Law and Gender Commons^™

Coverage Of Reproductive Technologies Under Employer-Sponsored Health Care Plans, Elizabeth Pendo

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The federal courts have issued two important decisions regarding non-discriminatory insurance coverage of conditions and treatments associated with sex, disability or both, such as prescription contraception and infertility treatment. Cases like Erickson and Saks are important because, as ERISA scholars know, state law mandates regarding coverage are unlikely to lead to uniform results due to the structure of ERISA's preemption provisions, and none of the federal proposals addressing infertility treatment or prescription contraception have been enacted to date.

What I would like to do is outline the impact of ERISA in this area, and offer some thoughts on one of …

Capitalism And Freedom -- For Whom? Feminist Legal Theory And Progressive Corporate Law,, Kellye Y. Testy

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Beginning at least in the 1980s, the version of corporate law and governance prevailing in the U.S. (as well as widely exported to other nations) was a radically privatized one, treating the corporation as a contractual arrangement for maximizing shortterm share price in a laissez faire global marketplace. Though many robust and varied social movements, many of which were bolstered by the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, have been and are engaged in challenging this hegemony from many angles, few have found their way into corporate law reform. That is not to say, however, that there are no progressive legal …

Consent Engendered: A Feminist Critique Of Consensual Fourth Amendment Searches, Dana Raigrodski

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As I will argue, the Court's consent-to-search cases are driven by this patriarchal ideology to maintain social structures of power disparities and to perpetuate the subordination of women, minorities, and other disempowered members of society.

We need to acknowledge the power and submission paradigm that underlies police-citizen encounters and to scrutinize the entire notion of consent. In order to confront both power and consent, I will turn to feminist critique of consent, particularly in the area of rape, and to feminist writings about choice and agency. Based on these writings I will argue that by distinguishing coerced consent to a …

The Politics Of Infertility: Recognizing Coverage Exclusions As Discrimination, Elizabeth Pendo

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Infertility affects approximately ten percent of the reproductive-age population in the United States, and strikes people of every race, ethnicity and socio-economic level. It is recognized by the medical community as a disease, one with devastating physical, psychological, and financial effects. Nonetheless, comprehensive coverage of infertility treatments under employer-sponsored plans - where, like Jane, most Americans get health insurance - appears to be the exception rather than the rule. Can Jane sue for disability discrimination, sex discrimination, or both? While the answer - "it depends" - should not be surprising to anyone who has survived even a semester of law …

Gender, Human Rights, And Peace Agreements, Christine M. Chinkin

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I would first like to thank the organizers for the very great honor of being asked to present the annual Schwartz Lecture in 2002. It is especially apposite to discuss issues of international peace agreements in Ohio, not far from Dayton which is famous as the location of the process that brought an end to the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. However this lecture is going to examine issues that were not explored at Dayton, that is, some relationships between gender, peace agreements, and international human rights. In addition, because the function of peace agreements in today's world has become the broader …

Silence Compounded - The Conjunction Of Race And Gender Violence, Zanita E. Fenton

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No abstract provided.

Addressing Domestic Violence Through A Strategy Of Economic Rights, Donna Coker

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No abstract provided.

Reply To Martha Nussbaum And Ian Hacking, Edward D. Stein

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The essays by Martha Nussbaum and Ian Hacking both raise important issues about the some of the central themes of The Mismeasure of Desire and it is a pleasure and an honor to have such careful, significant and interdisciplinary thinkers engage my ideas. In this brief reply, I address some of their challenges.

The Beginning Of Herstory For Corporate Law, Kellye Y. Testy

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In The Gender Implications of Corporate Governance Change, Janis Sarra presents what has until now seemed oxymoronic to many: a feminist economic analysis of corporate governance in the global marketplace. In so doing, she joins a growing chorus of corporate governance scholars who are seeking to advance an alternative vision to the neoclassical, shareholder-centered model that is not only dominant in the United States, but is also widely exported-even to nations that do not share similar institutional configurations that support such a model. This diverse group of scholars--whose approaches have been labeled variously as "progressive," "communitarian," and "socio-economic,"--do not …

