Law and Gender Commons^™

Stoning Single Nigerian Mothers For Adultery: Applying Feminist Theory To An Analysis Of Gender Discrimination In International Law, Sarah Crutcher

UC Law SF Journal on Gender and Justice

In 2003, an Islamic Sharia court in northern Nigeria sentenced Amina Lawal to death by stoning for having sex outside of marriage. After the man Lawal named as the father of her baby was acquitted for lack of evidence, the international community pressured Nigeria to oppose the ruling by adhering to its own constitutional provisions, and international law prohibiting torture and gender discrimination. This article explores the fundamental conflicts between international human rights law and Islamic law as implemented by Sharia courts. The author cites the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, jus cogens and customary international law, …

The Admissibility Of Tape Recordings In Criminal Trials Involving Domestic Disputes: California's Proposition 8 And Title Iii Of The Federal Omnibus Crime Control And Safe Streets Act, Lee Ashely Smith

UC Law SF Journal on Gender and Justice

Domestic cases of eavesdropping and wiretapping pose a special problem for laws that were initially meant to govern police misconduct and espionage. California voters passed Proposition 8 but its passage led to many additional questions including whether the law truly champions victims' rights and whether it protects innocent defendants. Federal law, by comparison, sets a minimum standard of one-party consent for the admissibility of wiretap or eavesdropping evidence in criminal trials. This standard has been shown to permit parental wiretaps without allowing purely clandestine recording of another's activities, including spouses and domestic partners. In short, privacy rights are protected to …

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

UC Law SF Journal on Gender and Justice

This essay examines the inherent power imbalances that characterize police-individual encounters and questions the notion of consensual searches. Albeit feminist challenges to the notion of consent in other areas of the law, there has not been a feminist scrutiny of consent and agency as employed within search and seizure law. Therefore, this essay builds on feminist critique of rape laws and domestic violence to challenge the Court's dichotomized view of coercion and consent in its search and seizure cases and to offer a feminist concept of agency under conditions of subordination.

Lighting The Lantern: Visions Of A Virtual All-Women's Law School, Nancy E. Shurtz

UC Law SF Journal on Gender and Justice

"Lighting the Lantern: Visions of a Virtual All-Women's Law School" is a fictional narrative of a hypothetical all women's law school. It is written in non-traditional form in the hope that it will prompt the reader to view the law, academic institutions and societal constructs in ways more consistent with an evolving society that should embrace all differences, whether those differences are gender or racially based.

The mission of the All Women's Law School is threefold: "First, to teach specific lawyering skills and disseminate knowledge in a context designed to help students function effectively in the existing culture while working …

The Child Status Protection Act: Does Immigration Math Solve The Family Unity Equation, Shane Dizon

UC Law SF Journal on Gender and Justice

This note focuses on the Child Status Protection Act, passed by Congress in 2002 to allow individuals who turn 21 while their permanent residence paperwork is pending to preserve their eligibility as children. The note addresses the various reactions of the enforcing government authorities, practitioners, and courts since the Act's passage. In addition, the author explores the Act's place among other recent legislation and government agency policies purporting to advance the theme of family unity in immigration. Ultimately, the author suggests that the statutory stop-the-clock approach embodied by the Act seems not only inconsistent with its predecessors, which have expanded …

A Hometown Dilemma: Addressing Th E Sexual Harassment Of Undocumented Women In Meatpacking Plants In Iowa And Nebraska, Amanda Clark

UC Law SF Journal on Gender and Justice

Sexual harassment of undocumented women workers continues to be a systemic problem within the meatpacking industry. In Iowa and Nebraska, the state legislature, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, labor unions, and local advocacy organizations are working to address the problem of sexual harassment within the meatpacking industry. This note addresses the ongoing issues facing women in the meatpacking industry in Iowa and Nebraska, in particular the unique concerns facing undocumented and immigrant women workers. It also looks to the Supreme Court holding in Hoffman Plastic Compounds, Inc. v. NLRB to determine the applicability of that case to Title VII sexual …

Are Women More Ethical Lawyers – An Empirical Study, Patricia W. Moore, Kevin M. Simmons

Faculty Articles

We first noticed a possible "gender gap" in attorney discipline when we ran across the Oklahoma Disciplinary Commission's annual report for the year 2000. Women currently constitute 27% of Oklahoma attorneys, but 0% of the disciplined attorneys—none of the seventeen named—were women. Wondering whether the Oklahoma figures were aberrational, we attempted to locate research concerning gender and attorney discipline. But there have been few such studies, although “[p]robably no issue in the social sciences receives more attention than the difference between men and women.”

