Law and Gender Commons^™

Curing Corrective Rape: Socio-Legal Perspectives On Sexual Violence Against Black Lesbians In South Africa, Waruguru Gaitho

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

Corrective rape can be defined as a hate crime that entails the rape of any member of a group that does not conform to gender or sexual orientation norms, where the motive of the perpetrator is to “correct” the individual, fundamentally combining gender-based violence and homophobic violence. In the South African context, these biases intersect with systemic racism, producing a disproportionate impact on Black, queer, womxn. While the legal framework has evolved to better address sexual violence crimes, Black lesbians remain prone to falling through the legal cracks, and South African society continues to sanction the homophobia and misogyny that …

280 Characters To § 230 Immunity: Protecting Individual Sexual Assault Allegations On Twitter From Defamation Liability, Elizabeth Profaci

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

One in four female undergraduate students has been sexually assaulted. These students are three times more likely to experience sexual violence than any other group. Frustrated with the Title IX process on their campuses and the lack of discipline for their assailants, these students are unlikely to report their assault. Instead, they quietly tell their friends and other students, and in some cases, anonymously share their stories online. But instead of receiving support, these survivors are often faced with lawsuits. Accused assailants are using, or threatening to use, defamation lawsuits in an attempt to silence survivors who speak out, even …

Supreme Court Ruling On The Texas Abortion Law: Beginning To Unravel Roe V Wade, I. Glenn Cohen, Rebecca Reingold, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In 2021, Texas enacted an abortion statute, SB8, stating “a physician may not knowingly perform or induce an abortion on a pregnant woman if the physician detected a fetal heartbeat for the unborn child.” SB8’s prohibition applies broadly against anyone who “knowingly engages in conduct that aids or abets the performance or inducement of an abortion.” The law’s design is unprecedented, enforced solely by private lawsuits, providing damages of $10,000 or more for each abortion. SB8 prohibits government enforcement, with the explicit intent of preventing federal judicial review. SB8 clearly violates current Supreme Court precedent creating a constitutional right to …

The Importance Of Abolition Of The Carceral State For Native Survivors, Christina M. Schnalzer

American Indian Law Journal

No abstract provided.

P*Law 2022, Center For Public Service Law

2021–2022 Flyers

This document outlines the full schedule for P*LAW Week 2022 at Cardozo School of Law, presented by the Center for Public Service Law. Held virtually from January 24 to January 27, the week featured panels, workshops, and discussions on key issues in public interest law, including immigration policy, educational equity, criminal justice reform, reproductive rights, data privacy, military law, labor rights, and overdose prevention. Events brought together legal professionals, advocates, scholars, and Cardozo students to explore law’s role in advancing social justice and supporting vulnerable communities.

European Court Won’T Review Case Against Baker In Northern Ireland, Arthur S. Leonard

Other Publications

No abstract provided.

Giving The Equal Rights Amendment Teeth: A Proposal For Gender Equality Legislation Modeled After The Civil Rights Act Of 1964, Samantha Gagnon

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

Contrary to the belief of eighty percent of Americans, the U.S. Constitution does not prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex. The effect of this lack of protection can be seen in every corner of our society, including economic inequalities and a lack of representation in leadership. For almost one hundred years, women’s organizations and activists have attempted to rectify this by advocating for the inclusion of an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in the Constitution. In the past few years, there has been a revived push for the ERA due to the amendment’s first congressional hearing in thirty-six years, …

Sexual Exploitation And The Adultified Black Girl, Mikah K. Thompson

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

Blue Ivy Carter, daughter of entertainers Sean “Jay Z” Carter and Beyoncé Knowles Carter, celebrated her eighth birthday in January of 2020. To commemorate the occasion, Blue’s grandfather, Matthew Knowles, posted a picture of Blue on Instagram. Fans and journalists alike marveled that Blue looked so much like her famous mother, and many noted that she looked much older in the photograph. E! News tweeted Blue’s picture along with a question: “Can someone please explain to us when Blue Ivy became an adult?” The post went viral, and many people criticized E! News for referring to eight-year-old Blue as …

Protecting Women's Voices: Preventing Retaliatory Defamation Claims In The #Metoo Context, Nicole Ligon

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

As part of a personal commitment to positively utilize my legal skills, I joined the Legal Network for Gender Equity, a group of attorneys who support individuals seeking to come forward about their experiences with sexual harassment and assault. Through this network, I regularly counsel women who want to share their stories but are concerned that by doing so, they may open themselves up to costly defamation suits from their aggressors. Their concerns are not so much rooted in any notion that their stories are or could actually be defamatory. Instead, these concerns often stem from a recognition that …

Rising Up Without Pushing Down: Lessons Learned From The Suffragettes' Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric, Kit Johnson

