Law Commons^™

Oral Interview: Contextualizing The Women's Rights Movement In Tunisia Through Family History, Walid Zarrad

Papers, Posters, and Presentations

In their path towards emancipation and equal rights, Tunisian women have gone through a number of phases that seem to be directly linked to legal changes and cultural factors. In fact, the Code of Personal Status (CPS) of 1956 seems to be a milestone in the women’s movement, and its following amendments continued on this path. However, it is a lot more complex than that. A piece of legislation officially passing is not a simple determinant of the state of Women’s Rights in a country.

Through Dorra Mahfoudh Draoui’s “Report on Gender and Marriage in Tunisian Society” and my interview …

Women’S Votes, Women’S Voices, And The Limits Of Criminal Justice Reform, 1911–1950, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Publications

Deriving its vigor from the work of grassroots organizations at the state and local levels, the League of Women Voters (LWV) sought, in the first half of the twentieth century, to provide newly enfranchised women with a political education to strengthen their voice in public affairs. Local branches like the San Francisco Center learned from experience—through practical involvement in a variety of social welfare and criminal justice initiatives. This Article, written for a symposium commemorating the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, assesses the role of LWV leaders in California and especially San Francisco in reforming three aspects of the criminal …

The Troubling Alliance Between Feminism And Policing, Aya Gruber

Publications

No abstract provided.

Female Autonomy: An Analysis Of Privacy And Equality Doctrine For Reproductive Rights, Elizabeth Levi

Political Science Honors Projects

What is the constitutional basis for women’s equality? Recently, scholars have suggested that as the right to privacy has floundered against the political undoing of women's access to abortion, equal protection arguments have grown stronger. This thesis investigates the feminist utility and limits of the equality and privacy arguments. Taking liberal feminism and feminist legal theory as analytical lenses, I offer interpretations of gender discrimination, reproductive rights, and marriage equality case law. By this framework, I argue that while an equality argument is less inherently oppressive towards women than the privacy doctrine, equality doctrine has been constructed thus far to …

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 …

The Stereotyped Offender: Domestic Violence And The Failure Of Intervention, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Publications

Scholars and battered women's advocates now recognize that many facets of the legal response to intimate-partner abuse stereotype victims and harm abuse survivors who do not fit commonly accepted paradigms. However, it is less often acknowledged that the feminist analysis of domestic violence also tends to stereotype offenders and that state action, including court-mandated batterer intervention, is premised on these offender stereotypes. The feminist approach can be faulted for minimizing or denying the role of substance abuse, mental illness, childhood trauma, race, culture, and poverty in intimate-partner abuse. Moreover, those arrested for domestic violence crimes now include heterosexual women, lesbians, …

Intersectionality And Title Vii: A Brief (Pre-)History, Serena Mayeri

All Faculty Scholarship

Title VII was twenty-five years old when Kimberlé Crenshaw published her path-breaking article introducing “intersectionality” to critical legal scholarship. By the time the Civil Rights Act of 1964 reached its thirtieth birthday, the intersectionality critique had come of age, generating a sophisticated subfield and producing many articles that remain classics in the field of anti-discrimination law and beyond. Employment discrimination law was not the only target of intersectionality critics, but Title VII’s failure to capture and ameliorate the particular experiences of women of color loomed large in this early legal literature. Courts proved especially reluctant to recognize multi-dimensional discrimination against …

From Multiculturalism To Technique: Feminism, Culture And The Conflict Of Laws Style, Karen Knop, Ralf Michaels, Annelise Riles

Faculty Scholarship

The German chancellor, the French president and the British prime minister have each grabbed world headlines with pronouncements that their state’s policy of multiculturalism has failed. As so often, domestic debates about multiculturalism, as well as foreign policy debates about human rights in non-Western countries, revolve around the treatment of women. Yet there is also a widely noted brain drain from feminism. Feminists are no longer even certain how to frame, let alone resolve, the issues raised by veiling, polygamy and other cultural practices oppressive to women by Western standards. Feminism has become perplexed by the very concept of “culture.” …

Women Behind The Wheel: Gender And Transportation Law, 1860-1930, Margo Schlanger

Book Chapters

Gender difference is only infrequently mentioned in recent negligence cases. To contemporary (mostly non-essentialist) eyes, gender difference seems to appear only mildly relevant to tort law's area of concern: care and harm to others and self. But in the early days of modern tort law, when gender differences loomed larger in the consciousness of American jurists, and unabashedly so, judicial opinions more frequently grappled with how negligence doctrine ought to take account of female difference. This chapter explores opinions published between approximately 1860 and 1930 that illuminate this issue in cases involving women drivers and passengers of cars and wagons. …

The Third Wave's Break From Feminism, Bridget J. Crawford

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Janet Halley proves that third-wave feminism is wrong - wrongly described, that is. Young feminists in the United States tout a "third wave" of feminism that is hip, ironic and playful - the supposed opposite of the dour and strident "second wave" of 1970's feminism. Goodbye frumpy sandals; hello sexy fishnets, according to third-wave feminism. Initially young women themselves (and now writers and scholars) embraced a pervasive wave metaphor to convey the belief that differences within feminism are generational. Youth crashes against (and ultimately overtakes) its elders. But rifts within feminism cannot be so neatly explained. The story is more …

