Law and Gender Commons^™

Developing Markets In Baby-Making: In The Matter Of Baby M, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

In this Essay, I want to explore the Baby M case from a different, less philosophical perspective. The question I pose is simply this: how did the Sterns and the Whiteheads find one another in the first place? After all, apart from their New Jersey location (and a shared fondness for Bruce Springsteen), the two couples had little in common. Mary Beth was a high school dropout; Betsy had a Ph.D. and M.D. from the University of Michigan. Rick was a Vietnam vet fighting an ongoing battle with unemployment and alcoholism; Bill led what close friends called "a quiet, industrious …

International Union, U.A.W. V. Johnson Controls: The History Of Litigation Alliances And Mobilization To Challenge Fetal Protection Policies, Caroline Bettinger-Lopez, Susan P. Sturm

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court's decision in Johnson Controls is the culmination of a long legal campaign by labor, women's rights, and workplace safety advocates to invalidate restrictions on women's employment based on pregnancy. This campaign powerfully demonstrates the use of amicus briefs as opportunities to link the efforts of groups with overlapping agendas and to shape the Supreme Court's understanding of the surrounding empirical, social and political context. But Johnson Controls also provides important lessons about the narrowing effects and fragility of litigation-centered mobilization. The case affirmed an important anti-discrimination principle but ironically left women (and men) with the right to …

Abortion, Equality, And Administrative Regulation, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

Abortion and equality are a common pairing; courts as well as legal scholars have noted the importance of abortion and a woman's ability to control whether and when she has children to her ability to participate fully and equally in society. Abortion and administrative regulation, on the other hand, are a more unusual combination. Most restrictions on abortion are legislatively imposed, while guarantees of reproductive freedom are constitutionally derived, so administrative law does not frequently figure in debates about access to abortion.

Advances And Missed Opportunities In The International Prosecution Of Gender-Based Crimes, Susana Sacouto

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

INTRODUCTION: In the past decade, and particularly since 1998, there has been an incredible transformation in the treatment of sex-based and gender- based violence' in the fields of international humanitarian law and international criminal law. Before this, crimes committed exclusively or disproportionately against women and girls, in times of conflict, were largely either ignored, or at most, treated as secondary to other crimes. Despite the fact that rape and other forms of sexual violence had been widely reported during World War HI, for instance, the crime of rape was not expressly included in either the London Charter, establishing the International …

Progressive Lawyering In Politically Depressing Times, Susan Carle

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

INTRODUCTION: Susan Sturm's important work offers a ray of optimism in a contemporary political climate most people of progressive inclinations find somewhat depressing. Sturm examines new models for bringing about institutional re- form without extensive management from legislatures or courts. As Sturm recognizes, resort to litigation as a strategy for increasing gender parity in employment is not a promising option these days, for several sets of reasons. First, as Sturm has explained in an earlier pathbreaking article, judicial decrees are not well suited to addressing "second generation" problems of structural reform of institutions, such as eliminating manifestations of race and …

American Husbandry: Legal Norms Impacting The Production Of (Re)Productivity, Camille Nelson

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This article concentrates on the normative legal structure that established complete control over female slaves by sanctioning their subjugation to further slaveholders’ profit maximization and social domination. The criminal law sanctioned the rape of slave women, and the legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem mandated that the legal status of children born to slave women was determined by the mother’s legal status. The slave master derived an economic benefit from ensuring slave women had as many children as possible. This system ensured that slave women held no legally protected autonomy over their own bodies or over their own offspring.

Such …

Learning To Love After Learning To Harm: Post-Conflict Reconstruction, Gender Equality And Cultural Values, Penelope Andrews

Articles & Chapters

The question that the Jacob Zuma rape trial and its aftermath raised was how a country like South Africa, with such a wonderful Constitution and expansive Bill of Rights, could generate such negative and retrogressive attitudes towards women. In line with this inquiry, this article raises three issues: The first focuses on the legacy of apartheid violence and specifically the cultures of masculinity, the underbelly of apartheid violence. Second, the article explores the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), a vital part of the post-apartheid transformation agenda, to examine how the TRC pursued violations of women's human rights. …

Advocating For The Employment Rights Of Victims Of Domestic Violence And Sexual Assault, Deborah A. Widiss, Robin R. Runge

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Janet Halley, Split Decisions: How And Why To Take A Break From Feminism, Princeton University Press. 2006 (Book Review), Mary Anne Franks

Articles

No abstract provided.

