Law and Gender Commons^™

(Mis)Appropriated Liberty: Identity, Gender Justice And Muslim Personal Law Reform In India, Cyra Akila Choudhury

Faculty Publications

This article argues that in order to emancipate Indian-Muslim women from an outdated family legal code, their position at the intersection of gender and a minority religion must be taken seriously. Proposals for reform that have been suggested by Western liberal, secular feminists that ignore the importance of women's religious affiliation fail to do this. Moreover, by making assumptions about the strength of secularism in India, the willingness of the state to enact legal reforms driven by gender concerns, and by failing to acknowledge the limits of formal rights alone in changing norms, these scholars do not account for the …

Book Review, Angela Mae Kupenda

Journal Articles

YOUR BLUES AIN’T LIKE MINE is an excellently written, fictionalized account of the lives of several people set in the fifties as a rural Mississippi community reacts to impending school racial desegregation and the killing of a fifteen year old black boy who had the misfortune of speaking French in the direction of a white woman. I’ve used this book to facilitate discussion on issues of race, gender, the law, class, and politics in several of my law school classes such as Race and the Law, Gender and the Law, and Civil Rights.

The Geronimo Bank Murders: A Gay Tragedy, Joan W. Howarth

Scholarly Works

The Geronimo Bank Murders examines the intersection of homosexuality and capital punishment through the lenses of cultural criticism, queer theory, and legal analysis. The paper's subject is Jay Neill, who was executed in 2002 for murdering four people in a gruesome Geronimo, Oklahoma bank robbery in 1984, and for being gay. Current capital punishment doctrine permits, and perhaps even encourages, such results. The Geronimo Bank Murders recasts Neill's story, privileging homosexuality and gender, and uses that account to make three points, each based in law, culture, and politics. First, as a matter of legal doctrine, recognizing the error in using …

Fighting Women: The Military, Sex, And Extrajudicial Constitutional Change, Jill Elaine Hasday

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Supreme Court in Rostker v. Goldberg (1981) upheld male-only military registration, and endorsed male-only conscription and combat positions. Few cases have challenged restrictions on women's military service since Rostker, and none have reached the Supreme Court. Federal statutes continue to exclude women from military registration and draft eligibility, and military regulations still ban women from some combat positions. Yet many aspects of women's legal status in the military have changed in striking respects over the past quarter century while academic attention has focused elsewhere. Congress has eliminated statutory combat exclusions, the military has opened many combat positions to women, …

The Failure Of Title Vii As A Rights-Claiming System, Deborah L. Brake, Joanna L. Grossman

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This Article takes a comprehensive look at the failure of Title VII as a system for claiming nondiscrimination rights. The Supreme Court's recent decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, 127 S. Ct. 2162 (2007), requiring an employee to assert a Title VII pay discrimination claim within 180 days of when the discriminatory pay decision was first made, marks the tip of the iceberg in this flawed system. In the past decade, Title VII doctrines at both ends of the rights-claiming process have become increasing hostile to employees. At the front end, Title VII imposes strict requirements on …

Loving Gender Balance: Reframing Identity-Based Inequality Remedies, Darren Rosenblum

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

The egalitarian voice of the U.S. Supreme Court resonates forty years after it abolished antimiscegenation laws in Loving v. Virginia. While Loving's vigor influences contemporary debates on sex-related marriage restrictions, its impact extends to the hopes and tensions that undergird and unite equality movements. Half a world away, Norway's Corporate Board Quota (CBQ), recently began enforcing a forty percent floor for both sexes on publicly traded companies' boards of directors.

At first glance, Loving's affirmation of an interracial marriage in the face of the state's opprobrium seems impossibly divergent from the CBQ. Loving concerned de jure …

Instead Of Enda, A Course Correction For Title Vii, Jennifer S. Hendricks

Publications

In September 2008, the D.C. federal court issued a landmark decision holding that discrimination against a transgender person was sex discrimination under Title VII. This decision throws into sharp relief the ongoing debates among supporters of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act about whether the compromise on including protection for gender identity claims. Consideration of ENDA in some form will likely be early on the agenda of the next Congress, especially under a Democratic administration likely to support the bill. This essay proposes an alternative to ENDA that would embrace the theoretical connections between sex, gender, and sexual orientation, with important practical …

Walking The Path Of The Law: How Law Graduates Navigate Career Choices And Tolerate Jobs That Fail To Meet Expectations, Deborah J. Cantrell, Elizabeth Levy Paluck, Heather Lord, April Smith

Publications

If one talks to law students about the their career expectations, one is likely to hear a common story: when the student graduates, she plans to go into private practice, or possibly take a government job, or even less probably, take a public interest job. The students think their initial choices of legal jobs set them on a career trajectory that is fairly immutable. However, the students' beliefs may not be based on actual information about how lawyers choose their career paths.

