Law Commons^™

Western Feminism Before And After October 7, Lama Abu-Odeh

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this interview, I provide my view on the state of Western feminism before and after the assault on Gaza. The interview includes discussion of the various strands of emergent feminisms in the West and some of their offshoots as they appear in Palestine in the context of Israeli colonialism and resistance to it.

Asking For It: Gendered Dimensions Of Surveillance Capitalism, Jessica Rizzo

Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis

Advertising and privacy were once seen as mutually antagonistic. In the 1950s and 1960s, Americans went to court to fight for their right to be free from the invasion of privacy presented by unwanted advertising, but a strange realignment took place in the 1970s. Radical feminists were among those who were extremely concerned about the collection and computerization of personal data—they worried about private enterprise getting a hold of that data and using it to target women—but liberal feminists went in a different direction, making friends with advertising because they saw it as strategically valuable.

Liberal feminists argued that in …

Gender Inequality In Contracts Casebooks: Representations Of Women In The Contracts Curriculum, Deborah Zalesne

FIU Law Review

Gender has always explicitly or implicitly played a critical role in contracting and in contracts opinions—from the early nineteenth century, when married women lacked the legal capacity altogether to contract, through the next century, when women gained the right to contract but continued to lack bargaining power and to be disadvantaged in the bargaining process in many cases, to today, when women are present in greater numbers in business and commerce, but face continued, yet less overt, obstacles. Typical casebooks provide ample offerings for discussions of the ways in which parties can be and have been disadvantaged because of their …

English Courts And Transnational Islamic Divorces: What Role For Personal Liberty Of Muslim Women?, Ilias Bantekas

University of Miami Race & Social Justice Law Review

English courts consider the validity of a talaq obtained abroad on the basis of the lex matrimonii, without examining whether the circumstance of the divorce, both factual and legal, offend English public policy. An anthropological inquiry into talaq obtained in most Muslim nations reveals that androcentric culture – as opposed to religious prescription as such – largely distorts the Quranic vision of this institution. This author suggests that English courts and the scholarly/religious community should entertain the notion of the contractual nature of nikah (marriage) in order to assess the consequences of the talaq. If a nikah is entered into …

Introduction To Oxford Handbook Of Feminism And Law In The U.S., Deborah L. Brake, Martha Chamallas, Verna L. Williams

Book Chapters

Combining analyses of feminist legal theory, legal doctrine and feminist social movements, this Handbook offers a comprehensive overview of U.S. legal feminism. Contributions by leading feminist thinkers trace the impacts of legal feminism on legal claims and defenses and demonstrate how feminism has altered and transformed understandings of basic legal concepts, from sexual harassment and gender equity in sports to new conceptions of consent and motherhood. It connects legal feminism to adjacent intellectual discourses, such as masculinities theory and queer theory, and scrutinizes criticisms and backlash to feminism from all sides of the political spectrum. Its examination of the prominent …

Repenser Le Genre Face À La Modernité, Soumaya Belhabib

Dirassat

Feminism is claiming the equality between man and woman in society.

The gender approach is the most adequate approach to solve the problem of the discrimination towards women because this approach considers the social context and the culture as important to determine the characteristics of female and male not the physical aspects which concede female as being weak.

In morocco the new family code gives new representation between men and women, but discriminations still in access to education and responsibility in economy and politic, women still prisoner of traditional representations even if they try to access to modern life by …

Is This A Christian Nation?: Virtual Symposium September 25, 2020, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

A Taxing Feminism, Anthony C. Infanti, Bridget J. Crawford

Book Chapters

Feminist perspectives are not new to tax law. The first academic piece bringing a feminist perspective to bear on tax law dates to the early 1970s, when Grace Blumberg published “Sexism in the Code: A Comparative Study of Income Taxation of Working Wives and Mothers.” Contemporaneously, none other than Ruth Bader Ginsburg (along with her tax lawyer husband Marty Ginsburg) brought a feminist perspective to bear on tax law when she argued Moritz v. Commissioner before the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, as depicted in the movie On the Basis of Sex. Since then, numerous other contributions have been …

