Law Commons^™

The Interstate Commerce Of Abortion: A Constitutional Argument For The Federal Invalidation Of Restrictive State Abortion Laws, Kaiya Amelia Lyons

Kaiya Amelia Lyons

No abstract provided.

Dealing With Dangerous Women: Sexual Assault Under Cover Of National Security Laws In India, Surabhi Chopra Prof.

Surabhi Chopra Prof.

DEALING WITH DANGEROUS WOMEN: SEXUAL ASSAULT UNDER COVER OF NATIONAL SECURITY LAWS IN INDIA

This article examines violence against women suspected of being security threats in India’s internal conflict zones, one of the very few scholarly works to do so.

I focus on two cases in particular. In 2004, Thangjam Manorama was arrested by paramilitaries on suspicion of belonging to a violent separatist group, and found raped and murdered several hours later. I look at her family’s attempts to hold the armed forces accountable for her death. I also look at the ongoing criminal prosecution of Soni Sori, an indigenous …

Corporate Boardroom Diversity: Why Are We Still Talking About This?, Lawrence J. Trautman

Lawrence J. Trautman Sr.

What exactly is board diversity and why does it matter? How does diversity fit in an attempt to build the best board for any organization? What attributes and skills are required by law and what mix of experiences and talents provide the best corporate governance? Even though most companies say they are looking for diversity, why has there been such little progress? Are required director attributes, which are a must for all boards, consistent with future diversity gains and aligned with achieving high performance and optimal board composition? My goal is to provide answers to these questions, and to discuss …

Sex Is Less Offensive Than Violence: A Call To Update Obscenity Jurisprudence, Rachel Simon

Rachel Simon

This article addresses the gender bias presented by the disparate treatment of sex and violence under current obscenity jurisprudence. Under the controlling standard set forth by the Supreme Court in Miller v. California, sexual works may readily be regulated as obscenity, while violent works unequivocally may not. This article posits that this disparate treatment is the product of entrenched stereotypes about the way men and women “should” react to sex and violence, and notes the hypocrisy of failing to apply the same reasoning to assessments of violent versus sexual material.

First, reliance on “community standards” to define what material …

Regulating The Family: The Impact Of Pro-Family Policy Making Assessments On Women And Non-Traditional Families, Robin S. Maril

Robin S. Maril

Beginning in the 1980s, pro-family advocates lobbied the Reagan administration to take a stronger, more direct role in enforcing traditional family norms through agency rulemaking. In 1986 the White House Working Group on the Family published a report entitled, The Family: Preserving America’s Future, detailing what its authors perceived to be the biggest threats to the “American household of persons related by blood, marriage or adoption – the traditional . . . family.” These threats included a lax sexual culture carried over from the 1960s, resulting in rising divorce rates, children born “out of wedlock,” and increased acceptance of “alternative …

A Noble Cause: A Case Study Of Discrimination, Symbols, And Reciprocity, In: Diversity And European Human Rights, Yofi Tirosh

Yofi Tirosh

This chapter is part of a volume dedicated to rewriting human rights cases issued by the European Court of Human Rights. It uses the case of De La Cierva Osorio De Moscoso v. Spain (1999) as a platform to discuss the inherent tension typifying signs such as nobility titles – as merely symbolic or as carrying substantive content. The problem of one’s ownership of signs is especially acute in the case of women. I will argue that the distinction between form and substance collapses in this case, as in many other cases that involve allocation of allegedly merely symbolic signifiers …

The Limits Of Debate Or What We Talk About When We Talk About Gender Imbalance On The Bench, Keith Bybee

Keith J. Bybee

What do we talk about when we talk about gender imbalance on the bench? The first thing we do is keep track of the number of female judges. Once the data has been gathered, we then argue about what the disparity between men and women in the judiciary means. These arguments about meaning are not freestanding. On the contrary, I claim that debates over gender imbalance occur within the context of a broader public debate over the nature of judicial decisionmaking. I argue that this public debate revolves around dueling conceptions of the judge as impartial arbiter and as politically …

Imbrication Of Legal And Expert Discourses On Monoparental Adoptive Processes, Raquel Medina Plana

Raquel Medina Plana

Long and complex, international adoption processes can be seen as constituting a set of performative practices which involve strategies of transmission/ incorporation of culture, implying the construction of relational identities or subjectivities. With an “educational” drive, and a strong uniformity aspiration, the relevant institutions would be constructing a unified kind of adoptive parenthood, not just in their public dimension but also on the more intimate identity configuration level: the emotional life, affections, expectations, personal history… (Borrillo and Pitois-Etienne, 2004). When confronted with “non-traditional” family projects (as it is the case with monoparental adoption), adoptive processes perform a strong governmental control …

Feminism In The Global Political Economy: Contradiction And Consensus In Cuba, Deborah M. Weissman

Deborah M. Weissman

Much has been written about transnational feminist networks and their impacts on the local condition of women. Transborder feminist organizing has reshaped discourses and practice from the local to the international. Global feminist endeavors have influenced the development of international legal standards affecting the circumstances of women and contributed to the gender mainstreaming of human rights initiatives. At the same time, feminist transnationalism has often been identified as the source of tension as efforts have at times resulted in support for a neoliberal agenda propounding empowerment and self-esteem issues, which in turn, has raised questions about who is defining the …

Sacrifice And Civic Membership: The Case Of World War I, Julie Novkov

Julie Novkov

In the Civil War and World War II, many men of color gained rights while women's rights were in retrograde. While World War I is not a perfect mirror image of the Civil War and World War II, it may make sense to think of World War I as reversing the polarities that were in operation in the two other major conflicts. To understand this dynamic, this paper will explore the kinds of claims that men of color and women made for rights based in forms of civic service and sacrifice, how those claims were met by various state actors, …

Sacrifice And Civic Membership: Who Earns Rights, And When?, Julie Novkov

Julie Novkov

This paper considers two moments that scholars generally agree featured advances for African Americans’ citizenship – the end of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and World War II and its immediate aftermath – and reads these moments through lenses of race and gender. I consider the conjunction of acknowledged sacrifices and contributions to the state, the rights advances achieved, and the gendered and racialized conceptions of citizen service emerging out of both post-war periods. This conjunction suggests that the kind of citizenship that people of color gained during and after wartime crises depended upon gendered and racialized hierarchies that valued …

Soldiers And Wayward Women: Gendered Citizenship, And Migration Policy In Argentina, Italy, And Spain Since 1850, David Cook-Martín

David Cook-Martín

Policies that regulate peoples international movement and their state membership have historically made distinctions based on perceived sexual differences, but little is known about the process by which this has happened. This paper explores how and with what consequences migration and nationality policies have been gendered in two quintessential countries of emigration (Italy and Spain), and in a country of immigrants (Argentina) over a 150-year period. I argue that these migration and nationality policies have reflected the dynamics of the political fields in which they have been crafted. Especially before the Great War, laws and official practices that showed a …

Confronting Conventional Thinking: The Heuristics Problem In Feminist Legal Theory, Nancy Levit

Nancy Levit

The thesis of The Heuristics Problem is that the societal problems about which identity theorists are most concerned often spring from and are reinforced by thinking riddled with heuristic errors. This article first investigates the ways heuristic errors influence popular perceptions of feminist issues. Feminists and critical race theorists have explored the cognitive bias of stereotyping, but have not examined the ways probabilistic errors can have gendered consequences. Second, The Heuristics Problem traces some of the ways cognitive errors have influenced the development of laws relating to gender issues. It explores instances in judicial decisions in which courts commit heuristic …