Law and Gender Commons^™

Can A 'Dumb Ass Woman' Achieve Equality In The Workplace? Running The Gauntlet Of Hostile Environment Harassing Speech, Deborah Epstein

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Sandra Bundy may have guessed that her new job with the District of Columbia Department of Corrections would be a challenge. What she may not have expected was that she would have to meet the challenge under very different conditions than those faced by her male coworkers. Ms. Bundy's work was continually interrupted by one of her supervisors, who kept calling her into his office and forcing her to listen to his theories about how women ride horses to obtain sexual gratification. He repeatedly asked Ms. Bundy to come home with him in order to view his collection of pictures …

Fighting Domestic Violence In The Nation’S Capital, Deborah Epstein

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Every year, in the District of Columbia alone, the Metropolitan Police Department receives more than 18,000 calls for help from victims of domestic violence, and more than 2,500 battered women bring legal actions requesting protection from their abusers. Thousands of other cases go unreported, either because the victims are too afraid of their batterers to report the violence, or because they do not know how to obtain relief to which they are entitled.

Sex, Reason, And A Taste For The Absurd, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Like much of Richard Posner's best work, Sex and Reason does many things, and for that reason will no doubt attract a large and diverse readership. This heavily footnoted, exhaustively researched, and imminently accessible book is a welcome introduction to the interdisciplinary study of sex. For the lay reader it presents an arresting set of speculations about human sexuality, drawn from the author's evident familiarity with a sizeable library of studies representing at least half a dozen scientific and social scientific disciplines, assembled in a readable and lively way. Of more interest, perhaps, to academicians and social scientists familiar with …

Legitimating The Illegitimate: A Comment On 'Beyond Rape', Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Professor Dripps's provocative proposal, as I understand it, is that we think of sex as a commodity and rape as the theft of that commodity. Understood as such, the theft of sex accomplished through violence or the threat of violence is a twofold wrong: it violates our "negative" right to refuse to have sex with anyone for any or no reason, and violence or the threat of violence infringes our right to personal, physical security. Therefore, the violent expropriation of sex should be punished as a major felony, as is violent rape, at least in theory.
  
Furthermore, according to Dripps, …

The "Gag Rule" Revisited: Physicians As Abortion Gatekeepers, Maxwell Gregg Bloche

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

To the surprise of many and the dismay of some, the U.S. Supreme Court took it upon itself last term to proclaim a national compromise on the question of abortion. The Court's announced truce, an elaboration on Justice O'Connor's "undue burden" idea, is pragmatic in design but unlikely to prove stable in practice. The three justices who spoke for the Court disparaged Roe with reluctant praise, then upheld its outer shell on the ground that social expectations and the need to sustain the appearance of the rule of law made it impolitic to do otherwise. This awkward doctrinal invention seems …

Reconstructing Liberty, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

It is commonly and rightly understood in this country that our constitutional system ensures, or seeks to ensure, that individuals are accorded the greatest degree of personal, political, social, and economic liberty possible, consistent with a like amount of liberty given to others, the duty and right of the community to establish the conditions for a moral and secure collective life, and the responsibility of the state to provide for the common defense of the community against outside aggression. Our distinctive cultural and constitutional commitment to individual liberty places very real restraints on what our elected representatives can do, even …

Equality Theory, Marital Rape, And The Promise Of The Fourteenth Amendment, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

During the 1980s a handful of state judges either held or opined in dicta what must be incontrovertible to the feminist community, as well as to most progressive legal advocates and academics: the so-called marital rape exemption, whether statutory or common law in origin, constitutes a denial of a married woman's constitutional right to equal protection under the law. Indeed, a more obvious denial of equal protection is difficult to imagine: the marital rape exemption denies married women protection against violent crime solely on the basis of gender and marital status. What possibly could be less rational than a statute …

Economic Man And Literary Woman: One Contrast, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The law and literature movement has been with us long enough that it is now possible to speak seriously of a "literary analysis of law," just as it has become possible, and even standard, to speak of an "economic analysis of law." It is also standard, of course, to speak of that abstract character who has emerged from the economic analysis of law: "economic man." In these brief comments, I want to offer one contrast of the "economic man" that emerges from economic legal analysis with the "literary person" that is beginning to emerge from literary legal analysis. I will …

Jurisprudence And Gender, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

What is a human being? Legal theorists must, perforce, answer this question: jurisprudence, after all, is about human beings. The task has not proven to be divisive. In fact, virtually all modern American legal theorists, like most modern moral and political philosophers, either explicitly or implicitly embrace what I will call the "separation thesis" about what it means to be a human being: a "human being," whatever else he is, is physically separate from all other human beings. I am one human being and you are another, and that distinction between you and me is central to the meaning of …

A Civil Liberties Analysis Of Surrogacy Arrangements, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this essay the author comes to the following conclusions based upon a civil liberties analysis. First, surrogacy arrangements cannot be prohibited or criminalized. Second, the state cannot ban the exchange of money for surrogacy services, provided the money is paid for conception, gestation, and birth. Money, however, cannot be paid on condition that the gestational mother waive her parental rights over the child. Third, contractual provisions that require the gestational mother to waive her parental rights or her rights to privacy and autonomy are void and unenforceable. Fourth, when the child is born, both the gestational mother and the …

Differentiating Sex From Sex: The Male Irresistible Impulse, Jane H. Aiken

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The courts have not wholeheartedly embraced the idea of equality of the sexes, and therefore do not attack sex discrimination with the same vigor as they attack racism. Rather, the courts are equivocal about sexual equality and weigh equality less carefully for sex than for race. Color is thought an arbitrary distinction; gender, however, is assumed to be something of substance.

When courts sustain sex discrimination, they generally do not characterize it as such. Rather, differences between the sexes, both real and imagined, are used to justify the gender distinction. It is easy to be hypnotized by the purported differences …

Child Support Law And Policy: The Systematic Imposition Of Costs On Women, Nan D. Hunter

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

From 1970 to 1981, the number of divorces in the United States more than doubled, and the number of children living with one parent increased by fifty-four percent, to a total of 12.6 million children, or one child in five. The great majority of these children have a living noncustodial parent from whom they are entitled to receive support payrents. Thus, approximately twenty percent of the nation's children are involved- at least potentially-in the child support system. Yet, despite its growing reach, the child support system remains in many ways primitive and inchoate. Award amounts are inadequate to pay for …