Provoking Change: Comparative Insights On Feminist Homicide Law Reform, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Publications

The provocation defense, which mitigates murder to manslaughter for killings perpetrated in the heat of passion, is one of the most controversial doctrines in the criminal law because of its perceived gender bias; yet most American scholars and lawmakers have not recommended that it be abolished. This Article analyzes trendsetting feminist homicide law reforms, including the abolition of the provocation defense in three Australian jurisdictions, places these reforms in historical context, and assesses their applicability to the United States. It ultimately advocates reintroducing the concept of justified emotion, grounded in modern equality principles and social values, as a requirement for …

Race, Sex, And Rulemaking: Administrative Constitutionalism And The Workplace, 1960 To The Present, Sophia Z. Lee

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article uses the history of equal employment rulemaking at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Federal Power Commission (FPC) to document and analyze, for the first time, how administrative agencies interpret the Constitution. Although it is widely recognized that administrators must implement policy with an eye on the Constitution, neither constitutional nor administrative law scholarship has examined how administrators approach constitutional interpretation. Indeed, there is limited understanding of agencies’ core task of interpreting statutes, let alone of their constitutional practice. During the 1960s and 1970s, officials at the FCC relied on a strikingly broad and affirmative interpretation of …

Feminism As Liberalism: A Tribute To The Work Of Martha Nussbaum Symposium: Honoring The Contributions Of Professor Martha Nussbaum To The Scholarship And Practice Of Gender And Sexuality Law: Feminism And Liberalism, Tracy E. Higgins

Faculty Scholarship

In this essay, I revisit and expand an argument I have made with respect to the limited usefulness of liberalism in defining an agenda for guaranteeing women's rights and improving women's conditions. After laying out this case, I discuss Martha Nussbaum's capabilities approach to fundamental rights and human development and acknowledge that her approach addresses to a significant degree many of the objections I and other feminist scholars have raised. I then turn to fieldwork that I have done in South Africa on the issue of custom and women's choices with regard to marriage and divorce. Applying Professor Nussbaum's capabilities …

Introduction (Excerpt) In Justice Bertha Wilson: One Woman's Difference, Kim Brooks

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Bertha Wilson was the first woman to be appointed to Canada's Supreme Court in 1982. Her appointment capped off a career of firsts. She had been the first woman lawyer and partner at a prominent Toronto law firm and the first woman appointed to the Ontario Court of Appeal. Her career and passing in 2007 have provoked reflection on her contributions to Canadian society and caused many to reflect on the question she herself posed: what difference do women judges make? What follows is an excerpt from the introduction to the book. The chapters of the book explore a broad …

The Feminist War On Crime, Aya Gruber

Publications

One of the most celebrated successes of the feminist movement is its lasting impact on domestic violence criminal laws. Today, society has moved from discourse characterizing domestic abuse as legitimate or merely a private problem to a belief that battering is a heinous crime, more egregious than garden-variety assault. I know all too well how far the pendulum has swung, having practiced as a public defender in the District of Columbia domestic violence system. Day after day, prosecutors proceeded with cases against the wishes of victims, resulting in the mass incarceration of young black men. Could this have been the …

The Trial Of Susan B. Anthony For Illegal Voting, Douglas O. Linder

Faculty Works

More than any other woman of her generation, Susan B. Anthony saw that all of the legal disabilities faced by American women owed their existence to the simple fact that women lacked the vote. When Anthony, at age 32, attended her first woman's rights convention in Syracuse in 1852, she declared that the right which woman needed above every other, the one indeed which would secure to her all the others, was the right of suffrage. Anthony spent the next fifty-plus years of her life fighting for the right to vote. She would work tirelessly: giving speeches, petitioning Congress and …

Book Review: Decreeing Women's Equality: Using Women's History To Create Legal Parity, Denise D. J. Roy

Faculty Scholarship

This article critiques the feminist view Ute Gerhard offers in “Debating Women's Equality: Toward a Feminist Theory of Law from a European Perspective”. Throughout Debating Women's Equality, Gerhard appears to have three ambitious objectives in mind: (1) to decry the paucity of research into women's legal history while beginning to do the needed work, focusing primarily on Germany but also broadly exploring European trends, (2) to demonstrate that German/European women's legal history ultimately vindicates reliance on “equal rights” as a political strategy for women, and (3) to develop an understanding of legal equality that can serve as a meaningful tool …

A Brief History Of Gender Law Journals: The Heritage Of Myra Bradwell's Chicago Legal News, Richard H. Chused

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Chapter 7 - Reflections On The Scholarship Of Elizabeth B. Clark, Kristin Olbertson, Carol Weisbrod, Christine Stansell, Martha Minow

