Law and Gender Commons^™

Women And Microfinance: Why We Should Do More, Elissa Mccarter

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

No abstract provided.

No Penis, No Problem, Kay L. Levine

Fordham Urban Law Journal

Over the past century and a half, the gendered essence of statutory rape has become deeply embedded in the purpose of the statute, extending its tentacles far beyond the statutory language, such that we can no longer extricate the male-on-female image from the formal law's requirements for prosecution. The reality of statutory rape is, however, far more complex than the traditional gender construct implies. Female sex abusers and male victims exist, in substantial numbers and varieties. Part I documents the statutory rape law's gendered essence, explaining the formal law's traditional gendered classification scheme, the Supreme Court's approval of that approach, …

Women And Law: A Comparative Analysis Of The United States And Indian Supreme Courts’ Equality Jurisprudence, Eileen Kaufman

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Incarcerated Men And Women, The Equal Protection Clause, And The Requirement Of “Similarly Situated”, Natasha L. Carroll-Ferrary

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Confronting Conventional Thinking: The Heuristics Problem In Feminist Legal Theory, Nancy Levit

Faculty Works

The thesis of The Heuristics Problem is that the societal problems about which identity theorists are most concerned often spring from and are reinforced by thinking riddled with heuristic errors. This article first investigates the ways heuristic errors influence popular perceptions of feminist issues. Feminists and critical race theorists have explored the cognitive bias of stereotyping, but have not examined the ways probabilistic errors can have gendered consequences. Second, The Heuristics Problem traces some of the ways cognitive errors have influenced the development of laws relating to gender issues. It explores instances in judicial decisions in which courts commit heuristic …

Women’S Representation On The Courts In The Republic Of South Africa, Ruth B. Cowan

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

No abstract provided.

Rethinking Prison Sex: Self Expression And Safety, Brenda V. Smith

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This article analyzes legislation and policies that limit prisoners' sexual expression and autonomy. The article juxtaposes prisoners interest in sexual expression against the interests of the state in regulating sex by and between prisoners. The article concludes that the state has an interest in regulating sex between inmates and staff and in regulating coerced or forced sex between inmates. In other instances prisons could accommodate prisoners' interest in sexual expression and achieve important goals such as better decisionmaking; improved relations with family and partners to aid community reentry; reduction of prison rape; and as inmate management.

Against "Academic Deference": How Recent Developments In Employment Discrimination Law Undercut An Already Dubious Doctrine, Scott A. Moss

Publications

When the defendant in an employment case is a college or other institution of higher education, the plaintiff usually will face an "academic deference" argument. Citing the importance of their "academic freedom," defendants and sympathetic courts have asserted that federal courts should decline to "invade" higher education with "federal court supervision." Whether or not courts cite the "academic deference" doctrine expressly, they certainly have proven hostile to professors' claims of discrimination, dismissing as a matter of law claims that seemed quite strong, or at least solid enough to allow a factfinder to rule either way. Indeed, empirical evidence shows that …

Some Dumb Girl Syndrome: Challenging And Subverting Destructive Stereotypes Of Female Attorneys, Ann Bartow

Law Faculty Scholarship

This Essay considers ways in which female attorneys confront sexism and stereotyping in the legal profession and in life, and strongly endorses embracing feminism, and wearing comfortable shoes.

Why Are There Fewer Women In Engineering?, Sue Ellen Haupt

ADVANCE Library Collection

This paper attempts to explain the paucity of women in engineering. While the percentage of women entering engineering and science careers has been increasing, the number at higher ranks has not increased as quickly, after considering the appropriate time lag. The differences in tenure rate due to gender alone were statistically insignificant. Instead, these were attributed to the fact that women who are married or have children are less successful than are men with matching characteristics. One solution proposed is to recognize that priorities might be different at differing stages of family life. It is also important to encourage more …

The Feminist Pervasion: How Gender-Based Scholarship Informs Law And Law Teaching, Deseriee A. Kennedy, Ann Bartow, F. Carolyn Graglia, Joan Macload Hemingway

Scholarly Works

This is an edited, annotated transcript of a conference panel discussion on feminism, sex, and gender in law, legal education, and legal scholarship. The transcript reflects widely divergent views of the place of feminism, sex, and gender in the law and legal scholarship. Moreover, the panelists differ as to the role feminism has played in the lives of women as law students and practicing attorneys. In the latter part of the transcript, the panelists' remarks focus in on hotly debated issues surrounding possible gender (or sex) and racial bias in LSAT testing and the innate abilities of women and men …

Separate But Equal Education In The Context Of Gender, Isabelle Katz Pinzler

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Myths And Realities In The Sameness/Difference Debate, Rosemary C. Salomone