Sex Wars As Proxy Wars, Aya Gruber

Publications

The clash between feminists and queer theorists over the meaning of sex—danger versus pleasure—is well- trodden academic territory. Less discussed is what the theories have in common. There is an important presumption uniting many feminist and queer accounts of sexuality: sex, relative to all other human activities, is something of great, or grave, importance. The theories reflect Gayle Rubin’s postulation that "everything pertaining to sex has been a ‘special case’ in our culture.” In the #MeToo era, we can see all too clearly how sex has an outsized influence in public debate. Raging against sexual harm has become the preferred …

Cracking Down On Cages: Feminist And Prison Abolitionist Considerations For Litigating Solitary Confinement In Canada, Winnie Phillips-Osei

Master of Laws Research Papers Repository

Guided by prison abolition ethic and intersectional feminism, my key argument is that Charter section 15 is the ideal means of eradicating solitary confinement and its adverse impact on women who are Aboriginal, racialized, mentally ill, or immigration detainees. I utilize a provincial superior court’s failing in exploring a discrimination analysis concerning Aboriginal women, to illustrate my key argument. However, because of the piecemeal fashion in which courts can effect developments in the law, the abolition of solitary confinement may very well occur through a series of ‘little wins’. In Chapter 11, I provide a constitutional analysis, arguing that solitary …

Creating A Classroom Component For Field Placement Programs: Enhancing Clinical Goals With Feminist Pedagogy, Linda Morton

Maine Law Review

There exists a historic conflict between the more traditional Langdellian philosophy of legal education, and the experiential philosophy of apprenticeship programs, now known as field placement programs. The conflict is most recently apparent in the American Bar Association's (ABA) attempts to impose a more traditional classroom format on field placement programs through its regulations, guidelines, and instructions pertaining to law school accreditation. The ABA argues that law schools need to allocate greater instructional resources toward their field placement programs, particularly programs that provide more than one-half a semester's credit. Such programs should include a classroom component that meets ABA guidelines. …

The Normalization Of Prostitution In Switzerland: The Origin Of Policies, Corinne Isler, Marjut Jyrkinen

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

In this article, we examine how socio-political actors frame prostitution and problems attached to the phenomenon and what types of policies they suggest. The sex trade in Switzerland has been tolerated since 1942, and prostitution is protected under the economic freedom guaranteed by the Swiss constitution. Any critique of prostitution is viewed as counterproductive, claimed to be rooted in old-fashioned ideas about sexuality and thought to worsen the situation for women who sell sex. The role of sex buyers is largely obscured, and the presumed right to buy sex remains unquestioned.

Paying Attention To The Little Man Behind The Curtain: Destroying The Myth Of The Liberal's Dilemma, Deborah M. Boulette Taylor

Maine Law Review

Generally, feminists and other liberals, and in particular multi-culturalists, share the common goal of seeking to make American law reflective of a greater variety of voices and experiences beyond those of the dominant, white-male culture. There currently exists an issue, however, about which feminists find it necessary to depart from this goal: whether to permit a criminal defendant to introduce exculpatory cultural evidence. Much of the feminist literature on the use of the “cultural defense” argues that introduction of such evidence serves only to deny immigrant women and children the same protections afforded others in our criminal justice system because …

Keeping Students Awake: Feminist Theory And Legal Education, Martha Minow

Maine Law Review

I am not exactly sure why, but when I turned to think about legal education for today's conference, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein came to mind. It was not because of my own nightmares that my chosen profession as law professor involves turning ordinary people into monsters, although that's a thought we can explore perhaps over drinks. It was because of this comment Shelley makes in the book: “If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study …

Feminist Microenterprise: Vindicating The Rights Of Women In The New Global Order?, Lucie E. White