We thus embarked upon a national study of disciplinary actions decided in 2000. After collecting, coding, …

Roe's Legacy: The Nonconsensual Medical Treatment Of Pregnant Women And Implications For Female Citizenship, April L. Cherry

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

In this Essay, I demonstrate how I have come to the conclusion that the "compelling state interest" language used by the Court in Roe has been used to constrain and derogate women's citizenship. In Part I, I detail Roe's holding and describe some of the arguments, which use Roe as precedent, that seek to justify limits on health care decision making by pregnant women. I argue that because Roe does not address situations outside of the abortion context, it leaves intact women's common law and constitutional liberty rights to direct their medical care. Therefore, the state cannot constitutionally compel medical …

Race, Gender, And Work/Family Policy, Nancy E. Dowd

UF Law Faculty Publications

Family leave is not an end in itself, but rather is part of a much bigger picture: work/family policy. The goal of work/family policy is to achieve a good society by supporting families. Ideally, families enable children to develop to their fullest capacity and to contribute to their communities and society. Public rhetoric in the United States has always strongly supported families. Our policies, however, have not. In the area of work/family policy, the United States continues to lag behind every other advanced industrialized country, as well as many developing countries, in the degree to which we provide affirmative support …

Piercing The Prison Uniform Of Invisibility For Black Female Inmates, Michelle S. Jacobs

UF Law Faculty Publications

In Inner Lives: Voices of African American Women In Prison, Professor Paula Johnson has written about the most invisible of incarcerated women — incarcerated African American women. The number of women incarcerated in the United States increased by seventy-five percent between 1986 and 1991. Of these women, a disproportionate number are black women. The percentages vary by region and by the nature of institution (county jail, state prison or federal facility), but the bottom line remains the same. In every instance, black women are incarcerated at rates disproportionate to their percentage in the general population. In Inner Lives, …

Beyond Imminence: Evolving International Law And Battered Women's Right To Self-Defense, Shana Wallace

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Queering Legal Education: A Project Of Theoretical Discovery, Kim Brooks, Debra Parkes

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The article has two parts. Part II discusses the materials we reviewed to inform the development of a queer legal pedagogy. In particular, it examines the categories of queer legal scholarship and highlights the contributions of other outsider scholars to legal education debates. Early in our research, we found limited material on queer legal pedagogy, and we discovered nothing that posited a theoretical approach. We did, however, find rich resources written by other outsiders to law from which some design principles for queer legal pedagogy might be drawn. We should note at the outset that our goal in this Part …

Book Review Of Gender On Trial: Sexual Stereotypes And Work/Life Balance In The Legal Workplace, Nicole Buonocore Porter

Faculty Publications

Holly English's book, Gender on Trial: Sexual Stereotypes and Work/Life Balance in the Legal Workplace, offers a very interesting, albeit mostly anecdotal, look at the many real or perceived sexual stereotypes in the legal workplace. Her book is the result of interviews with 180 lawyers (fifty of them men) over a two-year period in all regions of the country. Her main purpose of the book was to "explore the fact that persistent gender stereotypes present a continuing obstacle that obstructs the availability of broad opinions and choices for men and women lawyers." Through eight substantive chapters, she seeks to explore …

Critical Race Histories: In And Out, Darren L. Hutchinson

Faculty Articles

Insider critiques of CRT also require critical assessment. Recent internal critics complain that racial identity discourse, including multidimensionality theory, marginalizes more important attention to material, class, or economic issues. If their claim holds true, the material harm critics serve a vital purpose: because racial injustice causes and interacts with economic deprivation, any progressive racial justice movement should interrogate class and economic inequality concems. Nevertheless, the analysis of the material harm critics suffers because it dichotomizes class and multidimensionality. Although these critics bifurcate multiplicity and class analysis, multiplicity theories relate to class analysis in two important respects. First, poverty has multidimensional …

Progress And Progression In Family Law, Martha Albertson Fineman

Faculty Articles

The process and nature of change in our family formation seems unlikely to be derailed. The policy question for those concerned with the institution of the family in today's world should not be how we can resuscitate marriage and thus save society, but rather how we can support all individuals who create intimate, caring relationships, regardless of the form of those relationships. Continued inattention to the social and economic dislocations and the emerging family needs produced in the wake of changes in family formation can be disastrous, not only to individual families, but also to society.

Of particular importance for …

Sexual Harassment: An International Human Rights Perspective., Christine M. Chinkin

Book Chapters

This chapter considers sexual harassment in the workplace from the perspective of international human rights law. Adopting a human rights approach locates sexual harassment in the context of women’s economic and social rights and more broadly in the wider frame of international imperatives such as the maintenance of international peace and security and global economic development. Sexual harassment has come onto the international agenda comparatively recently, and the story comprises both the inclusion of prohibitions within legal instruments and significant silences, especially where breaking the silence requires intrusion into state policies relating to militarism, trade and investment liberalization, and the …

A Woman's World, Michael Fischl

Faculty Articles and Papers

No abstract provided.

