Law and Gender Commons^™

Banding Together: Reflections On The Role Of The Women's Bar Association Of The District Of Columbia And The Washington College Of Law In Promoting Women's Rights, Jamie Abrams, Daniela Kraiem

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

The Washington College of Law and the Women's Bar Association of the District of Columbia share an important historical connection; Ellen Spencer Mussey and Emma Gillett founded both institutions together, in 1898 and 1917, respectively. Mussey and Gillett were pioneers in legal education, legal reform, and the development of women lawyers. 2 More significant than the work they performed during their lives, however, is the legacy of activism, reform, and support that they ignited by founding two institutions that advance women in the law. These institutions have trained and supported generations of women lawyers through world wars and depressions, through …

The Ironical Exclusion Of Women From Harvard Law School, 1870–1900, Bruce A. Kimball, Brain S. Shull

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Combating Gender Inequities In Law School: Time For A New Feminist Rhetoric That Encourages Practical Change, Caitlin Howell

The Modern American

No abstract provided.

Banding Together: Reflections Of The Role Of The Women's Bar Association Of The District Of Columbia And The Washington College Of Law In Promoting Women's Rights, Jamie R. Abrams, Daniela Kraiem

The Modern American

No abstract provided.

Walking The Path Of The Law: How Law Graduates Navigate Career Choices And Tolerate Jobs That Fail To Meet Expectations, Deborah J. Cantrell, Elizabeth Levy Paluck, Heather Lord, April Smith

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The article presents a longitudinal study of Yale Law School graduates from 1970 to 1999, analyzing their career paths, job satisfaction, and gender differences in professional experiences. It highlights the prevalence of career transitions, with many graduates moving from private practice to academia, government, or public interest roles. The study reveals significant gender disparities in job satisfaction and work-life balance, while challenging common assumptions about legal careers, such as the notion that women abandon private practice more frequently than men. The analysis underscores the importance of understanding career dynamics to improve support systems for law graduates.

Counting Outsiders: A Critical Exploration Of Outsider Course Enrollment In Canadian Legal Education, Kim Brooks, Natasha Bahkt, Gillian Calder, Jennifer Koshan, Sonia Lawrence, Carissima Mathen, Debra L. Parkes

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In response to anecdotal concerns that student enrollment in "outsider" courses, and in particular feminist courses, is on the decline in Canadian law schools, the authors explore patterns of course enrollment at seven Canadian law schools. Articulating a definition of "outsider" that describes those who are members of groups historically lacking power in society, or traditionally outside the realms of fashioning, teaching, and adjudicating the law, the authors document the results of quantitative and qualitative surveys conducted at their respective schools to argue that outsider pedagogy remains a critical component of legal education. The article situates the numerical survey results …

A Complete Property Right Amendment, John H. Ryskamp

ExpressO

The trend of the eminent domain reform and "Kelo plus" initiatives is toward a comprehensive Constitutional property right incorporating the elements of level of review, nature of government action, and extent of compensation. This article contains a draft amendment which reflects these concerns.

Form And Substance: Standards For Promotion And Retention Of Legal Writing Faculty On Clinical Tenure Track, Melissa H. Weresh

ExpressO

This article compares standards for promotion and retention of legal writing faculty on a clinical tenure track. The article provides a brief history of legal writing professionals and examines specific employment criteria such as teaching, service, and scholarship. The article makes recommendations regarding those criteria based upon an assessment of institutional realities and the historical development of the profession.

Imagining The Law-Trained Reader: The Faulty Description Of The Audience In Legal Writing Textbooks., Jessica E. Price

ExpressO

In law schools today, first-year legal writing courses play a crucial role in helping students learn to communicate about the law. Many legal writing teachers approach legal writing education in a practical way, attempting to pass on their own experiences in law practice settings to students. Unfortunately, as other writers have observed, such reliance on personal knowledge about “what lawyers are like” may lead legal writing teachers to oversimplify a complicated matter – the needs and preferences of the audience for legal writing – and may even amount to indoctrination in stereotypes about law practice. This article offers a closer …

Motherhood And The Mission: What Catholic Law Schools Could Learn From Harvard About Women, Elizabeth R. Schiltz

