Law and Gender Commons^™

#Sowhitemale: Federal Procedural Rulemaking Committees, Brooke D. Coleman

Faculty Articles

Of the 630 members of a specialized set of committees responsible for drafting the federal rules for civil and criminal litigation, 591 of them have been white. That is 94 percent of the committee membership. Of that same group, 513—or 81 percent—have been white men. Decisionmaking bodies do better work when their members are diverse; these rulemaking committees are no exception. The Federal Rules of Practice and Procedure are not mere technical instructions, nor are they created by a neutral set of experts. To the contrary, the Rules embody normative judgments about what values trump others, and the rulemakers—while experts—are …

Maintaining The Delicate Balance Between Due Process And Protecting Reporting Students From Re-Traumatization During Cross-Examination: Title Ix Investigations In The Wake Of The Trump Administration's Proposed Regulations, Lauren Bizier

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

First Women Lawyers In Rhode Island, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Sexual Assault And Intoxication: Defining (In)Capacity To Consent, Elaine Craig

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This article considers how the law of sexual assault in Canada addresses cases involving intoxicated complainants. There are two main aspects to the law of capacity to consent to sexual touching in the context of intoxicated women. The first involves the evidence of intoxication courts typically require in order to prove lack of capacity. The second pertains to the legal standard to which that evidence is applied. The nature of the evidence required to establish incapacity turns on the level of capacity the law requires. A comprehensive review of Canadian caselaw involving intoxicated complainants reveals a legal standard that is …

Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence: An Overview, Suzie Dunn

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Technology facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) is a complex worldwide phenomenon with devastating results. Research to date shows that victim-survivors of intimate partner violence are tracked by their abusive partners who use technology to monitor their movements and communication. Many women journalists, human rights defenders and politicians face daily death threats and rape threats for speaking out about equality issues or for simply being a woman in a leadership role. Those with intersecting marginalized identities are at specific risk, with Black, Indigenous, and people of colour, LGBTQ+ people, and people with disabilities facing higher rates of attacks and concerted attacks that …

Aging On Air: Sex, Age, And Television News, Rebecca H. White

Scholarly Works

The best piece of advice I received when I began teaching law was to adopt Charlie Sullivan's and Mike Zimmer's casebook for my Employment Discrimination class. Before I became a law professor, I had no clue how important choosing the right textbook is, not only for the students but for the teacher. I also was unaware of how much I had to learn about a subject I thought I knew well. I had been litigating employment discrimination cases for several years, but when I began teaching, I quickly learned how much I did not know. Charlie's and Mike's casebook, through …

Balancing Burdens In Religious Freedom Claims, T. J. Denley

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The article examines the expansion of religious freedom claims under the First Amendment and related laws, arguing that recent developments risk creating unequal treatment and burdening marginalized groups. It critiques the shift in doctrine that favors conservative Judeo-Christian morality, potentially undermining antidiscrimination protections and creating "theocratic zones of control." The analysis emphasizes the need to balance religious freedom with the rights of third parties and equality-implicating rights.

Where Drugs Are Involved, Universities Offer Education And Rehabilitation, While The Juvenile Justice System Offers Detention And Punishment: Why Juvenile Drug Courts Are The Answer, Samantha Balanevsky

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Not Yet America's Best Idea: Law, Inequality, And Grand Canyon National Park, Sarah Krakoff

Publications

Even the nation’s most cherished and protected public lands are not spaces apart from the workings of law, politics, and power. This Essay explores that premise in the context of Grand Canyon National Park. On the occasion of the Park’s 100th Anniversary, it examines how law — embedded in a political economy committed to rapid growth and development in the southwestern United States — facilitated the violent displacement of indigenous peoples and entrenched racialized inequalities in the surrounding region. It also explores law’s shortcomings in the context of sexual harassment and discrimination within the Park. The Essay concludes by suggesting …

Crowdfunding Issuers In The United States, Andrew A. Schwartz

Publications

Startup companies can now legally sell shares of stock, bonds, or other securities to the broad public using equity crowdfunding, a new type of online capital market modeled on Kickstarter and other reward crowdfunding websites. Through equity crowdfunding, entrepreneurs can go directly to the broad public (the “crowd”) for investment, without having to go through the usual (and costly) process of an initial public offering (IPO). Equity crowdfunding thus offers a chance for all entrepreneurs, regardless of their physical location, gender, or anything else, to solicit investors and raise capital.