Manuscript of Women, Church, and State: Religion and the Culture of Individual Rights in Nineteenth-Century America

Elizabeth Clark's essays on early nineteenth-century reform movements make a compelling case that abolitionists and feminists alike understood individual rights from a profoundly religious perspective. Clark also demonstrates how these reformers advocated the protection of so-called "natural rights" for enslaved African-Americans and white women in the vivid and fervently emotional language of evangelical revivalism. Broader cultural and intellectual trends of resistance to governmental and clerical authority, trends rooted in liberal and evangelical Protestantism, Clark argues, helped fuel attacks on slavery and gender inequality. Rejecting other historians' portrayals of the antebellum reformers as primarily secular in orientation, Clark makes the arresting, …

Injured Women Before Common Law Courts, 1860-1930, Margo Schlanger

Articles

How did early American tort law treat women? How were they expected to behave, and how were others expected to behave towards them? What gender differences mattered, and how did courts deal with those differences? These are the issues this Article explores. My aim is to illuminate the common law of torts and its relation to and with ideas about gender difference, by focusing on three sets of cases involving injured women, spanning the time between approximately 1860 and 1930. My conclusions run counter to two approaches scholars have frequently taken in analyzing gender and the common law of torts. …

Straying From The Path Of The Law After One Hundred Years, The, Tracy E. Higgins

Faculty Scholarship

What common ground can be found between modern feminist legal theory and a century-old essay advocating understanding the law from the perspective of the "bad man"? The question admits of no simple answer. Feminists, including myself, might agree with some irony that "[i]f you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man" but would add that this is precisely the problem. Of course, Holmes does not use the concept of the bad man in a feminist sense to suggest that the law empowers the bad man at the expense of women. …

Feminist Jurisprudence: Why Law Must Consider Women's Perspectives, Ann Juergens

Faculty Scholarship

A growing number of scholars are asking how the law would be different if it took women's points of view and experiences into account. Feminist Jurisprudence argues that we must look at the norms embedded in our legal system and rethink the law. It is about being inclusive of women, and of all people who differ from the norms of the law as it is today. The endeavor will necessarily shake up established relations between family, the workplace and the state. Lawyers, judges, and legislators should get ready for the changes.

Chapter 5 - Matrimonial Bonds: Slavery And Divorce In Nineteenth-Century America (Previously Published Article), Elizabeth B. Clark

Manuscript of Women, Church, and State: Religion and the Culture of Individual Rights in Nineteenth-Century America

In the covenant of marriage, woman is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master -- the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement. He has so framed the law of divorce . . . as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of women -- the law, in all cases, going upon a false supposition of the supremacy of man, and giving all power into his hands.

Matrimonial Bonds: Slavery And Divorce In Nineteenth-Century America, Elizabeth B. Clark

Publications

In the covenant of marriage, woman is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master -- the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement. He has so framed the law of divorce . . . as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of women -- the law, in all cases, going upon a false supposition of the supremacy of man, and giving all power into his hands.

Feminism's Search For The Feminine: Essentialism, Utopianism, And Community, Susan H. Williams

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

The Politics Of God And The Woman's Vote: Religion In The American Suffrage Movement, 1848-1895, Elizabeth B. Clark

Publications

This thesis examines the role of religion— both liberal and evangelical Protestantism— in the development of a feminist political theory in America during the nineteenth century and how that feminist theory in turn helped to transform American liberalism. Chapter 1 looks for the genesis of women's rights language, not in the republican rhetoric of the Founding Fathers, but in the teachings of liberal Protestantism and its links with laissez-faire economic theory. The antebellum understanding of rights is shown to have encompassed social and civil rights alike, and to have arisen from a vision of the mutual benefits that derived from …

Chapter 4 - Self-Ownership And The Political Theory Of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (Previously Published Article), Elizabeth B. Clark

Manuscript of Women, Church, and State: Religion and the Culture of Individual Rights in Nineteenth-Century America

The emphasis on freedom or enslavement of the body, and the issues that sprang from that focus, were feminists' contribution to nineteenth-century American liberalism, as well as their link to radical thought. Elizabeth Cady Stanton drew arguments from the realm of political liberty and religious tolerance to make the case for choice in private life. But the vision of individual autonomy in sexual and domestic matters served also as the basis for her definition of citizenship and as a paradigm for relations among citizens and between citizens and the state. Self-ownership was the unifying theme that ran through Stanton's political …

Self-Ownership And The Political Theory Of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Elizabeth B. Clark

Publications

The emphasis on freedom or enslavement of the body, and the issues that sprang from that focus, were feminists' contribution to nineteenth-century American liberalism, as well as their link to radical thought. Elizabeth Cady Stanton drew arguments from the realm of political liberty and religious tolerance to make the case for choice in private life. But the vision of individual autonomy in sexual and domestic matters served also as the basis for her definition of citizenship and as a paradigm for relations among citizens and between citizens and the state. Self-ownership was the unifying theme that ran through Stanton's political …