ExpressO

This article argues that Catholic law schools have compelling reasons to pay close attention to a largely ignored part of the controversial speech given last year by the President of Harvard University, Lawrence H. Summers, about the persistent under-representation of women on university faculties. While the press accounts of this talk focused on his speculation that there might be innate differences in aptitudes of men and women in science and math, Summers argued that a more significant cause of the under-representation of women might be the clash between the demands of high-powered jobs and the demands of family life. This …

Paid Family Leave In American Law Schools: Findings And Open Questions, Laura T. Kessler

ExpressO

There exists a substantial literature on the status of women in the legal profession, including studies on women students’ experiences in law schools, gender bias on law school faculties, and family leave policies and practices among legal employers. However, no recent study examines the family leave policies and practices in American law schools. This study seeks to fill that gap. Its findings are threefold. First, almost three quarters of law schools provide wage replacement during a family leave that is more generous than required by federal law. Second, there is a positive relationship between teaching at top-tier and private law …

Reflections On The Law Review Symposium On Women’S Rights And Pornography: Big Sister, Big Brother, And The Role Of Legal Scholarship In Affirming Human Rights, Nadine Strossen

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Working In The Best Interest Of Children: Facilitating The Collaboration Of Lawyers And Social Workers In Abuse And Neglect Cases, Mary Kay Kisthardt

Faculty Works

Working in the best interest of children in abuse and neglect cases is a daunting task for both lawyers and social workers. The legal system is inadequate to meet the myriad needs of children and families in crisis. Yet only under the authority of the legal system can social work and other mental health professions intervene in families on behalf of children. The juvenile court system has been buffeted historically by the competing values and methods of social work and law. The institution and its rules are still evolving today. This dynamic environment means that even if competition for "ownership" …

Race And Gender In The Law Review, Cynthia Grant Bowman

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Man, The State And You: The Role Of The State In Regulating Gender Hierarchies, Meredith Render

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

Feminists, Angels, Poets, And Revolutionaries: What I'Ve Learned From Ruthann Robson And Nicole Brossard On What It Means To Be A Law Teacher, Kim Brooks

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This short piece was written as a tribute to the contributions Ruthann Robson has made to legal pedagogy, and was presented at a Symposium in her honor held at CUNY.

Aals As Creative Problem Solver: Implementing Bylaw 6-4(A) To Prohibit Discrimination On The Basis Of Sexual Orientation In Legal Education, Barbara Cox

Faculty Scholarship

I wrote this article because it is important for the legal education community to understand the important leadership that the AALS has provided in lessening the discrimination that sexual minorities encounter in legal education, and to know of the challenges and problems it encountered in making Bylaw 6-4(a) into more than a membership requirement in name only.

A Conversation Among Deans, Katharine T. Bartlett, Edward Rubin, W. H. Knight

Faculty Scholarship

On March 10, 2006, the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender, Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, and Harvard Law Review co-sponsored a conference, "Results: Legal Education, Institutional Change, and a Decade of Gender Studies," to address the number of student experience studies that detail women's lower performance in and dissatisfaction with law school. Rather than advocate for a particular set of responses to the different experiences of men and women in legal education , this conference sought to foster a discussion about the institutional challenges these patterns highlight. As a means of accomplishing this end, law school deans from …

What The Internet Age Means For Female Scholars, Rosa Brooks

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Is the Internet-driven transformation of legal scholarship good for the girls, or bad for the girls?

Will it remove some of the handicaps that have dogged women's efforts to join the ranks of scholarly "superstars"? Or will it only increase the professional obstacles still faced by women in legal academia? In this short Essay, the author tries to predict some of the promises and perils that the Internet holds for women in the legal academy.

