Law Commons^™

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 …

Elizabeth Cady Stanton On The Federal Marriage Amendment: A Letter To The President, Tracy A. Thomas

Akron Law Faculty Publications

This essay written from a historical, first-person perspective explores the parallels between the current movement for a Federal Marriage Amendment and that of the nineteenth century through the lens of feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Using the archival sources of Stanton’s articles and speeches from 1880 to 1902, the paper identifies her key arguments opposing a constitutional standard of marriage. The paper then juxtaposes Stanton’s arguments against the 2004 Federal Marriage Amendment to reveal the continued relevance and import of her insights.

Stanton’s analytical platform attacked the core pretexts of federalism and gender that fueled the proposed marriage amendment in her …

The New Marital Property Of Employee Stock Options, Tracy A. Thomas

Akron Law Faculty Publications

One of the most valuable assets in a dissolution case today is an employee stock option (ESO). An ESO is a contractual right granted to an employee to purchase the stock of her corporate employer during a designated period of time at a predetermined price. The law, however, has failed to keep up with this modern form of employee compensation and indeed has struggled to understand this new form of property in the context of dividing and distributing marital property. Only fourteen state supreme courts to date have spoken on any aspect of this complex issue, and of these, only …