Law Commons^™

Teaching Values, Teaching Stereotypes: Sex Ed And Indoctrination In Public Schools, Jennifer S. Hendricks

College of Law Faculty Scholarship

Many sex education curricula currently used in public schools indoctrinate students in gender stereotypes. As expressed in the title of one article: “If You Don’t Aim to Please, Don’t Dress to Tease,” and Other Public School Sex Education Lessons Subsidized by You, the Federal Taxpayer (Jennifer L. Greenblatt, 14 TEX. J. ON C.L. & C.R. 1 (2008)). Other lessons pertain not only to responsibility for sexual activity but to lifelong approaches to family life and individual achievement. One lesson, for example, instructs students that, in marriage, men need sex from their wives and women need financial support from their husbands. …

Body And Soul: Equality, Pregnancy, And The Unitary Right To Abortion, Jennifer S. Hendricks

College of Law Faculty Scholarship

This Article explores equality-based arguments for abortion rights, revealing both their necessity and their pitfalls. It first uses the narrowness of the “health exception” to abortion regulations to show why equality arguments are needed—because our legal tradition's conception of liberty is based on male experience, and we have no theory of basic human rights grounded in women's reproductive experiences. Next, however, the Article shows that equality arguments, although necessary, can undermine women's reproductive freedom because they require that pregnancy and abortion be analogized to male experiences. The result is that equality arguments focus on either the bodily or the social …

Book Review: Saving Law Reviews From Political Scientists, Benjamin H. Barton

College of Law Faculty Scholarship

This essay reviews Robert J. Spitzer, Saving the Constitution from Lawyers: How Legal Training and Law Reviews Distort Constitutional Meaning, and argues that it fails on two fronts. First, I offer a defense of lawyers, law professors, and law reviews. Second, I show that Spitzer's own book proves that peer-reviewed political science scholarship suffers from at least as many faults and foibles as law review scholarship.

For example, in each of his three examples of wayward theorizing Spitzer insists that his reading of the Constitution and its history is so clearly correct that his opponents' scholarship is not only wrong …

An Article I Theory Of The Inherent Powers Of The Federal Courts, Benjamin H. Barton

College of Law Faculty Scholarship

A proper understanding of the nature of the inherent powers begins with separating whether the judiciary has any constitutional power to overrule Congress from the judiciary’s power to act in the absence of congressional action, i.e. in the interstices of federal statutes and rules. Separating out these two very different types of powers helps clarify that the inherent powers of federal courts are actually both broader and shallower than have been previously thought: Congress has near plenary authority in this area, but the courts have a great deal of leeway to act when Congress has not.

An examination of the …