Breaking The Bank: Revisiting Central Bank Of Denver After Enron And Sarbanes-Oxley, Celia Taylor

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

The Wrongful Rejection Of Big Theory (Marxism) By Feminism And Queer Theory: A Brief Debate, Dana Neacsu

ExpressO

Post modern thought has fought meta-narrative into derision. "[I]f you lick my nipple," as Michael Warner remarked, "the world suddenly seems insignificant," and of course, identity becomes more than a cultural trait. It becomes "the performance of desire." It becomes a place of "ideological contestation over need," or, in other words, an ideology that demands "legitimacy for its desire." However, meta-narratives talk about desire too. For example, Marx talked about the desire caused by the never-ending production of commodities. Thus, if, at first sight, it may seem that identity politics and Marxism have very little in common, that may not …

The Shadow Of Professor Kingsfield: Contemporary Dilemmas Facing Women Law Professors, Martha Chamallas

The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law Working Paper Series

This essay discusses the predicament of women law professors in an era when the representation of women on law faculties has reached a “critical mass.” It explores three mechanisms for reproducing gender inequality: (1) self-fulfilling stereotypes, (2) gender-specific comparison groups, and (3) the accumulation of small disadvantages. Chamallas uses stories from her own and colleagues’ experiences to illustrate contemporary forms of bias.

Tragedy Of The Scaffold, Tragedy Of The Trial: Tragedy, Representation Of The Public, Innermost Conviction, And Personal Judgments, Christian Biet

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Symposium: Latinas In Legal Education - Through The Doors Of Opportunity: Assimilation, Marginalization, Cooptation Or Transformation?, Antoinette Sedillo Lopez

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

Costs Of An Outdated Pedagogy? Study On Gender At Harvard Law School, Adam Neufeld

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

Cambridge Law School For Women: The Evolution And Legacy Of The Nation's First Graduate Law School Exclusively For Women, Nina A. Kohn

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Although several scholars have briefly discussed CLSW in conjunction with work on other subjects, this Article presents the first comprehensive history of the school. The Article begins in Section Two by exploring how and why CLSW came into being in 1915 after two young Radcliffe suffragists led an unsuccessful campaign for admission to Harvard Law School. Section Three examines the design, pedagogical foundations, and day-to-day workings of the school during its first two years. Sections Four and Five explore the historical events that led to CLSW's closure in 1917. These sections also document and discuss the school's subsequent, and previously …

An Experiment In Integrating Critical Theory And Clinical Education, Margaret E. Johnson

All Faculty Scholarship

Critical theory is important in live-client clinical teaching as a means to achieve the pedagogical goals of clinical education. Feminist legal theory, critical race theory, and poverty law theory serve as useful frameworks to enable students to deconstruct assumptions they, persons within institutions, and broader society make about the students' clients and their lives. Critical theory highlights the importance of looking for both the "obvious and non-obvious relationships of domination." Thus, critical theory informs students of the presence and importance of alternative voices that challenge the dominant discourse. When student attorneys ignore or are unaware of such voices, other voices …

The Feminist Pervasion: How Gender-Based Scholarship Informs Law And Law Teaching, Deseriee A. Kennedy, Ann Bartow, F. Carolyn Graglia, Joan Macload Hemingway

Scholarly Works

This is an edited, annotated transcript of a conference panel discussion on feminism, sex, and gender in law, legal education, and legal scholarship. The transcript reflects widely divergent views of the place of feminism, sex, and gender in the law and legal scholarship. Moreover, the panelists differ as to the role feminism has played in the lives of women as law students and practicing attorneys. In the latter part of the transcript, the panelists' remarks focus in on hotly debated issues surrounding possible gender (or sex) and racial bias in LSAT testing and the innate abilities of women and men …

Dealing With Hate In The Feminist Classroom, Kathryn M. Stanchi

Scholarly Works

The goals of this essay are two-fold. First, by describing the experience I had in Law and Feminism, the essay will show how hateful and harassing speech in a seminar devoted to issues of gender, race and sexuality can rob students of important educational experiences. The story of my class is meant to remind legal educators and administrators of the concrete harm, both personal and educational, of hate speech. Too often the hate speech debate focuses on the theoretical and the abstract; participants forget that the principles at stake have demonstrable consequences for real people.

Second, while this essay does …

Discrimination In Our Midst: Law School's Potential Liability For Employment Practices, Ann C. Mcginley

Scholarly Works

Studies and articles examining tenured, tenure-track and contract faculty in law schools have exposed the inequalities that women face when compared with their male counterparts. This article asks the legal academic community to consider these conditions in light of established Title VII doctrine which forbids discrimination because of sex. This article offers a hypothetical about the fictitious National Law School, whose labor relationships mimic those of many real law schools in a number of ways. Based on the facts in this hypothetical, the article explores different possible causes of action, either systemic or individual, that employees could reasonably win against …