Law and Gender Commons^™

Turning Labor Into Love: Housework And The Law, Katharine B. Silbaugh

Faculty Scholarship

Women's unpaid domestic labor produces tremendous economic value. In the United States, women spend more of their productive work hours in unpaid labor than in paid labor, and the credible estimates of the economic value of unpaid labor range from the equivalent of 24% to 60% of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product ("GDP"). Given its economic value and its significant role in the working lives of women, it is surprising that the topic of home labor has received no systematic examination by legal scholars. This Article undertakes such an examination. It concludes that a wide range of legal doctrines treat …

Professionalism, Gender And The Public Interest: The Advocacy Of Protection, Minna J. Kotkin

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Feminism And The False Dichotomy Of Victimization And Agency, Elizabeth M. Schneider

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Epilogue: Making Reconceptualization Of Violence Against Women Real, Elizabeth M. Schneider

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Rosalie Wahl: Her Extraordinary Contributions To Legal Education, James F. Hogg

Faculty Scholarship

Justice Rosalie Wahl is well-known as the first woman to be appointed to the Minnesota Supreme Court, but she has made a lesser known, yet critical, contribution to the quality and effectiveness of legal education in this country. As chair of the American Bar Association's Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, Wahl created the MacCrate Commission. The MacCrate Report charts the way for improvement in law school teaching and learning, and the discussion following the report lead to the creation of an ABA Commission to take testimony and review the ABA Accreditation Standards. Wahl also chaired this …

Professional Women And The Professionalization Of Motherhood: Marcia Clark's Double Bind, D. Kelly Weisberg

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Girls And The Getaway: Cars, Culture, And The Predicament Of Gendered Space, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

What does law tell us about our relations to material things? Property theorists maintain that there are no legal relations between persons and things. Things can be owned, transferred, bequeathed, assigned, repossessed, and so on, but such arrangements really describe relationships among different persons with regard to the object rather than relationships between persons and things.

Yet the quality or shape of the legal relations among persons often depends on the cultural meaning of the thing in question, a meaning (or meanings) that exists, in some form anyway, prior to or independent of, legal concepts traditionally attached to things such …

Hearing Women Not Being Heard: On Carol Gilligan's Getting Civilized And The Complexity Of Voice, Elizabeth M. Schneider

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Feminist Lawmaking And Historical Consciousness: Bringing The Past Into The Future, Elizabeth M. Schneider

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Law, Culture, And Harassment, Anita Bernstein

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

"The Woman In The Street:" Reclaiming The Public Space From Sexual Harassment, Deborah Thompson Eisenberg

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Against Marriage, Steven K. Homer

Faculty Scholarship

What is marriage? In the debate surrounding same-sex marriage, the central term has gone undefined. Using the Hawaii Supreme Court's decision in Baehr v. Lewin as a starting point, this Note argues that marriage lacks legal as well as experiential coherence. A series of legal and social moves intended, on the one hand, to preserve the dominance of heterosexuality over gays and lesbians and, on the other, to allow, heterosexuals to escape the dominance of heterosexuality over themselves, has left little conceptual space for marriage. That is, to speak of "extending marriage" to same-sex couples creates the illusion that marriage …

By Reason Of Their Sex: Feminist Theory Postmodernism And Justice , Tracy E. Higgins

Faculty Scholarship

Both the Supreme Court's jurisprudence of gender and feminist legal theory have generally assumed that some identifiable and describable category of woman exists prior to the construction of legal categories. For the Court, this woman-whose characteristics admittedly have changed over time-serves as the standard against which gendered legal classifications are measured. For feminism, her existence has served a different but equally important purpose as the subject for whom political goals are pursued. To the extent that the definitions of the category diverge, the differences among definitions are played out in feminist critiques of the Court's gender jurisprudence, and, occasionally, in …

Law And Language(S): Image, Integration And Innovation, Margaret E. Montoya

Faculty Scholarship

Examining the complex relationship between law and language enhances our understanding of the marginalization and subordination of linguistic Outsiders. This nexus between law and language has many manifestations. In this essay I discuss the biases about language that constrain traditional legal discourse while I explore strategies for its reframing by using the languages of Outsiders. Succinctly stated, this essay posits that traditional language norms create images or maintain stereotypes that stultify public discourse as well as impose cultural integration and linguistic assimilation with destructive consequences. The essay proposes that linguistic norms in law schools can be refashioned through pedagogical innovations …

A Paradigm For Sexual Harassment: Toward The Optimal Level Of Loss, Marie T. Reilly

Faculty Scholarship

This article proposes a paradigm that draws from the common-law rule of negligence. It defines actionable sexual conduct in the workplace in terms of the cost of precautionary conduct and the increased safety such precaution would have yielded. Like the rule of negligence, the proposed paradigm creates incentives for men and women to take steps to prevent sexual conduct loss to the point at which the cost of an additional increment of precaution is equal to the value of the reduction in risk of loss. This point is the optimal level of precaution. After this point, additional precaution might further …

Unburdening The Undue Burden Standard: Orienting Casey In Constitutional Jurisprudence, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

"Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt." With these words in the 1992 case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Supreme Court ushered in a new era of abortion regulation. Speaking through a joint opinion authored by Justices O'Connor, Kennedy, and Souter, the Court indicated that from this point forth abortion regulations would be judged by an "undue burden" standard. According to this standard, an abortion regulation is unconstitutional if it "has the purpose or effect of placing a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion" of a nonviable fetus.