Maine Law Review

The subject of this symposium is “Law, Feminism & the 21st Century.” What are the greatest challenges for feminism in the coming century and how can the law help to meet them? I want to begin this essay by asking that question from two radically different vantage points. The first is very far removed from the usual starting point for feminist analysis, which is the “lived” experience of women's lives. Let us move far away from a place from which we can feel the lines on women's faces, and move to a place from which we can see only numbers, …

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

Maine Law Review

In this brief essay, I illustrate how Critical Race Feminist analysis could reconceptualize the human rights problems facing “Inter/national Black women” --in this case, Black women who migrate between the United States and Jamaica. This focus on Jamaican American migrants is very personal as well as political; I was raised by Jamaican American women. However, I have begun to focus on such women in my research not only in a search for “home” but also because there are important lessons to be learned from those who are the least visible in the legal literature. I draw the framework for a …

Shattered Jade, Broken Shoe: Foreign Economic Development And The Sexual Exploitation Of Women In China, Elizabeth Spahn

Maine Law Review

Predicting the ways in which feminisms might develop in the next century is unfortunately well beyond my own capabilities. In the next decade or two, however, one thing I believe we might want to think about are the relationships between feminisms and global free market capitalisms. The question I am asking, simply stated, is the extent to which economic development (free-market global capitalism) advances, is neutral toward, or harms women. One traditional American way of viewing the global free market is to tout economic development as a panacea for the problems facing the world's poorest and most violated group, women. …

What If The Butchers In The Slaughter House Cases Had Won?: An Exercise In "Counterfactual" Doctrine, Jane L. Scarborough

Maine Law Review

In a recent Harvard Law Review commentary, two well-known constitutional scholars called into question not only what Supreme Court cases are “canonized” in casebooks, but whether the “Court-centeredness” of our scholarship and teaching about constitutional law has led to an impoverishment of the discourse on justice. The authors document how “[c]ases become important to teach and remember because they serve as the icons (and demons) of an invented constitutional tradition” --a tradition that “comes into being at a particular point in history, and then regards itself as always having been there.” There is no better example of such an icon …

Grounded Applications: Feminism And The Law At The Millennium, Katharine Silbaugh

Maine Law Review

The conference topic is feminism in the twenty-first century, a dialogue between academics and practicing attorneys. The first order of business will be to resist the millennium invitation to come up with evermore novel, overarching formulations of the mission and means of feminism. At the end of the twentieth century we know quite a bit about the problems presented by feminists and the problems within feminism. We have had a long history of insightful intellectual discourse on questions of equality and on the meaning of gender. We also know that it takes time to absorb and apply broad insights in …

Holy Gender! Promoting Free Exercise Of Gender By Discernment Without Establishing Binary Sex Or Compulsory Fluidity, José Gabilondo

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

“Who Is A Latcrit?”: Jerome Culp And Angela Harris Provide Answers And Ways Of Being, Margaret Montoya

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Islam's (In)Compatibility With The West?: Dress Code Restrictions In The Age Of Feminism, Lisa M. La Fornara

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Many secular Western countries have adopted some form of legislation regulating a woman's ability to wear traditional "Islamic" coverings. These governments often cite concerns for gender equality to justify the regulations. Although it is certainly true that some women are forced to wear hijab, many women cover by choice. These women's choices may be rooted in their faith, but the decisions are also commonly linked to other factors like culture. Thus, this Note argues, regulations that prevent a woman from choosing how to dress do not enhance her rights. Rather, the regulations replace a feared authoritarian man with an overly …

On The Basis Of Sex: Examining John Grisham's Legal Fiction Through Feminist Theory, Viviana I. Vasiu

Florida A & M University Law Review

John Grisham’s legal fiction takes readers to a thrilling land where attorneys are the new heroes, fighting against the dark forces of injustice, corruption, and greed. Alas, in these masterfully crafted thrillers lies a force darker than all: Grisham’s writing has negatively molded our perception of women in the law and beyond. “[F]ictional portrayals can have a powerful impact on perceptions of real-life professionals.” Applying feminist theory to a text can unearth such portrayals and the ideology that “Western culture is fundamentally patriarchal” in literature in order to effectuate change. Analyzing text through the lens of feminist theory requires asking …