In 2012, new federal legislation—the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) …

The Troubling Alliance Between Feminism And Policing, Aya Gruber

Publications

No abstract provided.

#Metoo And Mass Incarceration, Aya Gruber

Publications

This Symposium Guest Editor’s Note is an adapted version of the Introduction to The Feminist War on Crime: The Unexpected Role of Women’s Liberation in Mass Incarceration (UC Press 2020). The book examines how American feminists, in the quest to secure women’s protection from domestic violence and rape, often acted as soldiers in the war on crime by emphasizing white female victimhood, expanding the power of police and prosecutors, touting incarceration, and diverting resources toward law enforcement and away from marginalized communities Today, despite deep concerns over racist policing and mass incarceration, many feminists continue to assert that gender crime …

Reproductive Health Care Exceptionalism And The Pandemic, Helen Norton

Publications

No abstract provided.

(Un)Common Law And The Female Body, Lolita Buckner Inniss

Publications

A dissonance frequently exists between explicit feminist approaches to law and the realities of a common law system that has often ignored and even at times exacerbated women’s legal disabilities. In The Common Law Inside the Fe-male Body, Anita Bernstein mounts a challenge to this story of division. There is, and has long been, she asserts, a substantial interrelation between the common law and feminist jurisprudential approaches to law. But Bernstein’s central argument, far from disrupting broad understandings of the common law, is in keeping with a claim that other legal scholars have long asserted: decisions according to precedent, …

Feminist Action Against Pornography In Japan: Unexpected Success In An Unlikely Place, Caroline Norma, Seiya Morita

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

In late 2016 a feminist movement against problems of commercial sexual exploitation, and especially issues of coerced pornography filming, arose in Japan. This article describes the history of this movement as it mobilized to combat human rights violations perpetrated by the country’s pornographers. The movement’s success came not spontaneously or haphazardly; in fact, it was orchestrated earlier over a full decade-and-a-half by activists who persevered in researching and highlighting pornography’s harms in a civil environment of hostility, isolation and social derision, even among progressive groups and individuals. The Anti-Pornography and Prostitution Research Group (APP) was particularly prominent in this history. …

The Paradox Of Legal Training And Leadership: A Conversation Between Akilah Folami And Susan Sturm, Akilah Folami, Susan P. Sturm

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Akilah Folami:
Welcome and thank you for coming. I am eager to engage in this opening exchange with Susan Sturm today in hopes that it will help bring to surface some of the issues that undergird the conversations planned for today in the panels. So let us begin. Susan has been teasing out a series of paradoxes that she argues develops in the tensions built into lawyer-leadership, i.e., legal training and leadership development. Her work on these lawyer-leadership paradoxes grows out of her other work that is related to the theme of this conference: Leading Differently Across Difference. She …

Criminal Deterrence: A Review Of The Missing Literature, Alex Raskolnikov

Faculty Scholarship

This review of the criminal deterrence literature focuses on the questions that are largely missing from many recent, excellent, comprehensive reviews of that literature, and from the literature itself. By “missing” I mean, first, questions that criminal deterrence scholars have ignored either completely or to a large extent. These questions range from fundamental (the distributional analysis of the criminal justice system), to those hidden in plain sight (economic analysis of misdemeanors), to those that are well-known yet mostly overlooked (the role of positive incentives, offender’s mental state, and celerity of punishment). I also use “missing” to refer to the areas …

Harassment, Workplace Culture, And The Power And Limits Of Law, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

This article asks why it remains so difficult for employers to prevent and respond effectively to harassment, especially sexual harassment, and identifies promising points for legal intervention. It is sobering to consider social-science evidence of the myriad barriers to reporting sexual harassment – from the individual-level and interpersonal to those rooted in society at large. Most of these are out of reach for an employer but workplace culture stands out as a significant arena where employers have influence on whether harassment and other discriminatory behaviors are likely to thrive. Yet employers typically make choices in this area with attention to …