Promoting Women's Access To Politics And Decision Making: The Role Of Tgnp And Other Advocacy Groups In The 2000 General Elections., Miranda Johnson, Aggripina Mosha

Faculty Publications & Other Works

No abstract provided.

Paradoxes Of Health And Equality: When A Boy Becomes A Girl, Noa Ben-Asher

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Can a parent be legally required to control the gender of a child? What is the legal justification of a forced disintegration of a family? This Essay will try to address these issues, raised by an unusual legal dispute between parents who believed that they should raise their child as a girl, and a state agency that insisted on a masculine upbringing as a boy.

Prostitution, Hustling, And Sex Work Law And Policy, Polly Thistlethwaite

Publications and Research

Prostitution, hustling, and sex work are forms of labor, not erotic preferences or identities as are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender, but sex workers and queers alike are stigmatized and criminalized for consensual sexual activity. The state – federal, state, and local law enforcement – routinely interferes with certain types of sexual activity. Enforcement of laws regulating sex behavior often varies given the discretion of local police. In her 1989 essay “Thinking Sex,” Gayle Rubin positions sex-for-money, prostitution, with pornography, promiscuous sex, pornography, and homosexual sex in the low status “outer limits” of the contemporary American sex hierarchy; while heterosexual, …

Who Gets In? The Quest For Diversity After Grutter, Margaret E. Montoya, Athena Mutua, Sheldon Zedeck, Frank H. Wu, Charles E. Daye, David L. Chambers

Faculty Scholarship

Transcript of The 2004 James McCormick Mitchell Lecture. On March 8, 2004, the University at Buffalo Law School hosted its annual Mitchell Lecture,1 a panel discussion entitled, "Who Gets In? The Quest for Diversity After Grutter." The Mitchell Committee decided to focus this year's lecture on innovative proposals to ensure diversity in law school admissions in light of the Supreme Court's ruling in Grutter v. Bollinger, which confirmed that race and ethnicity could be taken into consideration in admission decisions for diversity purposes. Noting that much of the debate about Grutter thus far has emphasized the decision's constitutionality or its …

Introduction And Congratulations, Mary Kay Kane

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

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

Articles

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 …

Paradoxes Of Health And Equality: When A Boy Becomes A Girl, Noa Ben-Asher

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

In the fall of 2000, six-year-old male Zachary from a small town in Ohio, claimed that s/he was a girl and requested, from now on, to be called Aurora. When the child's parents honored this unusual wish and made efforts to make official the child's feminine identity, the case turned into a custody battle between the parents and the state of Ohio. Although the child was occasionally treated as a girl at home from the age of two, the attempt to register the child in public school as a girl motivated the state dissolution of this family. At the …

Egyptian Feminism: Trapped In The Identity Debate, Lama Abu-Odeh

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Article argues that if we wish to account for the limited gains made in the area of family law reform in Egypt in the twentieth century, it is crucial to relate the debate on family law with another debate, one revolving around the identity of the Egyptian legal system. Whereas the dispute over family law reform forced decisions on gender and the family, the contest surrounding identity centered on the ongoing and agonized struggle by Egyptians to define the nature of their country's contemporary cultural identity. The question of identity was often framed as a debate over the "character" …

Annotated Legal Bibliography On Gender

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Not If, But When?: Dismantling The Florida Adoption Act Of 2001, Andrew T. Binstock

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The note critiques the notice provision of the Adoption Act of 2001, arguing that it unjustly required single mothers to publish personal details in newspapers, violating privacy rights under the Due Process Clause and the Florida Constitution. The provision was ultimately invalidated by the Fourth District Court of Appeals, reflecting a broader tension between protecting fathers' rights and safeguarding mothers' privacy. The legislature's repeal of the notice requirement and the establishment of a voluntary putative father registry marked a shift toward balancing these interests while respecting reproductive autonomy.

Annotated Legal Bibliography On Gender

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Choosing Liberty Over Equality And Sacrificing Both: Equal Protection And Due Process In Lawrence V. Texas, Andrew J. Seligsohn

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The article critiques the Supreme Court's decision in Lawrence v. Texas, arguing that the Court's reliance on substantive due process under the Due Process Clause, rather than the Equal Protection Clause, undermines the broader equality concerns faced by the LGBTQ+ community. By prioritizing liberty over equality, the Court missed an opportunity to establish a more robust legal foundation for future LGBTQ+ rights, leaving the decision vulnerable to challenge and failing to address the systemic discrimination against gays and lesbians.

Table Of Contents - Cardozo Women's Law Journal, Vol. 10, Iss. 3

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

No abstract provided.