Law and Gender Commons^™

The Universal And Its Others: Dialectics And Conflict In Comprehensive Pluralism, Julie Saada

Cardozo Law Review

Since the release of Rawls’s A Theory of Justice in 1971, discussions on the role of groups, redistribution, and symbolic recognition have gained unprecedented attention in North America and Europe. How can we ensure equal recognition among groups and foster equitable access to goods in a way that provides fair distribution not only among groups (plurality) but also within groups (the singular) so that all are politically and socially included on a common shared basis (the universal)? While the approach to this question differs between America and Europe—think of French republican universalism and the historical evolution of the concept of …

Settler Colonialism And Ecosystem Change: How Ideology Has Shaped Minnesota’S Environments, Sarah E. Hobby

History Honors Projects

The formation of a uniquely American land ethic—defined by European political history and Christian biblical doctrine and forged through systems of dispossession—is central to the creation of environments within the United States today. Using Minnesota as a microcosm to understand how settler colonial interactions played out all across the United States, this paper analyzes connections between violent dispossession of Indigenous people and the degradation of environments. By understanding how Ojibwe and Dakota people think about and have shaped Minnesotan lands throughout their history and comparing Indigenous land-ethics to the Euro-American-settler land ethic, this paper evaluates the role that ideology and …

Beyond The Binary: Analyzing Transgender Legislation In Spain And Its Implications For Equality And Rights, Stephanie Hernandez

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Spain is considered one of the leading countries in LGBT+ acceptance and rights with their progressive laws, gaining a name for itself as a haven for those within the community. In this research paper, I investigate the evolution of transgender legislation in Spain into the current day and how it impacts the public perception and gender affirmative care available to trans people. Focusing primarily on the passage of Trans Ley 4/2023 and the windows it opened in Trans rights. Looking into the improvements made in Trans laws, from Ley 3/2007 to current day. Additionally, this paper will look into attempted …

Perceptions, Attitudes, And Behaviors Of Young Jordanian Women On Their Second-Class Citizenship, Umulkair Mohamed

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This case study examines the societal impact of Jordan's gender-discriminatory nationality law on the perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors of young women. Utilizing quantitative interviews with six Jordanian women, aged 21-37, the research explores their perspectives on the law's implications and justifications. Despite constitutional guarantees of equality, the 1954 Jordanian Nationality Law disproportionately favors men in citizenship transmission, violating international human rights principles ratified by Jordan. This results in Jordanian women who marry non-national men not being able to transmit their nationality to their children in most cases. Without Jordanian nationality, these children suffer many challenges such as limited employment and …

The Imperative Of Rejecting "Gender-Critical" Feminism In The Law, Henry F. Fradella

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

Roughly a half-century ago at the height of the second-wave feminist movement, some feminist scholars and activists found themselves arguing with transgender people about who is a woman. While much of contemporary feminist thought has moved past biological essentialism’s outdated embrace of a sex binary to embrace trans-equality, a relatively small but vocal group of self-proclaimed “gender-critical feminists” (who are sometimes called trans-exclusionary radical feminists, or “TERFs” for short) eschew transgender legal rights that they perceive as potentially threatening to the rights of cisgender women. Most gender-critical arguments in that regard are fallacious; they are based on myths and false …

Exploring The Factors That Influence Female Offending In The U.S. And Mexico, Dana Villasenor

CMC Senior Theses

Hollywood has painted a picture of the criminal woman as a sexy, sneaky, and often psychotic female fatale. This is because men run Hollywood. Much like movies, research on why women offend had historically focused on men as their stellar. However, towards the turn of the century and with the disproportionate rise in female incarceration, literature caught up to the fact that women and men do not experience the same socialization, standards, or reality and, therefore, have different reasons for and ways of offending. This research explores those reasons for women in the U.S. and Mexico and paints the picture …

Creating A Just System Of Civil Recourse – Articulating The Controlled Instrumentalist Approach For Marginalized People, Rukmini Banerjee

CMC Senior Theses

A system of civil recourse is a precondition for a just society. In this paper, I outline the ideal version of a system of civil recourse and analyze the accounts of various liberal philosophers to explain how a non-instrumental and mutual accountability theory of civil recourse best encapsulates its stated purpose. I analyze the American system of civil recourse, specifically tort law, and argue that it bypasses the threshold of tolerable injustice for marginalized people in the United States. Using Tommie Shelby’s framework in Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform, I argue that marginalized people are not obligated by …

Preservation Through Transformation: An Interpretive Analysis Of Title Vii’S Failure To Secure Remedy For The Wrongs Of Workplace Sexual Harassment, Halle Rudman