Sex-Based Discrimination In Health Care Under Section 1557: The New Final Rule And Supreme Court Developments, Brietta R. Clark, Elizabeth Pendo, Gabriella Garbero

Articles

One of the primary goals of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) has been the reduction and elimination of health disparities, generally defined as population-level health differences that adversely affect disadvantaged groups, including disparities associated with sex and gender. Many of PPACA’s general provisions — expanded access to public and private insurance coverage, guarantee issue and pricing reforms, and coverage mandates — were expected to reduce barriers and eliminate discriminatory practices targeting or disproportionately impacting women and transgender individuals. Provisions like the Women’s Health Amendment, which mandated women’s preventive healthcare to be covered without cost sharing, and the …

Human Trafficking Victims' Need For Vacatur: Demolishing Roadblocks To Freedom: An Analysis Of The Current State Laws In The United States, The Current Federal Landscape, And A Call For The United Nations To Amend An Existing Protocol To Allow Victims Of Human Trafficking To Vacate Their Criminal Records, Melissa Owens

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

Closeted Or Credible: How Misinterpretation Of The Real Id Act Prevents Closeted Lgbtq+ Applicants From Establishing Credible Asylum Claims, Mary Kate O'Connell

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

Porn Wars: Serious Value, Social Harm, And The Burdens Of Modern Obscenity Doctrine, P. Brooks Fuller, Kyla P. Garrett Wagner, Farnosh Mazandarani

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

During the 1980s, anti-pornography ideologues—an unlikely alliance of feminist activists and right-wing evangelical Christians—waged an open war against pornography and the anti-censorship feminists who supported legal protection for pornographic works. Following a pivotal defeat of an anti-pornography ordinance in federal court, the ideologies constituted in the so-called “Porn Wars” continued to guide obscenity doctrine. These ideologies have informed lower courts’ understanding of the harms and values associated with sexually explicit content more than constitutional scholars recognize, at least explicitly. Although courts recognize core feminist values such as sexual autonomy and privacy in sexually explicit content, they have built doctrine that …

Slavery-Like Conditions And Abuse Of Positions Of Vulnerability: Why The United States Should Judge Countries' Efforts To Combat Human Trafficking Based On The Palermo Protocol And Consider The Effects Of Legalized Prostitution On Human Trafficking, Danica Baird

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

The Georgia Life Act: Limiting Women's State Constitutional Right To Privacy, Phoebe Varunok

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

The Intersection Between Disability And Lgbt Discrimination And Marginalization, Victoria M. Rodríguez-Roldán

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

Sexual Contact Between A Suspect And Police Officers: How Far Should Police Go To Prove Prostitution?, Paula Del Valle Torres

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

The Future (Public Company Boardroom) Is Female: From California Sb 826 To A Gender Diversity Listing Standard, Sunitha Malepati

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

Introduction

The issue of board diversity has received an unusual amount of attention in recent years as corporations face an increasing amount of pressure to add more women to their boards. In 2017, State Street Corporation, the world’s third-largest asset manager, made headlines when it announced its board gender diversity campaign by placing a statue of the Fearless Girl staring down the Charging Bull of Wall Street in New York City’s Financial District. At the beginning of 2020, Goldman Sachs announced that it would require companies it helps take public to have at least one diverse board member, with a …

Prospects And Pitfalls: Confronting Sexual Harassment In The Legal Cannabis Industry, Alexis N. Smith, Griffon Toronjo Pivateau

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

I. Introduction

In the last decade, the legal cannabis industry emerged as a fast-growing and complex new market. Legal cultivation of the cannabis plant promises to create tremendous economic opportunities. Further, the new market hints at significant social consequences. Numerous women have entered the field as entrepreneurs, advocates, and employees. Early reports indicate a much higher percentage of women within the cannabis industry than the agricultural industry in general.

Nevertheless, women face challenges and obstacles. The cannabis industry bears the characteristics of a start-up entity, but this entity resides within a market skewed by the federal law banning the cultivation …