Law and Gender Commons^™

An Incomplete Revolution: Reexaming The Law, History, And Politics Of Marital Property, Mary Ziegler

Scholarly Publications

Did the divorce revolution betray the interests of American women? While there has been considerable disagreement about the impact of divorce reform on women’s standard of living, many agree that judicial practices involving the division of marital property and the allocation of alimony have systematically disadvantaged women. Most often, in the courts and the academy, commentators see these practices as evidence of the need for family law reform.

These conclusions rely on a shared account of the history of divorce reform. According to this account, the transformation of divorce law in the 1970s and 1980s was a “silent revolution,” a …

Save Our Children: Overcoming The Narrative That Gays And Lesbians Are Harmful To Children, 21 Duke J. Gender L. & Pol'y 125 (2013), Anthony Niedwiecki

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

This paper focuses on how gay rights activists had no real choice but to use the court system to advance marriage rights for same-sex couples because they were unable to use the political process to effectively rebut the claim that gays and lesbians were harmful to children. Part I begins with an overview of the ways in which the initiative process has been used to limit gay rights and prevent marriage equality. It then details how, in contrast to the political process, courts have been more receptive to advancing marriage rights for same-sex couples. Part II details Walter Fisher's narrative …

A Bibliography Of Title Ix Of The Education Amendments Of 1972, Christine Iaconeta Dulac

Faculty Publications

It has been thirty-five years since the passage of Title IX of the Education Amendment of 1972. Title IX provides that no person shall be excluded from participation in any educational program or activity that receives federal funding. This legislation is credited with bolstering the participation rates of girls and women in athletics. Although athletics are not explicitly addressed in the statutory language, Title IX requires schools to offer male and female students equal opportunities to play sports, to give male and female athletes their fair share of athletic scholarship money, and to treat male and female athletes equally in …

The Exit Myth: Family Law, Gender Roles, And Changing Attitudes Toward Female Victims Of Domestic Violence, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Publications

This Article presents a hypothesis suggesting how and why the criminal justice response to domestic violence changed, over the course of the twentieth century, from sympathy for abused women and a surprising degree of state intervention in intimate relationships to the apathy and discrimination that the battered women' movement exposed. The riddle of declining public sympathy for female victims of intimate-partner violence can only be solved by looking beyond the criminal law to the social and legal changes that created the Exit Myth.

While the situation that gave rise to the battered women's movement in the 1970s is often presumed …

International Law Weekend, American Branch Of The International Law Association Perspectives On Crimes Of Sexual Violence In International Law, Susana Sacouto

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Creditors And The Feme Covert, James Oldham

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

As is well-known, the Court of King’s Bench in Marshall v. Rutton (1800), under Chief Justice Lloyd Kenyon, overruled earlier King’s Bench decisions by Lord Mansfield that had allowed creditors to prevail in suits against married women in an expanding set of factual circumstances. As Kenyon confessed in Marshall, he had never been satisfied with the Mansfield decisions, and had wished that a case “should come to take away all the difficulties.” The Marshall case fulfilled his wish. Kenyon, however, was not the powerful leader of King’s Bench that Mansfield had been, and but for fortuities of judicial turnover, …

Images Of Men In Feminist Legal Theory , Brian Bendig

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Finding Women In Early Modern English Courts: Evidence From Peter King's Manuscript Reports, Lloyd Bonfield

Chicago-Kent Law Review

This article constitutes a preliminary report on cases involving women that appear in a manuscript authored by Chief Justice Peter King during the first seven years of his tenure as Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas in early eighteenth century England. While the 327 cases he reported in the manuscript run the gamut of the procedural and substantive matters that vexed early modem Englishmen, the cases isolated and discussed hereinafter are the fifty-five cases in which women were a party to the litigation observed. By so doing, isolating cases in which women appeared as litigants, we may catalog …

Law, Land, Identity: The Case Of Lady Anne Clifford, Carla Spivack

Chicago-Kent Law Review

This article presents the case history of Lady Anne Clifford, a seventeenth century Englishwoman who spent most of her adult life fighting to regain her ancestral estates, which she felt her father had unjustly left to her uncle instead of to her. Although, as the article explains, she had the better of the legal argument, that was no match for the combined forces of her two husbands and of King James I, who sought to deprive her of her land. Finally, however, because Clifford outlived her uncle's son, the last male heir, she did inherit the estates.