This empirical study of 2800 lawyers who graduated from law school between 1970 and 1999 analyzes whether lawyers …

Diverse Conceptions Of Emotions In Risk Regulation, Peter H. Huang

Publications

No abstract provided.

Friends With Benefits, Laura A. Rosenbury

UF Law Faculty Publications

Family law has long been intensely interested in certain adult intimate relationships, namely marriage and marriage-like relationships, and silent about other adult intimate relationships, namely friendship. This Article examines the effects of that focus, illustrating how it frustrates one of the goals embraced by most family law scholars over the past forty years: the achievement of gender equality, within the family and without.

Part I examines the current scope of family law doctrine and scholarship, highlighting the ways that the home is still the organizing structure for family. Despite calls for increased legal recognition of diverse families, few scholars have …

The Intersection Of Gender And Early American Historic Preservation: A Case Study Of Ann Pamela Cunningham And Her Mount Vernon Preservation Effort, Jill Teehan

Georgetown Law Historic Preservation Papers Series

American historic preservationists universally credit Ann Pamela Cunningham, the woman who saved George Washington's Mount Vernon home, as the chief architect of the historic preservation movement in the United States. However, little scholarship has considered how Cunningham's social position as a woman significantly contributed to her ability to save Mount Vernon, and thus jumpstart a national movement to save historically significant places. Using Cunningham and the organization she formed, the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association of the Union (MVLA), widely regarded as the nation's first historic preservation society, this paper considers the intersection of gender and early historic preservation in the …

An Uninvited Guest: The Federal Death Penalty And The Massachusetts Prosecution Of Nurse Kristen Gilbert, John P. Cunningham

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Casa Of Maryland And The Battle Regarding Human Trafficking And Domestic Worker Rights, Elizabeth Keyes

All Faculty Scholarship

At the November 2006 symposium presented by the University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class, the panelists discussed various issues regarding human trafficking. One entity at the forefront of the fight against human trafficking is CASA of Maryland. This article contains remarks originally made by the author that focused the topic of human trafficking on one particular group of workers: domestic workers. That particular group provides an interesting study because of the many race and gender issues that are wrapped up in the treatment of domestic workers under the law.

Gender Equity In College Athletics: Women Coaches As A Case Study, Deborah L. Rhode, Christopher J. Walker

ExpressO

As Title IX celebrates its 35th anniversary, many have noted the positive impact it has had on women sports. But there is also an unintended (and oft-neglected) byproduct: as opportunities for female students have increased, opportunities for female professionals have declined. This Article focuses on the barriers that still confront women in college athletics, particularly those who seek professional positions in coaching and administration. Part I presents a brief overview of Title IX, which makes clear its limitations in securing gender equity. Part II.A discusses the declining representation and lower success rate of women coaches, while Part II.B explores the …

Casa Of Maryland And The Battle Regarding Human Trafficking And Domestic Workers' Rights, Elizabeth Keyes

Women, Leadership & Equality

No abstract provided.

Seeking Integral Reparations For The Murders And Disappearances Of Women In Ciudad Juárez: A Gender And Cultural Perspective, Jorge Calderón Gamboa

Human Rights Brief

No abstract provided.

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.

The Lost Legislative History Of The Equal Rights Amendment: Lessons From The Unpublished 1983 Markup By The House Judiciary Committee, Paul Taylor, Philip G. Kiko

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.

