Law Commons^™

The "Rabbi's Daughter" And The "Jewish Jane Addams": Jewish Women, Legal Aid, And The Fluidity Of Identity, 1890-1930, Felice Batlan

Felice J Batlan

Acting White? Or Acting Affluent? A Book Review Of Acting White? Rethinking Race In "Post-Racial" America, Lisa Pruitt

Lisa R Pruitt

Acting White? Rethinking Race in “Post-Racial” America (2013) is the latest installment in Devon Carbado and Mitu Gulati’s decade-plus collaboration regarding issues of race and employment. This review lauds the book’s comprehensive treatment of the double bind that racial minorities—especially blacks—experience within principally white institutions. In this volume, the authors expand on their prior employment-centered work to consider, for example, Barack and Michelle Obama’s presence on the national political stage, racial identity and performance in the context of higher education admissions, and racial profiling by law enforcement. With a focus on intra-racial diversity, Carbado and Gulati begin to gesture to …

Urbanormativity, Spatial Privilege, And Judicial Blind Spots In Abortion Law, Lisa Pruitt

Lisa R Pruitt

State laws regulating abortion have proliferated dramatically in recent years. Twenty-two states adopted 70 different restrictions in 2013 alone. Between 2011 and 2013, state legislatures passed 205 abortion restrictions, exceeding the 189 enacted during the entire prior decade. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit recently upheld as constitutional several such restrictions, parts of Texas H.B. 2 (2013), in Planned Parenthood of Texas v. Abbott. That court is currently considering the constitutionality of a similar Mississippi law. These and other recent cases raise issues likely to be heard soon by the U.S. Supreme Court. Among the regulations at …

Who's Afraid Of White Class Migrants? On Denial, Discrediting, And Disdain (And Toward A Richer Conception Of Diversity), Lisa R. Pruitt

Lisa R Pruitt

Constrained Choice: Mothers, The State, And Domestic Violence, Rona Kaufman Kitchen

Rona Kaufman Kitchen

Mothers who are the victims of domestic violence face unique challenges in their quest for safety. The legal response to domestic violence requires that mothers respond to abuse in specific state-sanctioned manners. However, when mothers respond accordingly, such as by reporting abuse and leaving the abusive relationship, their safety and the safety of their children is not guaranteed. Moreover, by responding in state-sanctioned manners, mothers risk a host of negative consequences including increased threat to their immediate and long-term safety, the loss of their children, undesired financial, health, and social consequences, and criminal prosecution. On the other hand, when mothers …

The Illusion Of Equality: The Failure Of The Community Property Reform To Achieve Management Equality, Elizabeth Carter

Elizabeth R. Carter

Fatherhood And Equality: Reconfiguring Masculinities, Nancy E. Dowd

Nancy Dowd

In this article, Professor Dowd sets out the asymmetric pattern of men’s caretaking as compared to women’s caretaking, and raises the issue of why greater equality has not been achieved in care as women’s participation in the workforce has increased. She argues that not only is this linked to the lack of institutional and structural supports for parenthood, which leads to gendered outcomes in who does care, but in addition, and perhaps most importantly, the barrier to care is cultural, linked to masculinities norms. Dowd sets out the barriers to care linked to masculinities and suggests a further analysis linked …

Race, Gender, And Work/Family Policy, Nancy Dowd

Nancy Dowd

Family leave is not an end in itself, but rather is part of a much bigger picture: work/family policy. The goal of work/family policy is to achieve a good society by supporting families. Ideally, families enable children to develop to their fullest capacity and to contribute to their communities and society. Public rhetoric in the United States has always strongly supported families. Our policies, however, have not. In the area of work/family policy, the United States continues to lag behind every other advanced industrialized country, as well as many developing countries, in the degree to which we provide affirmative support …

The Future Of Polyamorous Marriage: Lessons From The Marriage Equality Struggle, Hadar Aviram, Gwendolyn Manriquez Leachman

Hadar Aviram

Amidst the recent legal victories and growing public support for same-sex marriage, numerous polyamorous individuals have expressed interest in pursuing legal recognition for marriages between more than two consenting adults. This Article explores the possibilities that exist for such a polyamorous marriage equality campaign, in light of the theoretical literature on law and social movements, as well as our own original and secondary research on polyamorous and LGBT communities. Among other issues, we examine the prospect of prioritizing the marriage struggle over other forms of nonmarital relationship recognition; pragmatic regulative challenges, like taxation, healthcare, and immigration; and how law and …

Gender And Global Lawyering: Where Are The Women?, Steven Boutcher, Carole Silver

Carole Silver

The dual processes of diversity and globalization are responsible for significant growth among U.S. law firms: female lawyers account for much of the increase in headcount in large law firms over the last several decades, and lawyers educated and licensed in jurisdictions outside of the U.S. have helped U.S.-based law firms expand internationally. This article draws on data gathered from lawyer biographies to examine the relationship between gender diversity and globalization, and considers whether career strategies that involve the international movement of lawyers are equally powerful for women and men. Our research suggests that gender inequality is not erased by …

Exchange As A Cornerstone Of Families, Martha Ertman

Martha M. Ertman

This essay up-ends critical theorist Ivan Illich’s critique of economic thinking as replacing households defined by vernacular gender with married pairs in “inhumane” sex-neutral economic partnerships. It challenges Illich’s view of exchange as a destroyer that has meddled in families for only a few hundred years, citing sociobiological literature to counter his case against exchange with one valorizing two exchanges that I call “primal deals” that played crucial roles in the evolution of humans, families, and day-to-day life. These primal deals—especially the primal pair-bonding deal between men and women—continue to play a central role in families and family law today. …

Women's Legal History Symposium Introduction: Making History, Felice J. Batlan

Felice J Batlan

This essay introduces the Chicago-Kent Symposium on Women's Legal History: A Global Perspective. It seeks to situate the field of women's legal history and to explore what it means to begin writing a transnational women's history which transcends and at times disrupts the nation state. In doing so, it sets forth some of the fundamental premises of women's legal history and points to new ways of writing such histories.

The Joke In Critical Race Theory: De Gustibus Disputandum Est?, Dan Subotnik

Dan Subotnik

No abstract provided.

Polarisations In The World-System, Nicos Trimikliniotis

Nicos Trimikliniotis

The project led by Immanuel Wallerstein’s which is re-examining various aspects/dimensions of polarisations over the last 500 years is a fascinating and ambitious project: ten aspects of the transformations/trends over this long period were chosen in order to examine how matters have been transformed during this time in the core, semi-periphery and periphery of the world-system. The broad themes are the following: wealth; deruralization; urbanization; state power; citizenship’; enterprises; ecology; gender; cultural practices and deviance. Not all papers are so far at the same level of advancement but they will promise to be so in a year’s time.