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

American suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton famously wrote: “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal.” Yet when suffragettes spoke of “all” men and women, they were clear about exceptions. Immigrants did not qualify. Indeed, in her own address at the First Women’s Rights Convention, held in Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848, Stanton said that “to have . . . ignorant foreigners . . . fully recognized, while we ourselves are thrust out from all the rights that belong to citizens, it is too grossly insulting to the dignity of woman …

The Mismeasure Of Success, Alissa Rubin Gomez

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

Large law firms evolved to serve major corporations by offering them “lawyers who were white males comfortable with the business elite, with wives at home to free up work time . . . .” After decades of advancing these same lawyers, the result has been a widespread belief that the ideal big firm lawyer is one who is committed to professional life at all hours of the day and night, and whose personal life is either nonexistent or handled by someone else. Women at large law firms have been expected to act accordingly. That is, to act like men. …

Commemorating The Forgotten Intersection Of The Fifteenth And Nineteenth Amendments, Taunya Lovell Banks

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

The women’s rights movement, throughout its history, defined its priorities with reference to white middle- or upper- class women. Thus “discrimination that affected all women” included the right of owning property but not [B]lack women’s voting rights.

This year we commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment’s ratification. I use the term commemorate instead of celebrate because it is important to remember that this anniversary is also a time to reflect on the lost opportunities to advance equality for all one hundred years ago. This reflection seems especially appropriate in a presidential election year rife with accusations …

Introduction, Samantha Gagnon

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

This issue of the St. John’s Law Review contains several articles which were first presented at the Law Review’s Fall 2020 Symposium. This symposium was organized to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment, which states very simply, “[t]he right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”

The right to vote is one of the most important political rights in this country but for most, it was also one of the hardest-won rights. For 244 years, American women were …

Mental Health Care And Intimate Partner Violence: Unasked Questions, Delaney E. Anderson, Richard C. Boldt

Faculty Scholarship

There is significant overlap between the group of people who experience trauma, including domestic or intimate partner violence, and those who are hospitalized for severe mental illness. In recent years there has been a growing awareness in the mental health treatment community of the prevalence of trauma among individuals with behavioral health problems. Despite the strong evidence of elevated rates of exposure to domestic or intimate partner violence among individuals experiencing mental illness (including depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder), mental health professionals often do not effectively address this co-occurring factor in assessing and treating their clients or patients. The …

Corporate Governance And The Feminization Of Capital, Sarah C. Haan

Scholarly Articles

At the start of the twentieth century, women made up a small proportion of shareholders in American publicly traded companies. By 1956, women were the majority of individual shareholders. Although this change in shareholder gender demographics happened gradually, it was evident early in the century: Before the 1929 stock market crash, women shareholders had come to outnumber men at some of America’s largest and most influential corporations, including AT&T, General Electric, and the Pennsylvania Railroad. This Article synthesizes information from a range of historical sources to reveal an overlooked narrative of corporate history—the feminization of capital, or the transformation of …

We Shouldn't Need Roe, Carliss Chatman

Scholarly Articles

In the face of state-by-state attacks on the right to choose, which result in regular challenges to Roe v. Wade in the U.S. Supreme Court, this essay asks whether Roe is needed at all. Decades of state law encroachments have caused Roe to fail to properly protect the right to choose. Building on prior works that challenge the premise of fetal personhood and highlighting the status of Roe-based rights after decades of challenges, this essay proposes an alternative solution to Roe. Federal legislative and executive efforts, including the Women’s Health Protection Act, are necessary to ensure the right …

The New Jim And Jane Crow Intersect: Challenges To Defending The Parental Rights Of Mothers During Incarceration, Carla Laroche

Scholarly Articles

Family law scholars and advocates have expressed the importance of providing counsel to parents in the family regulation system, especially parents who are incarcerated, because of the system’s complexities. This article establishes, however, that when mothers must navigate both the family regulation and criminal legal systems, the protections appointed parents’ counsel are supposed to provide are weakened. These harms are heightened especially for Black mothers within the carceral state. As this article shows, appointed lawyers in family regulation cases cannot properly protect the due process rights of mothers who are incarcerated because of the added challenges both mothers and their …

Black Women And Voter Suppression, Carla Laroche

Scholarly Articles

Black women who are eligible to vote do so at consistently high rates during elections in the United States. For thousands of Black women, however, racism, sexism, and criminal convictions intersect to require them to navigate a maze of laws and policies that keep them from voting. With the alarming rate of convictions and incarceration of Black women, criminal law intersects with civil rights to bar their involvement in the electoral process. This voting ban is known as felony disenfranchisement, but it amounts to voter suppression.

