Law Commons^™

Pregnancy And The Carceral State, Khiara M. Bridges

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood. by Michele Goodwin.

The Scales Of Reproductive Justice: Casey’S Failure To Rebalance Liberty Interests In The Racially Disparate State Of Maternal Medicine, Mallori D. Thompson

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Despite the maternal medicine crisis in the U.S., especially for Black women, legislatures are challenging constitutional abortion doctrine and forcing women to interact with a system that may cost them their lives. This Article proposes that because of abysmal maternal mortality rates and the arbitrary nature of most abortion restrictions, the right to choose an abortion is embedded in our Fourteenth Amendment right to not be arbitrarily deprived of life by the State. This Article is a call to abortion advocates to begin submitting state maternal mortality data when challenging abortion restrictions. The call for attention to life was central …

Thin And Thick Conceptions Of The Nineteenth Amendment Right To Vote And Congress's Power To Enforce It, Richard L. Hasen, Leah M. Litman

Articles

This Article, prepared for a Georgetown Law Journal symposium on the Nineteenth Amendment’s one-hundred-year anniversary, explores and defends a “thick” conception of the Nineteenth Amendment right to vote and Congress’s power to enforce it. A “thin” conception of the Nineteenth Amendment maintains that the Amendment merely prohibits states from enacting laws that prohibit women from voting once the state decides to hold an election. And a “thin” conception of Congress’s power to enforce the Nineteenth Amendment maintains that Congress may only supply remedies for official acts that violate the Amendment’s substantive guarantees. This Article argues the Nineteenth Amendment does more. …

Second Redemption, Third Reconstruction, Richard A. Primus

Articles

In The Accumulation of Advantages, the picture that Professor Owen Fiss paints about equality during and since the Second Reconstruction is largely a picture in black and white. That makes some sense. The black/white experience is probably the most important throughline in the story of equal protection. It was the central theme of both the First and Second Reconstructions. In keeping with that orientation, the picture of disadvantage described by Fiss’s theory of cumulative responsibility is largely drawn from the black/white experience. Important as it is, however, the black/white experience does not exhaust the subject of constitutional equality. So in …

Potential Life In The Doctrine, Leah Litman

Articles

In their article, Abortion: A Woman’s Private Choice, Erwin Chemerinsky and Michele Goodwin seek to shore up the doctrinal basis for a woman’s constitutional right to end her pregnancy. While Chemerinsky and Goodwin are partly concerned about the status of abortion rights in the United States because of President Donald Trump’s promise prior to taking office to appoint Justices to the Supreme Court who will overturn Roe v. Wade, they also maintain that some of the threat to abortion rights arises from an uncomfortable tension in the doctrine that recognizes states’ interest in potential life. I agree with Chemerinsky and …

Unduly Burdening Women’S Health: How Lower Courts Are Undermining Whole Woman’S Health V. Hellerstedt, Leah M. Litman

Michigan Law Review Online

At the end of the Supreme Court’s 2016 Term, the Court issued its decision in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt. One of the more closely watched cases of that Term, Hellerstedt asked whether the Supreme Court would adhere to its prior decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which reaffirmed that women have a constitutionally protected right to decide to end a pregnancy.

The state of Texas had not formally requested that the Court revisit Casey or the earlier decision Casey had affirmed, Roe v. Wade, in Hellerstedt. But that was what Texas was, in effect, asking …

Confrontation And Domestic Violence Post-Davis: Is There And Should There Be A Doctrinal Exception, Eleanor Simon

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Close to five million intimate partner rapes and physical assaults are perpetrated against women in the United States annually. Domestic violence accounts for twenty percent of all non-fatal crime experienced by women in this county. Despite these statistics, many have argued that in the past six years the Supreme Court has "put a target on [the] back" of the domestic violence victim, has "significantly eroded offender accountability in domestic violence prosecutions," and has directly instigated a substantial decline in domestic violence prosecutions. The asserted cause is the Court's complete and groundbreaking re-conceptualization of the Sixth Amendment right of a criminal …

Contingent Equal Protection: Reaching For Equality After Ricci And Pics, Jennifer S. Hendricks

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This Article uses the term contingent equal protection to describe the constitutional analysis that applies to a range of governmental efforts to ameliorate race and sex hierarchies. "Contingent" refers to the fact that the equal protection analysis is contingent upon the existence of structural, de facto inequality. Contingent equal protection cases include those that involve explicit race and sex classifications, facially neutral efforts to reduce inequality, and accommodation of sex differences to promote equality. Uniting all three kinds of cases under a single conceptual umbrella reveals the implications that developments in one area can have for the other two.