CMC Senior Theses

The establishment of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as federal law was a pivotal moment in the pursuit of workplace equality and eradication of discrimination. Unfortunately, the application of Title VII in sexual harassment cases has fallen short of the statute’s noble intentions. In this paper, I argue that the judicial treatment of Title VII has been disloyal to its original purpose, perpetuating systemic inequalities and hindering progress towards gender equality in the workplace. I first establish a framework for the reasonable construction of a statute, drawing on work from various legal theorists to establish three …

Body. Freedom. Choice: Creating Artwork In Post-Roe America, Erin Sedra

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

I knew from a young age that I never wanted children. Whenever I expressed my disinterest in motherhood, I was often met with bewilderment, disapproval, and hostility. The church I was raised in taught me that my value and worth as a woman directly correlated with the power of my birthing hips. This fundamentalist upbringing has significantly shaped my relationship with my femininity, my body, and my artwork. When I feel powerless, turning to my art gives me a sense of control and self-expression. This body of work began as a reaction to the overturning of Roe v. Wade and …

Gender In The Making Of The Constitution: Proposals For A Feminist Inquiry Into Indian Constitutional History, Achyut Chetan

National Law School Journal

A feminist inquiry into the framing of the Indian Constitution must retrieve and see the interventions of the women members of the Constituent Assembly for what they historically represent, namely, a feminist authorial voice that was developed over a period of time by the pre-Independence women’s movement in India. For a proper understanding of this voice, we must understand the gendered character of the Constituent Assembly, its architecture, its procedures, the dynamics of the gendered relations among its members, and above all, the performative aspects of the debates. This inquiry must also investigate the language employed by the members and …

The Quick And The Dead (And The Transported), Manushag N. Powell

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

In most nations that still execute prisoners—including the U.S.—it is illegal to execute a pregnant person. In English common law, women have been permitted to “plead the belly” in one form or another since the 14^th century, and this fact is sometimes misconstrued by anti-choice and forced-birth advocates as evidence of a long legal tradition of protection for the lives of fetuses. In fact, it is merely evidence of a long history of legal inconsistencies in the ways laws were applied and sentences carried out against women, for whom there were fewer options for clemency than for men. This …

Auc Community Only Lecture: Gender-Based Violence (Gbv), Women & The Law In Egypt, The Prince Alwaleed Center For American Studies And Research Casar

Performances, Events, and Presentations

This special guest lecture was part of the course “Exploring Feminist Perspectives in Egypt and the US” taught by CASAR Adjunct Faculty Yasmeen El-Ghazaly. The lecture was given in Arabic by Counselor Mohamed Samir, who is a senior member of the judicial authority in Egypt, responsible for the accountability of civil servants’ crimes and misconduct. He is also a lecturer in Political Science and Gender Based Violence Crimes. Samir has over 25 years of experience in his career, and was invited to discuss “challenges and legal obstacles women face when discussing gender based violence in Egypt.” In his insightful lecture, …

Same-Sex Marriage Judgment Asks Queer Citizens To Wait For True Equality At A Future Time That May Never Arrive, Kunal Ambasta

Popular Media

Excerpt:

"For about the last 15 years, the queer rights movement has enriched the constitutional law of this country. Some of the most cherished constitutional values and rights have been fleshed out with the movement as its springboards at the Supreme Court.... The Court fully acknowledges, in abstract, the rights of queer couples to equal treatment before the law, dignity, and of the numerous tangible and intangible benefits of the institution of marriage, but refuses to ensure any of these rights to a clear case of legal discrimination or to craft a suitable remedy."

La Significancia De La Instalación De Oficinas De Género Para Estudiantes Universitarias Lgbtq+ En Chile, Lori Hashasian

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This investigation explores the significance that offices of gender have for queer university students in Chile. It is based on the historical Mayo Feminista protests and the resulting passage of Ley 21.369, which aims to regulate sexual assault, gender violence, and gender discrimination in higher education. This law mandates Chilean universities to have offices of gender specifically dedicated to meeting these goals. This study draws on interviews to learn from the lived experiences of queer university students and directors of the offices of gender. It concentrates on two universities in Valparaíso, Chile: la Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María and la …

Politics Of Refusal: Justice And Liberation For Black Trans Lives, Quincy Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis investigates the challenges faced by Black trans people. In this thesis, I will explore how protest is used to highlight and confront the obstacles faced by the Black trans community. I will also examine the cultural work of Black trans people and what they teach us. The Brooklyn Liberation march and the TV show Pose is an important part of Black trans legacy. They both look at the complications surrounding Black trans lives and contributes to Black trans representation in protesting and fighting marginalization. This thesis will argue the importance of allyship to create safe space for Black …