By reconceptualizing voter suppression based on criminal convictions through the experiences of Black women’s …

Disparities In The Use Of Prophylactic Treatments In Reproductive Health Between The Sexes: A Recommendation For The Use Of Hpv Vaccination Schemes Rather Than Surgical Interventions To Reduce Inequities And Threats To The Public’S Health, Paul Mclaughlin

Scholarly Works

This Article will examine the unequal treatment of the sexes under the law with regard to prophylactic treatments against STDs. The second section of this Article will discuss the ethical and legal issues in the use of prophylactic treatments and the issues involving informed consent regarding their use. The third section of this Article will discuss the historic and current use of prophylactic surgeries on both sexes to prevent disease and the challenges that have been raised against such practices. The fourth section of this Article will discuss the use of the H.P.V. vaccinations in both sexes to reduce the …

‘‘Don’T Take On The Responsibilty Of Somebody Else’S Fu**Ed Up Behavior”: Responding To Online Abuse In The Context Of Barriers To Support, Chandell Gosse

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

Responsibilization, in a true circular fashion, is not only born of but also benefits institutional (e.g., social media companies and law enforcement) and cultural power structures (e.g., misogyny and patriarchy). When targets of online abuse take responsibility for the abuse launched against them, that assumption of responsibility requires energy, and that energy is taken away from efforts to hold institutions and perpetrators accountable. Responsibilization tries to tranquilize change in the service of power. The tricky thing about interrupting this process is that it requires more than just offering better support. It also requires exposing, challenging, and dismantling harmful ideologies, belief …

The Insidious Culture Of Fear In Indian Courts, Nidhi Shrivastava

English Faculty Publications

On 20 March 2020, the four adult convicts of the 2012 Delhi rape case were executed after a long debate regarding the punishment for their crime. The Delhi rape case, unlike others, was also given to the fast track court because of the worldwide outrage India received in its aftermath. Otherwise, most rape survivors rarely speak out and if they do, their lives are often endangered and threatened, depending on the severity of the case itself and the perpetrator's rank in the society. Through the analysis of Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury's, 2016 film Pink, and Ajay Bahl's film Section 375 …

White Silence And Violence: Positionality And Storytelling In Women’S Rights Movements, Inka Boehm

Human Rights Brief

Our identity impacts everything about how we move through the world as individuals. In the legislative process, identity is often disregarded but has detrimental effects if ignored. Positionality describes how society shapes identities through power and privilege. This methodology requires researchers to analyze their world with their own privileges in mind and is often overlooked by policymakers.

Sexual Violence As A Weapon Of War In Ethiopia's Tigray Region And The Developing Adjudication Of Violations Of The Protocol On The Rights Of Women In Africa, Valerie R. Cook

American University International Law Review

On November 4, 2020, a civil war broke out in the Tigray region of Ethiopia between joint Ethiopian and Eritrean military forces and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (“TPLF”). The war is in part an ethnic conflict between the newly centralized nationalist government under Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and the once politically dominant beneficiaries of a federalist system, the TPLF. Sexual violence as a method of war has become a hallmark of this conflict as reports of rape by Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers against Tigrayan women have increased.

Punishment And Prejudice: Reproductive Coercion In Immigration And Customs Enforcement Detention Centers, Inka Skłodowska Boehm

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

Introduction

Pauline Binam arrived in the United States from Cameroon as a toddler, with no notion of the dangers her new home had in store. At twenty-eight years old, Pauline found herself separated from her daughter and awaiting deportation in the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia. Pauline consented to what she believed was a minor procedure after suffering from irregular menstrual bleeding, an ailment likely triggered by her two-year confinement. Unbeknownst to Pauline, the doctor removed one of her fallopian tubes, barring her ability to give birth to more children. A year later, Pauline came forward following a …

Civil Rights In The Workplace: It's Time To Cut The Excess And Get To The Truth, Hnin N. Khaing

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

On February 8, 1964, during the last few hours before the enactment of the Civil Rights Act, thanks to an individual described as a “racist, male octogenarian,” Congress haphazardly added “sex” as a prohibited basis for discrimination alongside race, color, religion, and national origin under Title VII1 of the Act. It was not until two decades later, in 1986, that the Supreme Court recognized sexual harassment as a form of sex discrimination under Title VII. Five years later, Anita Hill’s riveting public testimony, during the nomination hearings for Justice Clarence Thomas, ignited a nationwide discussion on sexual harassment. A quarter …

The Supreme Mistake: When A Choice Is Really No Choice At All, 55 Uic L. Rev. 68 (2022), Brooke Payton

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

June Medical Services L.L.C V. Russo: Analyzing The Negative Impact Of Maintaining The Status Quo On Abortion, 55 Uic L. Rev. 120 (2022), Colleen Reider

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Plain Meaning Of Sex: A Note On Bostock V. Clayton County, 55 Uic L. Rev. 357 (2022), Christopher Dallas

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Justifying The Margins: Granting Suspect Classification To Trans* Individuals In The U.S. Judicial System, 55 Uic L. Rev. 403 (2022), James Casey Edwards

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

In Need Of Transition: Transgender Inmate Access To Gender Affirming Healthcare In Prison, 55 Uic L. Rev. 773 (2022), Erin Murphy Fete

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.