Law Commons^™

Surrey's Silence: Subpart F And The Swiss Subsidiary Tax That Never Was, Steven Dean

Faculty Scholarship

Was Stanley Surrey racist? Was he a coward for not speaking as plainly about the Swiss tax haven problem in public as the Surrey Papers reveal his team did in private? In the broad sweep of history Surrey’s silence may have mattered a great deal or it may have mattered very little. The quiet aspect of the Liberia problem that it highlights undoubtedly does. Exploiting the public’s misunderstanding of the term tax haven as Surrey quickly learned to do has become second nature to scholars and policymakers alike. No less powerful than the loud aspect of the Liberia problem, the …

Ms. Attribution: How Authorship Credit Contributes To The Gender Gap, Jordana Goodman

Faculty Scholarship

Misattribution plagues the practice of law in the United States. Seasoned practitioners and legislators alike will often claim full credit for joint work and, in some cases, for the entirety of a junior associate’s writing. The powerful over-credit themselves on legislation, opinions, and other legal works to the detriment of junior staff and associates. The ingrained and expected practice of leveraging junior attorneys as ghost-writers is, to many, unethical. But it presents a distinct concern that others have yet to interrogate: misattribution disparately impacts underrepresented members of the legal profession.

This Article fills that space by offering a quantitative analysis …

The Intersectional Race And Gender Effects Of The Pandemic In Legal Academia, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Faculty Scholarship

Just as the COVID-19 pandemic helped to expose the inequities that already existed between students at every level of education based on race and socioeconomic class status, it has exposed existing inequities among faculty based on gender and the intersection of gender and race. The legal academy has been no exception to this reality. The widespread loss of childcare and the closing of both public and private primary and secondary schools have disproportionately harmed women law faculty, who are more likely than their male peers to work a “second shift” in terms of childcare and household responsibilities. Similarly, women law …

Will Focusing On Men's Moral Calculus Make Abortion Less "About" Gender?, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

Decades ago, feminist leader Gloria Steinem quipped that, “if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.” As President Trump reinstates restrictions on women’s reproductive rights that the Obama Administration lifted (such as the “global gag rule”), the visual imagery of Trump signing executive orders while surrounded by an audience of white men raises – once again – the question of how gender shapes the abortion issue. In the recent unsuccessful Republican effort to repeal “Obamacare,” when Kansas Senator Pat Roberts was asked whether he supported removing the mandate that insurance companies cover “essential health benefits” such as maternity …

Stereotype Threat And Law Librarianship, Ronald E. Wheeler

Faculty Scholarship

Mr. Wheeler looks at the concept of stereotype threat and discusses ways to confront and combat it in a diverse society. He proposes some simple solutions within the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) and the law librarianship profession to help diminish the effects of this psychological barrier.

Illegitimate Borders: Jus Sanguinis Citizenship And The Legal Construction Of Family, Race, And Nation, Kristin Collins

Faculty Scholarship

The citizenship status of children born to American parents outside the United States is governed by a complex set of statutes. When the parents of such children are not married, these statutes encumber the transmission of citizenship between father and child while readily recognizing the child of an American mother as a citizen. Much of the debate concerning the propriety and constitutionality of those laws has centered on the extent to which they reflect gender-traditional understandings of fathers’ and mothers’ respective parental roles, or instead reflect “real differences” between men and women. Based on extensive archival research, this Article demonstrates …

Bullying Prevention And Boyhood, Katharine B. Silbaugh

Faculty Scholarship

A desire to reduce bullying in schools and to create safer and healthier school cultures has driven an anti-bullying movement characterized by significant reform in school programs and practices, as well as legislative reform and policy articulation in every state. A desire to improve school outcomes for boys has generated a number of programmatic proposals and responses in public and private education. Most notably, single-sex programming in public schools has been facilitated by the 2006 change to Title IX regulations setting out the criteria for permissible single-sex public school programs. These two recent movements in K-12 schooling spring from new …

'Petitions Without Number': Widows' Petitions And The Early Nineteenth-Century Origins Of Public Marriage-Based Entitlements, Kristin Collins

Faculty Scholarship

Between 1792 and 1858, Congress enacted approximately seventy-six public law statutes granting cash subsidies to large classes of military widows. War widows’ pensions were not wholly unknown in Anglo-American law before this time, but the widows’ pension system of the early nineteenth century was distinctive in both scope and kind: Congress rejected the class-based approach that had characterized war widows’ pensions of the eighteenth century by pensioning widows of rank-and-file soldiers, not just widows of officers, and by extending pensions to widows of veterans. This significant equalization and expansion of widows’ pensions resulted in the creation of the first broad-scale …

Revisiting Mary Ann Glendon: Abortion, Divorce, Dependency, And Rights Talk In Western Law, Linda C. Mcclain, Margaret F. Brining

Faculty Scholarship

This essay revisits Mary Ann Glendon’s comparative law study, Abortion and Divorce in Western Law and her subsequent book, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse. Glendon’s comparative study actually included a third topic: “forms of dependency which are connected with pregnancy, marriage, and child raising.” The topic of dependency has obvious relevance to consideration of intergenerational obligations and the interplay between family responsibility and societal responsibility for addressing dependency needs.