Latino Inter-Ethnic Employment Discrimination And The Diversity Defense, Tanya K. Hernandez

Faculty Scholarship

With the growing racial and ethnic diversity of the U.S. population and workforce, scholars have begun to address the ways in which coalition building across groups not only will continue to be necessary but also will become even more complex. Recent scholarship has focused on analyzing how best to promote effective coalition building. Thus far, scholars have not examined what that growing racial and ethnic diversity will mean in the context of individual racial and ethnic discrimination claims. What will antidiscrimination litigation look like when all the parties involved are non-White but nonetheless plaintiffs allege that a racial hierarchy exists …

Our Other Reproductive Choices: Equality In Sex Education, Contraceptive Access, And Work-Family Policy, Cornelia T. Pillard

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Reproductive rights are traditionally understood to be protected by the privacy aspect of the due process liberty guarantee, but equal protection is also at the heart of the matter. Many of us intuitively know the close relationship between sex equality and abortion rights, and the law, too, is starting to reflect it. This Symposium broadens the focus of traditional abortion-rights jurisprudence to develop equality-based analyses of abortion rights. Widening the angle even further, this Article looks at sex equality and reproductive rights issues beyond the core right to abortion . . . To highlight some of the opportunities created by …

Internalizing Gender: Why International Law Theory Should Adopt Comparative Methods, Darren Rosenblum

Faculty Publications

This Article uses the example of international women 's political rights to examine the value of comparative methodologies in analyzing the process by which nations internalize international norms. As internalized in Brazil and France, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women suggests possibilities for (and possible limitations of) interdisciplinary comparative and international law scholarship. Indeed, international law scholarship is divided between theories of internalization and neorealist challenges to those theories. Comparative methodologies add crucial complexity to internalization theory, the success of which depends on acknowledging vast differences in national legal cultures. Further, comparative methodologies expose …

Branded: Corporate Image, Sexual Stereotyping, And The New Face Of Capitalism, Dianne Avery, Marion Crain

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Disparate Impact Discrimination: The Limits Of Litigation, The Possibilities For Internal Compliance, Melissa Hart

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Possibility Of Avoiding Discrimination: Considering Compliance And Liability, Melissa Hart

Publications

The gender discrimination class action Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., whose certification was recently affirmed in the Ninth Circuit, presents a large-scale challenge to the company's excessive reliance on subjective judgment in employment decision-making. It is one in a growing number of similar suits, all of which are fundamentally attacks on the continued operation of entrenched gender stereotypes in the allocation of workplace opportunities. The breadth of this aim is one of the strengths of these suits, but it also raises a significant question: because this kind of litigation targets a broad social phenomenon, is it reasonably possible to …

The Feminist War On Crime, Aya Gruber

Publications

One of the most celebrated successes of the feminist movement is its lasting impact on domestic violence criminal laws. Today, society has moved from discourse characterizing domestic abuse as legitimate or merely a private problem to a belief that battering is a heinous crime, more egregious than garden-variety assault. I know all too well how far the pendulum has swung, having practiced as a public defender in the District of Columbia domestic violence system. Day after day, prosecutors proceeded with cases against the wishes of victims, resulting in the mass incarceration of young black men. Could this have been the …

Toward A Sui Generis View Of Black Rights In Canada? Overcoming The Difference-Denial Model Of Countering Anti-Black Racism, Lolita Buckner Inniss

Publications

No abstract provided.

Protecting Victims Of Gendered Persecution: Fear Of Floodgates Or Call To (Principled) Action?, Karen Musalo

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Personal Insights And Experiences Regarding The Passage Of Title Ix , Birch Bayh

Cleveland State Law Review

My purpose here today is to look at some of the legislative history of Title IX, and perhaps some of the details that never made it into the Congressional Record, and also to include my personal involvement in it. I do that with some fear and trepidation because it sounds like one is puffing himself up.It is fair to ask, “How can a kid who grew up on a corn and soybean farm, raising pigs and hogs and cattle and calves, chickens, how in the world could he ever get to be a United States Senator, let alone become involved …

Title Ix: How We Got It And What A Difference It Made, Bernice Resnick Sandler

Cleveland State Law Review

This article is a longer version of two speeches, one given at Women Rock: Title IX Academic and Legal Conference held at Cleveland State University on March 30, 2007 sponsored by McDonald Hopkins LLC, and one given in San Francisco at an Equal Rights Advocates fundraiser on June 8, 2007. In this article, the author takes the reader through her personal journey to reach Women's Equality in a world before Title IX. Through these experiences, she has become an integral part in the creation of Title IX legislation.

Toward A Third-Wave Feminist Legal Theory: Young Women, Pornography And The Praxis Of Pleasure, Bridget J. Crawford

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This article critically examines a growing body of non-legal writing by women who have proclaimed a third-wave of feminism and suggests the ways that legal theory might be enriched by this work. Scholars typically label the nineteenth-century woman suffrage movement as the first wave of feminism, and view the legal and social activism of the 1970s as the second wave of feminism. The third wave of feminism, with its intellectual origins in the response to the Clarence Thomas Senate confirmation hearings, is a reaction to the popular stereotype that feminists are humorless man-haters. Third-wave feminists proclaim their difference from second-wave …

Democracy, Gender, And Governance: Introduction, Darren Rosenblum

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Since at least the mid 1990s and the Fourth World Conference for Women in Beijing, gender as an analytic category and as a programmatic concern has become a mainstream part of international law. While feminists have traditionally understood their relation to international law in critical terms and from their position as outsiders, this turn toward gender equality places at least some feminists and some of their projects within the governance structure of international law itself. This crucial shift from exclusion to partial inclusion merits examination.