Queer Crises: Movements From Queerness And Feelings Of White Religion In The United States, Austin Williams Miller

Communication ETDs

Anchored by contemporary crises surrounding queer and trans people in the United States, I employ movements from queerness within an affective queer phenomenological framework to understand how arrangements of “white religion” (Schaefer, 2015, p. 63), a process whereby U.S. American Christian forms escape ideology into religious affective economies in the United States, relegate queer people “to the background… to sustain a certain direction” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 31). I assemble a queer rhetorical context analyzing white religious space in documentary film, secular sexual regulation through contemporary U.S. legal contexts around marriage, and settler colonial Christian nationalist political imaginations to critique how …

Book Review: A Women’S Place: U.S. Counterterrorism Since 9/11, Tahmina Sobat

Feminist Pedagogy

Cook, J. in her book named "A women’s place: U.S. Counterterrorism since 9/11" identifies shortcomings in the accessibility of gendered security studies and tries to bridge the gap between the academic world and government actions regarding security and its relation to women's position. Accordingly, Cook provides a framework to organize and assess how women can be brought into all security aspects, particularly countering terrorism (p. 2). This review will highlight different aspects of the above-mentioned agencies' work concerning women, and I will mostly reference examples of Afghanistan from the book.

Asking For It: Gendered Dimensions Of Surveillance Capitalism, Jessica Rizzo

Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis

Advertising and privacy were once seen as mutually antagonistic. In the 1950s and 1960s, Americans went to court to fight for their right to be free from the invasion of privacy presented by unwanted advertising, but a strange realignment took place in the 1970s. Radical feminists were among those who were extremely concerned about the collection and computerization of personal data—they worried about private enterprise getting a hold of that data and using it to target women—but liberal feminists went in a different direction, making friends with advertising because they saw it as strategically valuable.

Liberal feminists argued that in …

Patriarchal Violence, Rona Kaufman

Buffalo Law Review

For over a century, feminist theorists and activists have sought equality for women. They have aimed their efforts at the many distinct and related causes of women’s inequality, among them gendered violence, sexual violence, domestic violence, and violence against women. Recognizing the need to understand problems in order to solve them, feminist theorists have devoted decades to conceptualizing various manifestations of such violence, ranging from private acts, such as sexual assault and intimate partner abuse, to public acts, such as the incarceration of mothers and the criminalization of pregnancy. In this article, I argue in favor of conceptualizing the many …

2023 Ruth Bader Ginsburg Essay/Art Contest, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Why Are We Not Worth Saving? Latin American Immigrant Women's Experiences With Post-9/11 Crimmigration Policies And Asylum-Seeking In The United States, Kaye Romans

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis discusses Crimmigration—the convergence of criminal policies and immigration law—in a post-9/11 world as it relates to Latin American Immigrant women seeking asylum in the United States. Utilizing case law, legislation, and legal scholarship, I situate these policies in the broader context of immigration law both nationally and internationally, focusing on key post-9/11 legislation and policies such as Operation Streamline, Operation Liberty Shield, and Title 42, as well as key post-9/11 case law dealing with Latin American women seeking asylum in the United States. With these foundational understandings, I provide possible solutions that would lessen the harms presented to …

¿Por Qué No Vale La Pena Salvarnos? Experiencias De Mujeres Inmigrantes Latinoamericanas Con Políticas De Inmigración Post-9/11 Y Solicitantes De Asilo En Los Estados Unidos, Kaye Romans

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Esta tesis aborda la Crimmigration—la convergencia de las políticas criminales y la ley de inmigración—en un mundo post-9/11 en lo que se refiere a las mujeres inmigrantes latinoamericanas que buscan asilo en los Estados Unidos. Utilizando la jurisprudencia, la legislación y la erudición legal, sitúo estas políticas en el contexto más amplio de la ley de inmigración tanto a nivel nacional como internacional, centrándome en la legislación y políticas claves posteriores al 9/11 tales como la Operation Streamline, la Operation Liberty Shield y el Title 42, así como la jurisprudencia clave posterior al 9/11 que trata con las mujeres latinoamericanas …

Supreme Court Interruptions And Interventions: The Changing Role Of The Chief Justice, Tonja Jacobi, Matthew Sag

Faculty Articles

Interruptions at Supreme Court oral argument have received much attention in recent years, particularly the disproportionate number of interruptions directed at the female Justices. The Supreme Court changed the structure of oral argument to try to address this problem. This Article assesses whether the frequency and gender disparity of interruptions of Justices improved in recent years, and whether the structural change in argument helped. It shows that interruptions decreased during the pandemic but then resurged to near-record highs, as has the gender disparity in Justice-to-Justice interruptions. However, although the rate of advocate interruptions of Justices also remains historically high, for …