A central claim Glendon made in both books is that the U.S. legal tradition is “libertarian,” views individuals as “lone rights bearers,” and exalts the “right to be let …

Greensboro And Beyond: Remediating The Structural Sexism In Truth And Reconciliation Processes And Determining The Potential Impact And Benefits Of Truth Processes In The United States, Peggy Maisel

Faculty Scholarship

Over the last 35 years approximately forty truth commissions have investigated human rights violations and abuses in a wide range of countries and communities. Each of these forty commissions provides different lessons on how investigating and testifying about past abuse can lead to healing and change. I have participated in two of the more remarkable Truth and Reconciliation processes, the first as an observer, the other as an advisor. The former is perhaps the most widely known and discussed TRC process, the one which took place in South Africa from 1996 to 1998 that examined the entire apartheid era in …

Do Female “Firsts” Still Matter?: Why They Do For Women Of Color, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Amber Shanahan-Fricke

Faculty Scholarship

This Article argues that diversifying the federal judiciary with more women and men of color, but particularly with more women of color, is essential to moving forward and strengthening this country’s democracy. Specifically, this Article responds to arguments by prominent feminists that having female “firsts” on the bench is not as critical as having the “right” women on the bench—“right” meaning those women who are invested in and supportive of what are traditionally viewed as women’s issues. In so responding, this Article acknowledges the appeal of such arguments regarding judicial service from the “right” women, but contends that, while achieving …

Aryans, Gender, And American Politics, Robert L. Tsai

Faculty Scholarship

This short essay discusses some of the ways in which the Aryan movement in America activates gendered beliefs for the goal of legal, political, and cultural transformation. In recent years, the community has moved from common law theories of white sovereignty to more robust forms of racial constitutionalism. The piece is drawn from "America's Forgotten Constitutions: Defiant Visions of Power and Community" (forthcoming Harvard University Press, 2014).

Another Hair Piece: Exploring New Strands Of Analysis Under Title Vii, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay re-examines antidiscrimination case law that allows employers to enforce hair grooming policies that prohibit natural hairstyles for black women, such as braids, locks, and twists. In so doing, this Essay sets forth an intersectional, biological - as opposed to cultural - argument for why such bans are discriminatory under Title VII. Specifically, this Essay argues that antidiscrimination law fails to address intersectional race and gender discrimination against black women through such grooming restrictions because it does not recognize braided, twisted, and locked hairstyles as black-female equivalents of Afros, which are protected as racial characteristics under existing law. The …

Pregnant Man: A Conversation, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Darren Rosenblum, Noa Ben-Asher, Mary Anne Case, Elizabeth Emens, Berta E. Hernandez-Truyol,, Vivian M. Gutierrez, Lisa C. Ikemoto, Jacob Willig-Onwuachi, Kimberly Mutcherson, Peter Siegelman, Beth Jones

Faculty Scholarship

I'm a law professor who works on gender, sexuality, and culture in the international and comparative context. That's my head working. In "real" life, my partner, Howard, and I have been engaged in having a baby together for several years, a project that came to fruition with the birth of our daughter Melina. Of course, such a project evokes intensely complex feelings and thoughts. Beyond a simple transposition of the personal onto the political, I feel so fortunate to have engaged in myriad conversations with a variety of friends and colleagues who think much more carefully about the family and …

All In The Family, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Jacob Willig-Onwuachi

Faculty Scholarship

Your essay “Pregnant Man?” highlights many significant issues concerning the intersection of law, gender, sexuality, race, class, and family. In an earlier article A House Divided: The Invisibility of the Multiracial Family, we explored many of these issues as they relate to multiracial families, including our own. Specifically, we, a black female-white male married couple, analyzed the language in housing discrimination statutes to demonstrate how law and society function together to frame the normative ideal of family as heterosexual and monoracial. Our article examined the daily social privileges of monoracial, heterosexual couples as a means of revealing the invisibility of …

Gendering The Gentrification Of Public Housing: Hope Vi's Disparate Impact On Lowest-Income African American Women, Danielle Pelfrey Duryea

Faculty Scholarship

HOPE VI must have seemed so promising. When, in 1992, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) introduced the program later dubbed "HOPE VI," replacing the country's worst public housing projects with mixed-income, mixed-use, low-density new developments while providing targeted social services to low-income residents must have seemed like a worthy pursuit indeed. America's most run-down, crime-ridden, and poverty-plagued residential properties could be transformed into "human-scale" New Urbanist streetscapes, aesthetically continuous with surrounding areas, that would inspire pride and community in their residents. Perhaps most importantly, HOPE VI's required social service component might have seemed, at last, to recognize …

Negotiating Gender And (Free And Equal) Citizenship: The Place Of Associations, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

This article focuses on the place of associations within John Rawls's political liberalism and in feminist liberalism. It revisits crucial components of political liberalism in light of feminist criticisms, such as those of Susan Moller Okin and Martha Nussbaum, that political liberalism's protection of associational life hinders women's free and equal citizenship. Offering a different reading of Rawls, it finds greater potential to draw on political liberalism to support such citizenship. It then brings liberal feminist ideas about the place of associations into dialogue with recent feminist work on gender, rights, and culture calling for models of rights within culture …