of harmful traditional practices performed on infants, girls, and women in certain ethnic groups. This article, published in The Encyclopedia of Human Rights (David Forsythe, et al, ed., Oxford University Press, 2009) discusses the practices in the context of international human rights law. FGM-FGC, violates a number of international human rights standards, including the right to bodily integrity, the right to life, the right to the highest attainable standard of health, the rights of children, and the rights of women and girls to equality and non-discrimination. Nevertheless, …

Internalizing Gender: International Goals, Comparative Realities, Darren Rosenblum

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This Article uses the example of international women's political rights to examine the value of comparative methodologies in analyzing the process by which nations internalize international norms. As internalized in Brazil and France, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women suggests possibilities for (and possible limitations of) interdisciplinary comparative and international law scholarship. Indeed, international law scholarship is divided between theories of internalization and neorealist challenges to those theories. Comparative methodologies add crucial complexity to internalization theory, the success of which depends on acknowledging vast differences in national legal cultures. Further, comparative methodologies expose important …

The Prohibition Of Widespread Rape As A Jus Cogens, Dean Adams

San Diego International Law Journal

This Comment explains why the prohibition of widespread rape should be recognized as a jus cogens through analyses of the failure of existing international legal instruments, advances within international law towards the universal prohibition of widespread rape, and policy reasons for classifying widespread rape as a jus cogens. In doing so, this comment will demonstrate the particular timeliness of this topic by reviewing the use of widespread rape in several countries through the 1990s, the widespread rape presently occurring in Kenya, and the emerging reports from Iraq of rape committed at the hands of the Saddam Hussein regime. Finally, this …

Glocalizing Law And Culture: Towards A Cross-Constitutive Paradigm, Berta E. Hernández-Truyol

UF Law Faculty Publications

This lecture addresses the relationship between law and culture in three general parts. The first part consists of a brief review of the theories addressing the relationship of law and culture, mainly the mirror theory. But I will suggest that there is more to the relationship of law and culture than one being an inert reflection of the other; hence my proposal for what I call, as a working concept, a cross-constitutive paradigm of law and culture. The second part reviews the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women ("CEDAW''), a law that seeks to effect …

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 …

Cleaning Our Own House : "Exotic" And Familiar Human Rights Violations, Hope Lewis, Isabelle Gunning

Hope Lewis

Women's human rights activism in the United States tend to highlight human rights violations of women outside the U.S., or on women from other cultures who enter the U.S. as immigrants or asylum-seekers, while ignoring internal human rights abuses. This Article focuses on the events surrounding a recent U.S. gender asylum case involving Fauziya Kassindja, a young asylee from Togo, in an attempt to demonstrate the irony of American complacency about the status of the United States as a haven for the protection of human rights. Ms. Kassindja, and other immigrants and asylum-seekers, were subjected to degradation and abuse--in the …

Global Intersections : Critical Race Feminist Human Rights And Inter/National Black Women, Hope Lewis

Hope Lewis

Although there have been great strides in feminist human rights efforts in developing methods to prevent domestic violence and other forms of "private" violence against women, feminists still have far to go. For instance, feminists have only recently begun to acknowledge that physical, social, and economic violence against women, especially poor women of color, is perpetuated in part by top-down globalization. This Article demonstrates how Critical Race Feminist analysis, a set of approaches to legal scholarship rooted in feminist and anti-racist critical traditions, reconceptualizes the human rights problems facing Black women who migrate between the United States and Jamaica. Like …

Lionheart Gals Facing The Dragon : The Human Rights Of Inter/National Black Women In The United States, Hope Lewis

Hope Lewis

This Article commands a more explicit engagement of critical race scholarship with feminist international human rights strategies. It focuses on Jamaican-American women. Part I discusses key aspects of the historical and sociological context in which the migration of Jamaican women to the New York City area has occurred. It also discusses trends in their participation in the paid labor force since the migratory patterns of Jamaican women are strongly linked to their employment opportunities. Part II describes and analyzes significant survival strategies used by working-class Jamaican-American women to escape from, reshape, or resist the exploitative conditions they face. The strategies …