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Remarks made by Lawrence H. Summers, the President of Harvard University, suggesting by his "best guess" that "intrinsic aptitude" primarily accounts for the paucity of women holding senior academic positions in math, physics, engineering, and technology' have touched off a new round in a timeless debate over gender sameness and difference. This seeming bow to biology, emanating from the head of the nation's most prestigious academic institution, conjures up memories of yet another Harvard figure almost a century and a half ago. At that time, Dr. Edward Clarke, a member of Harvard's Board of Overseers and a former member …

In Response To The Remarks By Lawrence H. Summers, Presenting Empirical Data On The Differences In Learning Styles Between Males And Females, Robin A. Boyle, Andrea Honigsfeld

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Lawrence H. Summers' remarks at a conference on "Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce," raise provocative issues regarding reasons for the disparities of "women's representation in tenured positions in science and engineering at top universities and research institutions." He postulated that one reason for this disparity was the "different availability of aptitude at the high end." One suspects that the word "aptitude" struck a raw nerve in the audience. After all, most academics in the audience would be familiar with the research of Carol Gilligan, and her well-known book, In A Different Voice, suggesting that women have different …

Constitutional Law—State Employees Have Private Cause Of Action Against Employers Under Family And Medical Leave Act—Nevada Department Of Human Resources V. Hibbs, 538 U.S. 721 (2003)., Gabriel H. Teninbaum

ExpressO

The Eleventh Amendment of the United States Constitution provides that non-consenting states are not subject to suit in federal court. Congress may, however, abrogate the states’ sovereign immunity by enacting legislation to enforce the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment. In Nevada Department of Human Resources v. Hibbs, the Supreme Court of the United States considered whether Congress acted within its constitutional authority by abrogating sovereign immunity under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), which allows private causes of action against state employers to enforce the FMLA’s family-leave provision. The Court held abrogation was proper under the FMLA and state …

The Best Interest Standard: How Broad Judicial Discretion And Influences Of Social And Political Suggestion Have Led To An Abandonment Of The Rule’S Primary Purpose In Child Custody Decisions, Lakeisha J. Johnson

ExpressO

The vital questions in child custody disputes all concern that which is in the best interest of the child. Historically, interpretations of the “best interest” standard have been founded upon presumptions steeped in the notion of natural rights and duties based largely upon a mix of scientific and subjective conclusions regarding gender-based parenting roles and the need to sustain them. My research demonstrates that, as courts attempt to avoid the decisions of the past and submit to the societal will of the present, the modern application of the “best interest of the child” standard has led unexpectedly to an abandonment …

Paradoxes Of Health And Equality: When A Boy Becomes A Girl, Noa Ben-Asher

ExpressO

This paper is about an unusual child custody dispute between the parents of a six-year-old child and the child welfare services of Franklin County, Ohio. The conflict emerged when the child’s parents complied with their male child’s professed desire to be treated as a girl by attempting to enroll the child in the first grade as a girl. The paper treats this case as an exemplary test-case of contemporary co-dependence between scientific-medical discourse and liberal-rights discourse. The paper analyzes the positions of the two sides of the custody dispute according to the classic modern distinction between mind and body. On …

Textual Harassment: A New Historicist Reappraisal With Gender In Mind, Hila Keren

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

From Petticoats To Briefs: History Of Women At The University Of Missouri-Kansas City School Of Law, Robert C. Downs, Brooke Grant, Elizabeth Sterling

Faculty Works

The story of women in American society has largely been defined and recorded by men and the institutions that men have dominated for most of the past two hundred-odd years. Women have been denied access to education, employment, political power and other benefits of social intercourse by exclusion, intimidation, ridicule and patronization. The experience of women in law school is one part of that experience. Law school is an arduous undertaking whether one is male or female. Gaining admission to modern law schools requires talent and demonstrated academic performance in a competitive environment. But in the nineteenth century, the foremost …

Lysistrata, Women And War: International Law's Treatment Of Women In Conflict And Post-Conflict Situations, Emma L. Lindsay

ExpressO

Aristophanes’ Lysistrata is powerful anti-war play often revived during times of international conflict. This paper uses Lysistrata to highlight and critique binary oppositions that underpin the treatment of women in conflict and post-conflict situations in the play and in international law. While many of the experiences of women and girls in war are similar to those of men and boys, there are important differences. Existing inequalities between women and men, and patterns of discrimination against women and girls, tend to be exacerbated in wartime. There are circumstances in which women suffer harms of a different kind and to a different …

Setting The Record Straight: Maryland's First Black Women Law Graduates, Taunya Lovell Banks

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Righting The Balance: Gender Diversity In The Geosciences, Robin E. Bell, Kim A. Kastens

ADVANCE Library Collection

The blatant barriers are down. Women are now routinely chief scientists on major cruises, lead field parties to all continents, and have risen to leadership positions in professional organizations, academic departments, and funding agencies. Nonetheless, barriers remain. Women continue to be under-represented in the Earth, ocean, and atmospheric sciences.

