Law and Gender Commons^™

International Human Rights And Feminism: When Discourses Meet, Karen Engle

Michigan Journal of International Law

In this article, the author brings some of the issues identified and discussed in domestic law into public international law, through an analysis of that area of human rights law pertaining to women. Although she is inspired by the domestic debate, her purpose here is not specifically to critique or defend rights. Rather, to explore the various ways that advocates of international women's rights have deployed, and at the same time critiqued, existing rights frameworks in order to achieve change for women. In doing so, the author analyzes the multiple roles that rights discourse plays in the advocacy of women's …

Rape And Responsibility, Lynne Henderson

Articles by Maurer Faculty

I am a "lucky" survivor of a rape committed by a stranger - "lucky", because people believed me, a jury convicted the man of raping me, and he is still in prison ten years later. I know many women who have been raped who were not so fortunate, because they believed the rape was their fault, because no one else believed them, because they knew their rapist, or because they were married to him and it wasn't a crime. We share some things - the anger, the pain, the anguish, the fear - and not others; nevertheless, this is what …

Feminism Awry: Excesses In The Pursuit Of Rights And Trifles, Kenneth Lasson

All Faculty Scholarship

Perhaps it is best to begin with the positive. From virtually any perspective, liberal and conservative feminists in the twentieth century have improved the quality of life for many women in a number of noteworthy ways. They have helped win the right to vote, to own property, to make contracts, to serve on juries, to use contraceptives.

They have succeeded in asserting the need for enhanced economic opportunities: equal pay for equal work, maternity leave, flex-time for mothers. They have made significant advancements against both domestic battery and sexual harassment in the workplace. As a consequence of all these efforts, …

Canadian Tort Law: A Review For The Nineties, B T. Hill

Dalhousie Law Journal

My purpose in writing this review follows from a tradition initiated by feminist scholars. My analysis of Canadian Tort Law. Cases, Notes and Materials begins with a survey of the casebook with commentary concerning its historical development as a casebook, focussing on instances where gender issues are raised. I then offer a critique concerning the lack of consideration and misappropriation of gender issues in the recently released 1990 edition of the casebook, using illustrative examples from the casebook and a selection of two feminists' critique of tort law. Some modest suggestions for improvement are made throughout the review, and the …

Gender Justice Without Foundations, Marion Smiley

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Feminism/Postmodernism edited by Linda J. Nicholson and Justice and the Politics of Difference by Iris Marion Young

The Challenges Of Multiplicity, Jennifer Nedelsky

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought by Elizabeth V. Spelman

Feminizing Unions: Challenging The Gendered Structure Of Wage Labor, Marion Crain

Michigan Law Review

In this article, I argue that labor unions can be an effective, central tool in a feminist agenda targeting the gendered structure of wage labor. Collective action is the most powerful and expedient route to female empowerment; further, it is the only feasible means of transforming our deeply gendered market and family structure. Others have laid the groundwork by showing how existing individual-model challenges have been unable to accomplish such broad-based reform. I begin where they leave off.

Book Review. Law's Patriarchy, Lynne N. Henderson

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Law's Patriarchy, Lynne Henderson

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Feminist Jurisprudence: Why Law Must Consider Women's Perspectives, Ann Juergens

Faculty Scholarship

A growing number of scholars are asking how the law would be different if it took women's points of view and experiences into account. Feminist Jurisprudence argues that we must look at the norms embedded in our legal system and rethink the law. It is about being inclusive of women, and of all people who differ from the norms of the law as it is today. The endeavor will necessarily shake up established relations between family, the workplace and the state. Lawyers, judges, and legislators should get ready for the changes.