A Theory Of (In)Justice: The Failure Of Tort Law To Secure Equal Respect For Women And A Feminist Contractarian Framework For Reform, Eva Augst

CMC Senior Theses

Traditional approaches to philosophical theories of tort law have systematically undermined the individual worth and security interests of women. However, torts also provide a particularly powerful avenue for reform, in that they embody the public power of private law and offer individuals the opportunity to seek recourse and accountability for wrongs. In this paper, I offer a framework for such reformist approaches to tort philosophy, predominantly inspired by Jean Hampton’s “Feminist Contractarianism,” which requires that women be recognized as individuals with intrinsic worth who are deserving of respect. To accomplish this, I first note the particular relevance of social contract …

How Survivors Of Domestic Violence Seek Legal And Social Support Against Their Abusers In Ahmednagar District Of Maharashtra State In India: An Exploratory Study, Jonathan Israel

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This exploratory study sought to gather detailed information about women’s experiences surviving and rehabilitating from domestic violence. This information was used to identify factors that encourage survivors to stay in their relationships and factors that enable them to seek legal and social support against their abusive partners. Qualitative data was gathered through a series of in-depth interviews and panel discussions with survivors of domestic violence in Ahmednagar, Maharashtra (India). This data was analyzed with guidance from Indian feminist theory, local professionals, and contributing research mentors. Further examination of national survey data, past research on domestic violence in Indian contexts, and …

Decolonizing The Corpus: A Queer Decolonial Re-Examination Of Gender In International Law's Origins, David Eichert

Michigan Journal of International Law

This article builds upon queer feminist and decolonial/TWAIL interventions into the history of international law, questioning the dominant discourses about gender and sexual victimhood in the laws of armed conflict. In Part One, I examine how early European international law writers (re)produced binary and hierarchical ideas about gender in influential legal texts, discursively creating a world in which wartime violence only featured men and women in strictly defined roles (a construction which continues to influence the practice of law today). In Part Two, I decenter these dominant discourses by looking outside Europe, questioning what a truly “international” law would look …

_Not That Bad_: Lessons Women Learn In A Rape Culture, Sydney J. Selman

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

In 2018, Roxane Gay assembled an anthology that addresses the severity of rape, rejecting the common belief that some sexually violent acts, compared to others, are not that bad. This collection, titled Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, compiles pieces from thirty different authors and sheds light on how the notion of not that bad contributes to a broader structural social problem involving sexual violence. This social problem, known as rape culture, is commonly defined as a culture that normalizes sexual violence and blames victims of sexual assault (“What is Rape Culture?”). In other words, rape culture …

Sexual Profiling & Blaqueer Furtivity: Blaqueers On The Run, T. Anansi Wilson

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

This article has taken some time to recollect. I have been struggling to find the grammar to communicate a phenomenon that is both central to BlaQueer life and beyond BlaQueer living. This difficulty, the silences, the gaps, the nonsensical and agrammatical nature of this phenomena—that of BlaQueer furtivity, the strict scrutiny of Black life and sexual profiling—are central features not only of this project but of the legal, extralegal and social logics and powers that mark, make and remake BlaQueer folks as always, already furtive, subject to strict scrutiny and necessarily sexual profiling. I have been struggling with whether to …

A “Hired Girl” Testifies Against The “Son Of A Prominent Family”: Bastardy And Rape On The Nineteenth-Century Nebraska Plains, Donna Rae Devlin

Department of History: Faculty Publications

In Red Cloud, Nebraska, in 1887, Anna “Annie” Sadilek (later Pavelka) pressed bastardy charges against the “son of a prominent family,” even though she could have, according to her pretrial testimony, pressed charges for rape. To the literary world, Sadilek is better known as Ántonia Shimerda, the powerful protagonist in Willa Cather’s 1918 novel, My Ántonia. However, it is Sadilek’s real-life experience that allows us to better understand life on the Nebraska Plains, specifically through an examination of the state’s rape laws and the ways these laws were subsequently interpreted by the courts. The Nebraska Supreme Court, between 1877 …

The Current Status Of Women In Morocco And How It Can Be Improved, Amanda Maia

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

My paper will explore the conditions of gender minorities in Morocco through representation, NGOs, social structures, and resources therein to support the progress of acquiring more rights for these demographics. With an emphasis on the status of women in Morocco. My main questions as it stands are: What are the living conditions for women in Morocco and how can they be improved? What progress has been and still can be made to improve the quality of life and foster joy for these demographics in Morocco? Since the 1990s, there has been significant progress in Morocco to improve Family Law and …