Sex, Gender, And September 11, Hilary Charlesworth, Christine M. Chinkin

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The October 2001 issue of the American Journal of International Law contained several editorials on the international law implications of the hijackings of September 11, 2001, and their aftermath. In one respect these editorials resemble other writings on these events in academic and popular media: questions of sex and gender are largely overlooked.' In our view, however, concepts of sex and gender provide a valuable perspective on these devastating actions.' We use the term "sex" here to refer to issues about women as distinct biological beings from men, and the term "gender" to encompass social understandings of femininity and masculinity. …

Looking Back On Planned Parenthood V. Casey, Christina B. Whitman

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Scholarship that tells us what is really at stake in the lives of people affected makes the law honest and responsive. Whether or not it directly shapes doctrine, this type of scholarship can capture imagination and influence judgment. The Michigan Law Review has published some of the best of this work: Yale Kamisar's articles on coerced confessions, Terry Sandalow's essay on affirmative action, Joe Sax and Phillip Hiestand's description of the emotional impact of living in a slum, Martha Chamallas and Linda Kerber's demonstration of how injuries that uniquely befall women have been dismissed as merely emotional wrongs, and, most …

The Customer Is Always Right . . . Not!: Employer Liability For Third Party Sexual Harassment, Lea B. Vaughn

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This article will ask a series of questions. What is third party sexual harassment? Under what conditions does it occur? Does it differ in any significant respects from traditional notions of sexual harassment? Should those differences, if any, make a difference in the way that the legal system addresses third party harassment? And indeed, should the problem be addressed solely through the legal system? What might an employer do to alleviate sexual harassment of this type?

The thesis of this article is that third party sexual harassment is a prevalent form of harassment that the legal system does not currently …

Evaluating The Sex Discrimination Argument For Lesbian And Gay Rights, Edward D. Stein

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The sex discrimination argument for lesbian and gay rights analyzes laws that discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation in terms of sex discrimination. For example, sodomy laws that prohibit only same-sex sexual activities are analyzed as discriminating on the basis of sex because they prohibit women from doing something men are permitted to do, that is, have sex with women. This argument has been championed by some scholars and litigators, and it has persuaded some judges. Edward Stein shows that there are sociological, theoretical, moral, and practical problems facing the sex discrimination argument. He suggests that there are better …

Foreword: Politics, Pragmatism And The Courts, Anthony E. Varona

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Vision And Reality: Democracy And Citizenship Of Women In The Dayton Peace Accords, Christine M. Chinkin, Kate Paradine

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This Article examines the gendered meanings of the concepts of democracy, citizenship, and human rights in the context of the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina (GFA), negotiated in Dayton, Ohio, in 1995. The Article is predicated upon the idea that a feminist theory and politics of citizenship and democracy "must embrace an internationalist agenda" and that in turn, for effectiveness and legitimacy, the internationalist agenda must embrace feminist thinking. This Article further argues that the GFA provided an opportunity for the renegotiation of a contested space where democratic concepts of access and participation and citizenship issues …

The Law Of White Spaces: Race, Culture, And Legal Education, Peter Goodrich, Linda G. Mills

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The scene, drawn from memory, is a first-year law school classroom. It is the early 1980s and the class is on civil procedure. The teacher is a white woman. She is nervous, and the class is dominated by students who provide standard right answers to formulaic law school questions. Other points of view, particularly those of a critical or feminist nature, are either passed over quickly or ignored. Questions of color are never mentioned. More than that, the teacher never calls on any African-American students. Students of color are either ignored completely or told, when they have questions, “We are …

Gender Matters: Teaching A Reasonable Woman Standard In Personal Injury Law, Margo Schlanger

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Reasonable care is, of course, a concept central to any torts class. But what is it? One very standard doctrinal move is to conceptualize reasonable care as that care shown by a "reasonable person" under like circumstances. The next step, logically, is to visualize this reasonable person. Visualization requires some important choices. For example, is the reasonable person old or young? Disabled or not? These are two questions that all the casebooks I have consulted discuss. But, oddly, no casebook of which I am aware deals with the trait that nearly invariably figures in our description of people: sex. If …

For Terry Sandalow - Challenger And Creator, Christina B. Whitman

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In the popular imagination, legal education is the experience of sitting in a classroom and being pushed to think deeply by a brilliant and demanding teacher. Some law schools are lucky enough to have a faculty member who actually fulfills this expectation - one professor in particular whose courses are the testing ground for the very best and most engaged students. When I was a student at Michigan in the 1970s, and until his retirement last year at the end of the century, that teacher was Terry Sandalow. For many Michigan graduates, taking Federal Courts or Fourteenth Amendment from Professor …