Economics, Feminism, And The Reinvention Of Alimony: A Reply To Ira Ellman, June Carbone

Vanderbilt Law Review

Divorce reform and gender roles are inextricably linked. When Lenore Weitzman chronicled the devastating consequences of divorce for most women, she described a legal system that, in an effort to be gender neutral in a formal sense, made no allowance for the domestic role women continue to perform. Herma Hill Kay, in reviewing Weitzman-inspired proposals to expand the scope of the financial awards made at divorce, nonetheless warned against encouraging "future couples entering marriage to make choices that will be economically disabling for women, thereby perpetuating their traditional financial dependence upon men and contributing to their inequality with men at …

Re-Vision Of The Bankruptcy System: New Images Of Individual Debtors, Karen Gross

Michigan Law Review

A Review of As We Forgive Our Debtors: Bankruptcy and Consumer Credit in American by Teresa A. Sullivan, Elizabeth Warren, and Jay Lawrene Westbrook

Nomos And Thanatos (Part B). Feminism As Jurisgenerative Transformation, Or Resistance Through Partial Incorporation?, Richard F. Devlin

Dalhousie Law Journal

In Part A of this essay, "The Killing Fields", I developed a critique of the disciplinary impulses that underlie modern law and legal theory. Invoking a number of perspectives and a plurality of analyses, I proposed that male-stream legal theory and contemporary law both assume as inevitable, and legitimize as appropriate, the funnelling of violence through law. The problem with a funnel, however, is that it does not curtail or reduce that which is channelled through it. On the contrary, to funnel is to condense and to intensify. Viewed from this perspective, interpreted from the bottom up, law and legal …

Toward An Expanded Conception Of Law Reform: Sexual Harassment Law And The Reconstruction Of Facts, Holly B. Fechner

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Note uses feminist reform of sexual harassment law to show how the reconstruction of factual descriptions can lead to change in the law. Part I describes the feminist methodology of consciousness raising and analyzes Catharine MacKinnon's Sexual Harassment of Working Women as an example of a successful consciousness-raising tool. Part II discusses sexual harassment doctrine and presents a case study illustrating how changing the way legal decision makers think about facts can lead to law reform. Part III discusses how social construction theory aids understanding of changes in sexual harassment law.

Whose Nature? Practical Reason And Patriarchy, Lynne Henderson

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Feminism's Search For The Feminine: Essentialism, Utopianism, And Community, Susan H. Williams

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Equality Theory, Marital Rape, And The Promise Of The Fourteenth Amendment, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

During the 1980s a handful of state judges either held or opined in dicta what must be incontrovertible to the feminist community, as well as to most progressive legal advocates and academics: the so-called marital rape exemption, whether statutory or common law in origin, constitutes a denial of a married woman's constitutional right to equal protection under the law. Indeed, a more obvious denial of equal protection is difficult to imagine: the marital rape exemption denies married women protection against violent crime solely on the basis of gender and marital status. What possibly could be less rational than a statute …

Reflections On Identity, Diversity And Morality, Deborah W. Post

Scholarly Works

The author reflects over events in her life that helped her define herself and her ethical identity, a black woman teacher.

Deconstructing Gender, Joan C. Williams

Michigan Law Review

I start out, as have many others, from the deep split among American feminists between "sameness" and "difference." The driving force behind the mid-twentieth-century resurgence of American feminism was an insistence on the fundamental similarity of men and women and, hence, their essential equality.

I begin in Part I by challenging the widely influential description of gender advocated by Carol Gilligan. While Part I challenges the description of gender differences offered by Gilligan feminists, it does not deny the existence of gender differences. The chief strength of the feminism of difference is its challenge to what have been called male …

Respect For Diversity: The Case Of Feminist Legal Thought, Carl W. Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

Respect for diversity was one quality many faculty members considered significant when searching in 1987 for a new dean of the University of Michigan School of Law. Yet other so-called elite law schools and less prestigious institutions recently have evinced little concern for diversity and even indifference toward the idea. Tenure and appointment disputes at several Ivy League schools have sparked heated controversy and call into question their institutional commitments to diversity. Those disputes have involved the legitimacy of work by women in legal theory and feminist legal thought, although considerable contentious activity also seems to reflect a general lack …

Book Review Of Feminism As Critique: On The Politics Of Gender, James C. Foster

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Brief Amici Curiae Of Feminist Anti-Censorship Taskforce, Et Al., In American Booksellers Association V. Hudnut, Nan D. Hunter, Sylvia A. Law