The Justices who wrote …

On Privilege, Antoinette M. Sedillo Lopez

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Mascaras, Trenzas, Y Grenas: Un/Masking The Self While Un/Braiding Latina Stories With Legal Discourse, Margaret E. Montoya

Faculty Scholarship

This article uses Critical Race Theory methodologies, such as autobiographical narratives, and analytical approaches, such as critical pedagogy. Using personal narrative, this Article examines the various masks ("mascaras") used to control how people respond to us and the important role such masks play in the subordination of Outsiders. The first part of the Article tells stories; the second part of the Article unbraids the stories to reveal an imbedded message: that Outsider storytelling is a discursive technique for resisting cultural and linguistic domination through personal and collective redefinition. The Article explores how transculturation creates new options for expression, personal identity, …

Curriculum Vitae (Feminae): Biography And Early American Women Lawyers, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

In this review, Carol Sanger examines the recent surge of interest in the lives of early women lawyers. Using Jane Friedman's biography of Myra Bradwell, America's First Woman Lawyer, as a starting point, Professor Sanger explores the complexities for the feminist biographer of reconciling for herself and for her subject conflicting professional, political, and personal sensibilities. Professor Sanger concludes that to advance the project of women's history, feminist biographers ought not retreat to the comforts of commemorative Victorian biography, even for Victorian subjects, but should instead strive to present and accept early women subjects on their own complex terms.

Parading Ourselves: Freedom Of Speech At The Feast Of St. Patrick, Larry Yackle

Faculty Scholarship

Three things are true. First, American society is now absorbed in yet another great civil rights movement, this one on behalf of gay, lesbian, and ambisexual citizens, which will lead ineluctably to the elimination of legal burdens on the basis of sexual orientation.' Change will come slowly, with much backing and filling, and at an awful price measured in human pain. Intolerance for the homosexualities that exist among us, and the homosexual behavior in which many of us engage, will persist in quarters where the law cannot reach.2 Yet private homophobia, deprived of legal sanction, will ultimately be discredited and …

Partner Notification And The Threat Of Domestic Violence Against Women With Hiv Infection, Karen H. Rothenberg, Richard L. North

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Colonization, Antoinette M. Sedillo Lopez

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Political Economy Of Female Violent Street Crime, Deborah Baskin, Ira Sommers, Jeffrey A. Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

Ten years after the U.S. Attorney General's Task Force on Violent Crime considered problems of violence in the United States, and on the heels of a National Academy Sciences report on violence, the nation seems poised to begin a new "war on violence." Past "wars" on crime problems, including the recently stalemated "war on drugs" have focused primarily on males. This one promises to be no different. Violence continues to be viewed as the province of young males in urban areas. According to the Uniform Crime Reports, over 75% of homicide victims in 1990 were males, and over 85% of …

Women Judges And Better Justice For All, John D. Feerick

Faculty Scholarship

According to the most recent report of The New York Judicial Committee on Women in the Courts, published in October 1992, out of a total of 1,129 judges, only 183 are female. It is clear women are under-represented in the judiciary. Decisive action is required in order to increase opportunities for women to become judges. In January 1992, Governor Cuomo's Task Force on Judicial Diversity ("the Task Force") issued its report. The Task Force strongly supported diversity and set forth compelling reasons why a diverse bench is in the public interest. The report reminded us that "diversity is vital because …

Building Bridges Between Theory And Practice, Activism And Scholarship, Elizabeth M. Schneider

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Supreme Court's Narrow View On Civil Rights, Jack M. Beermann

Faculty Scholarship

The right to choose abortion, although recently significantly curtailed from its original scope,' is a federally protected liberty interest of women, and is at least protected against the imposition of "undue burdens" by state and local government.² Some of the most serious threats to women's ability to choose abortion have come not from government regulation, but from private, national, organized efforts to prevent abortions. In addition to seeking change through the political system, some of these organizations, most notably Operation Rescue, have focused on the providers of abortion, and have attempted to prevent abortions by forcibly closing abortion clinics …

Cunning Stunts: From Hegemony To Desire A Review Of Madonna's Sex, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

What is sex? Is it an accidental or contingent property that every person can be said to have? I am brunette and female, but the Pope is bald and male. Or, is sex more constitutive, that is, an essential part of who we are? In this respect, the claim is often made that women experience the world ditfierently than men. Or, is sex something we do?

If we consider sex as an adjective, can we or should we be able to manipulate it like a new hair style? Or does the notion of sexual malleability trivialize the significance …

Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death: Political Asylum And The Global Persecution Of Lesbians And Gay Men, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

In a time marked by dramatic global change, women and men persecuted because they are lesbian or gay form part of the growing pool of international refugees. Their persecution takes the form of police harassment an assault, involuntary institutionalization and electroshock and drug "treatments," punishment under laws that impose extreme penalties including death for consensual lesbian or gay sexual relations, murder by paramilitary death squads, and government inaction in response to criminal assaults against lesbians and gay men. The survival of these women and men, like the survival of all refugees, depends on obtaining asylum outside the home country. Yet, …

Feminism And Disciplinarity: The Curl Of The Petals, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

In this Symposium, feminism has been invited to take a place alongside such well-established disciplines as history, philosophy, and economics in a consolidated exploration of interdisciplinary approaches to law. While sincerely extended – the feminist entry is not the only one that women are writing – and generously unbounded as to scope, ... the invitation raises what for many is a prior question: Is feminism a discipline at all?

As the feminist delegate to this interdisciplinary Symposium, I have therefore taken as my initial task consideration of the issue implicit in the invitation: feminism's credentials as a discipline. I explore …

Thelma And Louise And Bonnie And Jean: Images Of Women As Criminals, Susan Herman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.