Anchoring Justice: The Constitutionality Of The Local Law Enforcement Act In United States V. Morrison'S Shifting Seas, Anthony E. Varona, Kevin Layton

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Crime Control And Feminist Law Reform In Domestic Violence Law: A Critical Review, Donna Coker

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The Intervention Of American Law In Jewish Divorce: A Pluralist Analysis, Suzanne Last Stone

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The article examines the tension between gender equality and religious freedom through the lens of the *agunah* problem in Jewish law, where women are unable to remarry due to their husbands' refusal to grant a Jewish divorce (*get*). It critiques civil remedies aimed at addressing this issue, such as the Get Law, and evaluates their constitutional implications under the religion clauses. The analysis uses pluralist theories to assess how the liberal state should respond to conflicts between universal rights and group-specific legal practices, arguing that current approaches often undermine cultural diversity and individual rights within religious groups.

Brief Reflections On The Enterprise, Patricia D. White

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In Memoriam Rafael C. Benitez, Keith S. Rosenn

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Civilizing The Natives: Marriage In Post-Apartheid South Africa, David L. Chambers

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South Africa is a land of many cultures. For several hundred years, British and Afrikaaner whites controlled the country, systematically manipulating black people to the whites' advantage. For the most part, however, whites tolerated the continuation within black communities of traditional marriage practices that white Christians considered uncivilized. In 1994, South Africa changed governments. A black majority Parliament came to power, adopting a consitution dedicated to equality and human dignity. Four years later, Parliament adopted a new marriage law that, though permitting some of the external trappings of the traditional marriage system to continue, eliminated by law much of the …

The Enlightenment Case For Vouchers, John O. Mcginnis

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Private Remedies For Public Wrongs Under Section 5 (Symposium: New Directions In Federalism), Evan H. Caminker

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The Supreme Court has ushered in the new millennium with a renewed emphasis on federalism-based limits to Congress's regulatory authority in general, and Congress's Section 5 power to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment in particular. In a recent string of cases, the Court has refined and narrowed Section 5's enforcement power in two significant ways.1 First, the Court made clear that Congress lacks the authority to interpret the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment's substantive provisions themselves, and may only "enforce" the judiciary's definition of Fourteenth Amendment violations. 2 Second, the Court embraced a relatively stringent requirement concerning the relationship between means …

Some Of Them Still Don't Get It: Hostile Work Environment Litigation In The Lower Courts, Eric Schnapper

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This Article describes how the courts of appeals have decided sexual harassment cases in the five years since Harris v. Forklift Systems, Inc., 510 US 17 (1993). In some circuits, events have unfolded largely as Justice Scalia anticipated: the trier of fact—ordinarily a jury—applies the hostile work environment standard announced in Meritor and elaborated upon in Harris.

Three's A Crowd: A Feminist Critique Of Calabresi And Melamed's One View Of The Cathedral, Jeanne L. Schroeder

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The article critiques Calabresi and Melamed's trichotomy of property rights, arguing that it oversimplifies property as a binary relationship between subject and object, neglecting the complexities of enjoyment and third-party interests. By employing a feminist and Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective, the analysis highlights how this framework fails to address the dynamic, relational, and intersubjective nature of property, particularly in environmental disputes. The author advocates for a more inclusive understanding of property that incorporates both masculine and feminine metaphors, emphasizing the need to move beyond possession and exchange to recognize the mutual constitution of entitlements and law.

Title Vii And Homosexual Harassment After Oncale: Was It A Victory?, Mary I. Coombs

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No abstract provided.

Enhancing Autonomy For Battered Women: Lessons From Navajo Peacemaking, Donna Coker

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In this Article, Professor Donna Coker employs original empirical research to investigate the use of Navajo Peacemaking in cases involving domestic violence. Her analysis includes an examination of Navajo women's status and the impact of internal colonization. Many advocates for battered women worry that informal adjudication methods such as Peacemaking ignore domestic hierarchies of power and thus facilitate the batterer's ongoing violence against the victim. Those who endorse the use of Navajo Peacemaking and other systems of restorative justice believe that such processes are better equipped to cut through the batterer's denial and victim blaming and are more likely to …