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The document that follows represents both a legal brief and a political statement. It was written for two purposes: to mobilize, in a highly visible way, a broad spectrum of feminist opposition to the enactment of laws expanding state suppression of sexually explicit material; and to place before the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit a cogent legal argument for the constitutional invalidity of an Indianapolis municipal ordinance that would have permitted private civil suits to ban such material, purportedly to protect women. Drafting this brief was one of the most demanding and exhilarating assignments either author has yet …

Law And Sex, Christina B. Whitman

Reviews

In Feminism Unmodified, a collection of speeches given between 1981 and 1986, Catharine MacKinnon talks of law from the perspective of feminism. MacKinnon does not approach her topic as a lawyer with a uniquely legal perspective on feminism; she brings, instead, a distinctively feminist approach to law. Nor is the feminism from which she speaks grounded in the standard political theories: MacKinnon disclaims and attacks the Marxist approach to feminism, the socialist approach to feminism, and, most emphatically and repeatedly, the liberal approach to feminism that has been embraced by many lawyers in their effort to use law to eliminate …

From False Paternalism To False Equality: Judicial Assaults On Feminist Community, Illinois 1869-1895, Frances Olsen

Michigan Law Review

This essay will examine the "equal treatment" versus "special treatment" for women issue as it arose in Illinois in the late nineteenth century. In 1869 the Illinois Supreme Court barred Myra Bradwell from the practice of law on the basis that she was a married woman, and in 1870 it reaffirmed its exclusion of women in In re Bradwell, the state decision the United States Supreme Court upheld in Bradwell v. Illinois. This denial of equal treatment to women, especially the concurring opinion by United States Supreme Court Justice Bradley, appears to many to represent paternalism at its …

Two Hundred Years Later?, Yvonne Stam

IUSTITIA

The revival of feminism is in many ways different from its earlier stage, although this may in large part be due to what the early feminists accomplished. They were more concerned with substantive legal change-property rights, child custody, divorce, suffrage, and others. In addition to filling in some of the substantive right gaps, we today are more concerned with social attitudes and the exercise of legal rights. Although modern-day feminists have advocated the passage of some reform legislation particularly, the Equal Rights Amendment, much of the focus of the movement is on social and cultural changes.

The Equal Rights Amendment As An Instrument For Social Change, Lynn Andretta Fishel, Clarine Nardi Riddle

IUSTITIA

"The Equal Rights Amendment: Will it do so little, we don't need it -or so much, we shouldn't have it?"

The paradox stems from the arguments of the groups who oppose the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). On one hand, they claim that the 14th Amendment and Title V1II provide all the tools women need, so the ERA won't be able to accomplish anything uniquely significant. On the other hand they contend, with even greater fervor, that the ERA will be so powerful it will destroy the fabric of society. The paradox is not altogether ludicrous, however, when it is recognized …

Feminism And The Legalization Of Prostitution: How Far Down The River?, Marilyn C. Zilli

IUSTITIA

One of the most telling issues on the state of the women's movement today is that of the legalization of prostitution. It would be inappropriate to say that the issue has caused a breach in the ranks: the term is inapplicable to a movement which has never claimed coherency and which has, in fact, consistently demonstrated an inability to reconcile the views of its various factions. The prostitution issue is important, rather, precisely because it underscores these differences of analysis and tactics which have appeared in other areas and the splits between white middle class liberal women, radical feminists, marxist …

Rip-Off Professionalism, Marilyn C. Zilli

IUSTITIA

In the February 1972 issue of PRO SE (National Law Women's Newsletter) an article entitled "Professional Rip-off" criticized the Women's Liberation Movement for producing what the authors call "grasping opportunists," "pleasant, reasonable, charming, and eternally submissive sell-out[s] " (page 4). They are referring to professional women and posit that because, in a capitalist society, professional status is a privilege enjoyed by few, the claim that all women will benefit from an improvement in the status of professional women could not be farther from the truth (page 4): "Instead of making women more 'equal,' the new female professionals make themselves more …

Indiana Criminal And Penal Legislation Respecting Women, Daniel James

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.