The article examines …

Globalization And The Re-Establishment Of Women's Land Rights In Nigeria: The Role Of Legal History, Adetoun Ilumoka

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Much has been written on women's limited legal rights to land in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa, which is often attributed to custom and customary law. Persisting biases against women in legal regimes governing land ownership, allocation and use, result in a situation in which women, in all age groups, are vulnerable to dispossession and to abuse by male relatives in increasingly patriarchal family and community governance structures.

This paper raises questions about the genesis of ideas about women's rights to land in Nigeria today. It is an analysis of two court cases from South Western Nigeria in the early …

Puerto Rican Women Nationalist Vs. U.S. Colonialism: An Exploration Of Their Conditions And Struggles In Jail And Court, Margaret Pour

Chicago-Kent Law Review

This article examines the legal ramifications experienced by several women members of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party as a result of their militant opposition to U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico. These women participated in the 1950 uprising in Puerto Rico or, in the case of Lolita Lebrón, the Nationalist Party's 1954 attack on the U.S. Congress. The article explores their sentences and conditions in prison from a gendered perspective. It also suggests that several of the women were tortured while in prison. The article concludes that the women drew strength from their political commitment to Puerto Rican independence and their …

Engendering The History Of Race And International Relations: The Career Of Edith Sampson, 1927–1978, Gwen Jordan

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Edith Sampson was one of the leading black women lawyers in Chicago for over fifty years. She was admitted to the bar in 1927 and achieved a number of firsts in her career: the first black woman judge in Illinois, the first African American delegate to the United Nations, and the first African American appointed to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Sampson was also a pro-democracy, international spokesperson for the U.S. government during the Cold War, a position that earned her scorn from more radical African Americans, contributed to a misinterpretation of her activism, and resulted in her relative obscurity …

The Global "Parliament Of Mothers": History, The Revolutionary Tradition, And International Law In The Pre-War Women's Movement, Susan Hinely

Chicago-Kent Law Review

In spite of recent literature that examines late nineteenth and early twentieth century transnational movements in innovative ways, the largest transnational movement of that period, the women's movement, remains lodged in academic and popular memory as the "suffrage movement," a single-issue campaign waged by privileged Victorian women, a foregone development in the march of electoral progress that ended in victory with postwar enfranchisement. A fresh approach to the suffrage archive reveals instead a far more radical movement than conventional history suggests, one that explicitly linked its cause with both the revolutionary democratic tradition and with anti-colonial activism. Like the non-Western …

Women's Rights, Public Defense, And The Chicago World's Fair, Barbara Babcock

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Women were an important part of the great public meetings held in connection with the Chicago World's Fair. One of these "Congresses," as they were called, was devoted to the achievements of nineteenth century women, and brought together suffragists, club women, society ladies, and activists of all stripes from around the world. The Congress of Jurisprudence and Law Reform featured two American women lawyers holding their own on a platform with leading professors, judges and advocates. With an extraordinary speech based largely on her own experience in the courts, Clara Foltz launched the public defender movement.

Women Lawyers And Women's Legal Equality: Reflections On Women Lawyers At The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition In Chicago, Mary Jane Mossman

Chicago-Kent Law Review

In Chicago in 1893, for the first time in history, women lawyers were invited to participate with male lawyers and judges at the Congress on Jurisprudence and Law Reform, one of a number of Congresses organized in conjunction with the World's Columbian Exposition. By the 1890s, women lawyers had achieved considerable success for at least two decades in gaining admission to state bars in the United States, and their success provided important precedents for women who wished to become lawyers in other parts of the world. Yet, as Nancy Cott explained, although women's admission to the professions had been seen …