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 …

Transphobia And The Relational Production Of Gender, Elaine Craig

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Knowing one's place in the social order, whether that place is one of relative privilege or not, serves two psychologically ameliorative functions. It relieves one from the “anxiety of [gender] identity interrogation” and it helps to inform one as to the socially agreed upon, acceptable conduct for interpersonal exchanges--the episteme of social interaction. This Paper will demonstrate that gender identity is produced through relational, contextually influenced, interpretative processes. Because gender is constructed in societies which strongly embrace static, binary conceptions of gender, and in which social, familial, occupational, and sexual *139 interactions are heavily influenced by gendered social scripts, gender …

Transphobia And The Relational Production Of Gender, Elaine Craig

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Knowing one's place in the social order, whether that place is one of relative privilege or not, serves two psychologically ameliorative functions. It relieves one from the “anxiety of [gender] identity interrogation” and it helps to inform one as to the socially agreed upon, acceptable conduct for interpersonal exchanges--the episteme of social interaction. This Paper will demonstrate that gender identity is produced through relational, contextually influenced, interpretative processes. Because gender is constructed in societies which strongly embrace static, binary conceptions of gender, and in which social, familial, occupational, and sexual *139 interactions are heavily influenced by gendered social scripts, gender …

Symposium: Comments On Panel 2, Peter Jaszi

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

Gender Matters: Making The Case For Trans Inclusion, Nancy K. Knauer

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

[Excerpt] “The transgender communities are producing an important and nuanced critique of our gender system. For community members, the project is self-constitutive and, therefore, has an immediacy that also marks the efforts of other marginalized groups who have attempted to make sense of the world through description, interrogation, and ultimately a program for transformation. The transgender project also has universalizing elements because, existing within the gender system, each one of us embodies a particular gender articulation. It is through this articulation that we define ourselves in relation to the gender we were assigned at birth, the gender we choose, the …

Imagining The Law-Trained Reader: The Faulty Description Of The Audience In Legal Writing Textbooks., Jessica E. Price

ExpressO

In law schools today, first-year legal writing courses play a crucial role in helping students learn to communicate about the law. Many legal writing teachers approach legal writing education in a practical way, attempting to pass on their own experiences in law practice settings to students. Unfortunately, as other writers have observed, such reliance on personal knowledge about “what lawyers are like” may lead legal writing teachers to oversimplify a complicated matter – the needs and preferences of the audience for legal writing – and may even amount to indoctrination in stereotypes about law practice. This article offers a closer …

Internalizing Gender: International Goals, Comparative Realities, Darren Rosenblum

Elisabeth Haub School of Law 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 important …

Untying The Knot: An Analysis Of The English Divorce And Matrimonial Causes Court Records, 1858-1866, Danaya C. Wright

ExpressO

This paper is an analysis of the petitions, answers, affidavits, and court docket for the first nine years of the English divorce and matrimonial causes court. It examines in detail the child custody, alimony, gender, and class components of the court’s first nine years. After analyzing the petitions and court docket along gender lines for the different causes of action (divorce, separation, annulment, and restitution of conjugal rights), and their success rate by gender and by age of the marriage, it then breaks down marriages by age and speculates on a variety of causes for the different results and considers …

Superstition-Based Injustice In Africa And The United States: The Use Of Provocation As A Defense For Killing Witches And Homosexuals, Jennifer Dumin

ExpressO

This Article examines two different instances where strong cultural and religious beliefs suggest that an individual is justified in taking another’s life. Focusing primarily on South Africa and the United States, it argues that the rationale used to defend those who kill suspected witches and those who kill suspected homosexuals is the same – merely because a criminal holds a belief that the victim is evil, the criminal is somehow entitled to a lesser punishment. In the United States, those who readily recognize the absurdity of the witchcraft defense may have some difficulty in recognizing the same level of absurdity …

Foreword, Paula A. Monopoli

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.

Fair Use And The Fairer Sex: Gender, Feminism, And Copyright Law, Ann Bartow

Law Faculty Scholarship

Copyright laws are written and enforced to help certain groups of people assert and retain control over the resources generated by creative productivity. Because those people are predominantly male, the copyright infrastructure plays a role, largely unexamined by legal scholars, in helping to sustain the material and economic inequality between women and men. This essay considers some of the ways in which gender issues and copyright laws intersect, proposes a feminist critique of the copyright legal regime which advocates low levels of copyright protections, and asserts the importance of considering the social and economic disparities between women and men when …

Gender And Constitutional Design, Paula A. Monopoli

Faculty Scholarship

Does the allocation of power between the legislative and executive branches, and the way we define the scope of the executive affect whether women ascend to executive office? In this article, Professor Monopoli argues that the constitutional process of boundary-drawing between the legislative and executive branches of government has implications for how successful women will be in ascending to executive positions. She posits that the Hamiltonian vision of an expansive executive with plenary power is the model least likely to result in women’s ascending to executive office. The essay traces the philosophical heritage of Hamilton’s vision and outlines the empirical …