Les Papiers De La Liberté: Une Mère Africaine Et Ses Enfants À L'Époque De La Révolution Haïtienne, Rebecca Scott, Jean M. Hebrard

Articles

During the Louisiana Constitutional Convention of 1867-1868, the young Edouard Tinchant proposed measures to protect the civil rights of women. He suggested that the State adopt legal measures to allow all women, regardless of race or color, to more easily bring complaints in the event of a breach of a marriage promise. He also proposed additional measures to prevent women from being forced into “concubinage” against their will. While that constitutional Convention was open to men of color and guaranteed a number of the rights for which Tinchant and his friends were fighting, the assembly did not adopt his propositions …

Striking The Rock: Confronting Gender Equality In South Africa, Penelope E. Andrews

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Article analyzes the status of women's rights in the newly democratic South Africa. It examines rights guaranteed in the Constitution and conflicts between the principle of gender equality and the recognition of indigenous law and institutions. The Article focuses on the South African transition to democracy and the influence that feminist agitation at the international level has had on South African women's attempts at political organization. After dissecting the historical position of customary law in South Africa and questioning its place in the new democratic regime. The author argues that, although South African women have benefited from the global …

Ru 486 Examined: Impact Of A New Technology On An 0 Id Controversy, Gwendolyn Prothro

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Abortion is an extremely divisive issue in American politics and culture. Prothro begins this Article by analyzing the current legal standards governing reproduction, which draw a sharp distinction between abortion and contraception. Prothro then examines the function of RU 486, demonstrating that it acts both as a contraceptive and as an abortifacient. Because of this dual capacity, RU 486 does not fit neatly into the current legal framework. Prothro concludes this Article by arguing that RU 486 should force the Supreme Court to create a new framework for the "procreative right." Prothro argues that this new framework should treat the …

Homologizing Pregnancy And Motherhood: A Consideration Of Abortion, Julia E. Hanigsberg

Michigan Law Review

In this essay I reconsider abortion in order to bridge what initially seem to be two opposing frameworks: first, the conception of abortion as an issue of women's bodily integrity and liberty, and second, the acknowledgement of the existence and meaning of intrauterine life. The abortion choice is indeed deeply and necessarily tied to women's bodily integrity. I will discuss how taking away women's ability to control their decision not to become mothers can be severely damaging to their very sense of self, for this denial of decisionmaking divides women from their wombs and uses their wombs for a purpose …

The Countermajoritarian Paradox, Neal Davis

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade. by David J. Garrow

Constitutional Misconceptions, Radhika Rao

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Children of Choice: Freedom and the New Reproductive Technologies by John A. Robertson

Life's Sacred Value—Common Ground Or Battleground, Alexander Morgan Capron

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Life's Dominion: An Argument About Abortion, Euthanasia, and Individual Freedom by Ronald Dworkin

A Question Of Choice, Michele A. Estrin

Michigan Law Review

A Review of A Question of Choice by Sarah Weddington

"But Whoever Treasures Freedom…": The Right To Travel And Extraterritorial Abortions, Seth F. Kreimer

Michigan Law Review

In a prior article, I addressed the problem of extraterritorial abortions under the assumption that the federal constitutional right of reproductive choice would be repudiated by the Supreme Court on Justice Scalia's theory that such rights lack sufficiently deep roots in the history and traditions surrounding the framing of the Constitution and the Fourteenth Amendment. I argued there that a constitutional methodology that relied on traditions and expectations of the Framers would provide a strong basis for concluding that the Constitution imposes severe limits on states' power to project their moralities extraterritorially. If Justice Scalia is serious about a regard …

Conflict Of Constitutions? No Thanks: A Response To Professors Brilmayer And Kreimer, Gerald L. Neuman

Michigan Law Review

This colloquy was organized around the unpleasant hypothesis that the Supreme Court would overrule Roe v. Wade and that Congress would not fill the resulting void with federal legislation. The abortion debate would then move to the states, where local majorities could enact their own resolutions. If the local majorities were large enough, they could even write their local resolutions into their state constitutions. The contrasting state constitutions that could result might then replicate the comparativists' current juxtaposition between the U.S. Constitution and the constitutions of Germany and Ireland. In some states, prohibition of abortion would be constitutionally required, while …

Why We Lost The Era, Judith L. Hudson

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Why We Lost the ERA