The Body Politic: Federalism As Feminism In Health Reform, Elizabeth Mccuskey

Faculty Scholarship

This essay illuminates how modern health law has been mainstreaming feminism under the auspices of health equity and social determinants research. Feminism shares with public health and health policy both the empirical impulse to identify inequality and the normative value of pursing equity in treatment. Using the Affordable Care Act's federal health insurance reforms as a case study of health equity in action, the essay exposes the feminist undercurrents of health insurance reform and the impulse toward mutuality in a body politic. The essay concludes by revisiting-from a feminist perspective-scholars' arguments that equity in health insurance is essential for human …

Formative Projects, Formative Influences: Of Martha Albertson Fineman And Feminist, Liberal, And Vulnerable Subjects, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

This essay, contributed to a symposium on the work of Professor Martha Albertson Fineman, argues that Fineman is a truly generative and transformative scholar, spurring people to think in new ways about key terms like “dependency,” “autonomy,” and “vulnerability” and about basic institutions such as the family and the state. It also recounts Fineman’s role in creating spaces for the generation of scholarship by others. The essay traces critical shifts in Fineman’s scholarly concerns, such as from a theory of dependency to vulnerability theory and from a gender lens to a skepticism about a focus on identities and discrimination. In …

Telling Stories In The Supreme Court: Voices Briefs And The Role Of Democracy In Constitutional Deliberation, Linda H. Edwards

Scholarly Works

On January 4, 2016, over 112 women lawyers, law professors, and former judges told the world that they had had an abortion. In a daring amicus brief that captured national media attention, the women “came out” to their clients; to the lawyers with or against whom they practice; to the judges before whom they appear; and to the Justices of the Supreme Court.

The past three years have seen an explosion of such “voices briefs,” 16 in Obergefell and 17 in Whole Woman’s Health. The briefs can be powerful, but their use is controversial. They tell the stories of non-parties—strangers …

Exploring The Conflicts Within Carceral Feminism: A Call To Revocalize The Women Who Continue To Suffer, Krishna De La Cruz

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

Abstract forthcoming.

Brief Amici Curiae Of Professors Of History, Political Science, And Law In Support Of Respondent, Kristin Collins, Catherine E. Stetson, Jessica K. Jacobs

Faculty Scholarship

Sex-based laws premised on archaic presumptions about the proper roles of men and women run afoul of established constitutional principles, especially when they interfere with the parent-child relationship. Amici write to explain the history of the federal government’s use of sex-based classifications in the regulation of citizenship. In its regulation of intergenerational and interspousal citizenship transmission, the federal government has perpetuated outdated gender-based norms concerning proper parental roles, even when those norms have been rejected in other legal and social contexts. In addition, the laws governing derivative citizenship have significantly encumbered the ability of American fathers to transmit citizenship to …

Trending @ Rwu Law: Judge Netti Vogel's Post: Women, The Legal Profession, And How Far We've Come 7-19-16, Netti Vogel

Law School Blogs

No abstract provided.

Foundling Fathers: (Non-)Marriage And Parental Rights In The Age Of Equality, Serena Mayeri

All Faculty Scholarship

The twentieth-century equality revolution established the principle of sex neutrality in the law of marriage and divorce and eased the most severe legal disabilities traditionally imposed upon nonmarital children. Formal equality under the law eluded nonmarital parents, however. Although unwed fathers won unprecedented legal rights and recognition in a series of Supreme Court cases decided in the 1970s and 1980s, they failed to achieve constitutional parity with mothers or with married and divorced fathers. This Article excavates nonmarital fathers’ quest for equal rights, until now a mere footnote in the history of constitutional equality law.

Unmarried fathers lacked a social …