The Possibility Of Compromise: Antiabortion Moderates After Roe V. Wade, 1973–1980, Mary Ziegler

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Leading studies argue that Roe itself radicalized debate and marginalized antiabortion moderates, either by issuing a sweeping decision before adequate public support had developed or by framing the opinion in terms of moral absolutes. The polarization narrative on which leading studies rely obscures important actors and arguments that defined the antiabortion movement of the 1970s. First, contrary to what the polarization narrative suggests, self-identified moderates played a significant role in the mainstream antiabortion movement, shaping policies on issues like the treatment of unwed mothers or the Equal Rights Amendment. Working in organizations like Feminists for Life (FFL) or American Citizens …

Adultery By Doctor: Artificial Insemination, 1890–1945, Kara W. Swanson

Chicago-Kent Law Review

In 1945, American judges decided the first court cases involving assisted conception. The challenges posed by assisted reproductive technologies to law and society made national news then, and have continued to do so into the twenty-first century. This article considers the first technique of assisted conception, artificial insemination, from the late nineteenth century to 1945, the period in which doctors and their patients worked to transform it from a curiosity into an accepted medical technique, a transformation that also changed a largely clandestine medical practice into one of the most pressing medicolegal problems of the mid-twentieth century. Doctors and lawyers …

Portia's Deal, Karen M. Tani

Chicago-Kent Law Review

The New Deal, one of the greatest expansions of government in U.S. history, was a "lawyers' deal": it relied heavily on lawyers' skills and reflected lawyers' values. Was it exclusively a "male lawyers' deal"? This Essay argues that the New Deal offered important opportunities to women lawyers at a time when they were just beginning to graduate from law school in significant numbers. Agencies associated with social welfare policy, a traditionally "maternalist" enterprise, seem to have been particularly hospitable. Through these agencies, women lawyers helped to administer, interpret, and create the law of a new era. Using government records and …

Women And Poisons In 17th Century France, Benedetta Faedi Duramy

Chicago-Kent Law Review

This article examines the involvement of the Marquise de Brinvilliers, Catherine La Voisin, and the Marquise de Montespan, in the scandal "Affair of the Poisons," during the seventeenth century in France. Through such investigation, this article interrogates the discourse surrounding gender and crime in history, deepening the understanding of women's motivation to commit murder and the strategies they adopted. Moreover, the article examines how the legal system addressed women's crime, differentiated responses based on their class and social rank, and held women accountable for poisoning the country, thus failing to acknowledge the actual shortcomings of the French monarchy, the decline …

Women In Legal Education Section, Elizabeth Defeis

UMKC Law Review

Elizabeth Defeis shares the history and her own experiences with The Women in Legal Education (WLE) Section of the AALS.

A Section Memoir, Patricia Cain

UMKC Law Review

Patricia Cain discusses her experiences as a member and as Chair of the Women in Legel Education Section of the AALS.

1992: A Year Of Women, Bravery, And Growth, Karen Czapanskiy

UMKC Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Gendered Aspects Of Social Justice Work And Occupational Segregation In The Legal Academy: A Review Of 2003, Barbara Cox

UMKC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Reflections From An Era Of Breaking Glass - 1984-1998, Laura Rothstein

UMKC Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Path Of Women In The Legal Academy: Gender, Race, And Culture, Melissa Tatum

UMKC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Introduction: Reflections Of Women In Legal Education: Stories From Four Decades Of Section Chairs, Linda Jellum, Nancy Levit

UMKC Law Review

An introduction is presented in which the editors discuss stories of women legal educators, who have served as Chair of the Association of American Law Schools' (AALS) Women in Legal Education Section in the U.S. and what that service meant to them over the years.

Memory Or Imagination: Reflections On The Section On Women In Legal Education, Joyce E. Mcconnell

UMKC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Regaining Momentum, Pat K. Chew

UMKC Law Review

No abstract provided.

An Unexpected Chair, Elizabeth Nowicki

UMKC Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, Lisa R. Pruitt

UMKC Law Review

No abstract provided.