A New Image In The Looking Glass: Faculty Mentoring, Invitational Rhetoric, And The Second-Class Status Of Women In U.S. Academia, Carlo A. Pedrioli

Faculty Scholarship

This article maintains that because Title VII alone does not have the ability to further the progress women have made in academic hiring, retention, and promotion, looking to remedies in addition to Title VII will be advantageous in helping to improve the status of women in U.S. academia. The article suggests as an additional remedy the implementation of faculty mentoring opportunities for junior female faculty members. A key way of initiating and furthering such mentoring opportunities is a type of discourse called invitational rhetoric, which is “an invitation to understanding as a means to create...relationship[s] rooted in equality, immanent value, …

Race, Gender, And Work/Family Policy, Nancy E. Dowd

UF Law Faculty Publications

Family leave is not an end in itself, but rather is part of a much bigger picture: work/family policy. The goal of work/family policy is to achieve a good society by supporting families. Ideally, families enable children to develop to their fullest capacity and to contribute to their communities and society. Public rhetoric in the United States has always strongly supported families. Our policies, however, have not. In the area of work/family policy, the United States continues to lag behind every other advanced industrialized country, as well as many developing countries, in the degree to which we provide affirmative support …

Critical Race Histories: In And Out, Darren L. Hutchinson

Faculty Articles

Insider critiques of CRT also require critical assessment. Recent internal critics complain that racial identity discourse, including multidimensionality theory, marginalizes more important attention to material, class, or economic issues. If their claim holds true, the material harm critics serve a vital purpose: because racial injustice causes and interacts with economic deprivation, any progressive racial justice movement should interrogate class and economic inequality concems. Nevertheless, the analysis of the material harm critics suffers because it dichotomizes class and multidimensionality. Although these critics bifurcate multiplicity and class analysis, multiplicity theories relate to class analysis in two important respects. First, poverty has multidimensional …

Masculinities At Work, Ann C. Mcginley

Scholarly Works

This article focuses on the study of masculinities, a body of theoretical and empirical work by sociologists, feminist theorists and organization management theorists. This work, much of which employment law scholars have ignored, studies the role of masculinities, which are often invisible, in creating structural barriers to the advancement of many women and some men at work. Masculinities comprise both a structure that reinforces the superiority of men over women and a series of practices, associated with masculine behavior, performed by men or women, that aid men to maintain their superior position over women. In their less visible form, masculinities …

Paradoxes Of Health And Equality: When A Boy Becomes A Girl, Noa Ben-Asher

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

In the fall of 2000, six-year-old male Zachary from a small town in Ohio, claimed that s/he was a girl and requested, from now on, to be called Aurora. When the child's parents honored this unusual wish and made efforts to make official the child's feminine identity, the case turned into a custody battle between the parents and the state of Ohio. Although the child was occasionally treated as a girl at home from the age of two, the attempt to register the child in public school as a girl motivated the state dissolution of this family. At the …

Workplace Mediation: The First-Phase, Private Caucus In Individual Discrimination Disputes, Emily M. Calhoun

Publications

No abstract provided.

Negotiating Gender And (Free And Equal) Citizenship: The Place Of Associations, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

This article focuses on the place of associations within John Rawls's political liberalism and in feminist liberalism. It revisits crucial components of political liberalism in light of feminist criticisms, such as those of Susan Moller Okin and Martha Nussbaum, that political liberalism's protection of associational life hinders women's free and equal citizenship. Offering a different reading of Rawls, it finds greater potential to draw on political liberalism to support such citizenship. It then brings liberal feminist ideas about the place of associations into dialogue with recent feminist work on gender, rights, and culture calling for models of rights within culture …

Sex Discrimination In The Nineties, Seventies Style: Case Studies In The Preservation Of Male Workplace Norms, Michael L. Selmi

ExpressO

This article analyzes a series of class action employment discrimination cases that have arisen in the last decade to challenge persistent sex discrimination against women. These cases have targetted the practices in the securities and grocery industries, and include a series of sexual harassment class action claims. These cases pose a challenge to the consensual view that sex discrimination is now perpetuated through subtle practices, and instead highlight the continuing ways in which male norms are preserved in the workplace through intentional acts of hostility and exclusion.