Law and Gender Commons^™

Gender-Based Criteria For Asylum, Gabriel Eckstein, Gregg Epstein

Human Rights Brief

No abstract provided.

Gender Asylum Reflects Mistaken Priorities, Dan Stein

Human Rights Brief

No abstract provided.

Political Lawyering, One Person At A Time: The Challenge Of Legal Work Against Domestic Violence For The Impact Litigation/Client Service Debate, Peter Margulies

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

The premise of this Article is that, in his assertion that client service work is political lawyering, Ralph Reed is right. Indeed, Gary Bellow made a similar point about the political content of both impact litigation and client service work in a classic article written almost twenty years ago. Of course, Reed and Bellow are hardly ideological soulmates. Reed disapproves of the political content of service work, while Bellow heartily endorses it. On that point, this Article sides with Bellow. It employs the example of domestic violence lawyering to demonstrate why Bellow and Reed are correct that client service work …

Succeeding In Law School: A Comparison Of Women's Experiences At Brooklyn Law School And The University Of Pennsylvania, Marsha Garrison, Brian Tomko, Ivan Yip

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This Article reports our findings from a replication of the Penn research conducted at Brooklyn Law School in order to test the experience-performance link reported by the Penn researchers. Brooklyn Law School offers an ideal setting for a test of the Penn research because it already has adopted most of the reforms that the Penn researchers believe would reduce women's alienation from the learning environment and thus improve their academic performance. First, Brooklyn Law School, as compared to other American law schools, has a large proportion of women faculty. During the 1994-95 academic year, thirty-seven percent of its tenured and …

China's Denial Of Tibetan Women's Right To Reproductive Freedom, Eva Herzer, Sara B. Levin

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This Article first provides a historical account of the social and political context of the PRC's family planning policies in Tibet. Part B describes the PRC's official family policies from 1982 to the present. Part C discusses the PRC's actual practices, including its population quota controls, focusing on the forced and coerced abortions and sterilizations performed on Tibetan women. Part D applies international human rights law and concludes that the PRC's family planning policy, as implemented, violates international human rights laws. The Article concludes by recommending points of action for the PRC and international community to address these human rights …

Can Families Be Efficient? A Feminist Appraisal, Ann Laquer Estin

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This Article examines the convergence of feminist and law and economics theory on family law questions, particularly issues of marriage and divorce. Both feminist legal theory and law and economics analysis have come to occupy a significant place in the American legal academy, demonstrated by growing numbers of conferences, journals, casebooks and monographs, and electronic mail lists in each area. Not surprisingly, as the two fields have grown, they have begun to touch, to overlap, and occasionally to come into conflict. This process has been evident in the extensive literature on sex discrimination in employment and is increasingly apparent in …

Granting Political Asylum To Potential Victims Of Female Circumcision, Gregory A. Kelson

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Part I of this article examines two cases. In one case, a United States immigration court allowed female circumcision as a defense to deportation. In another case, the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board granted political asylum after recognizing female circumcision as a form of persecution. Part II assesses the extent of protections currently provided for potential victims of female circumcision under U.S. asylum law and analyzes the factors that a court should consider when making asylum determinations. Part III recommends that gender should be added to the enumerated grounds for persecution under U.S. asylum law. This section provides a hypothetical …

Innocent Spouses, Reasonable Women And Divorce: The Gap Between Reality And The Internal Revenue Code, Stephen A. Zorn

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This Article asks whether the "reasonable woman" should become the standard for women seeking relief from tax liabilities under the innocent spouse provision of the I.R.C. and whether an even more specific standard should be adopted for women who are also going through divorce or are in similar situations.

U.N. Women's Event Unleashed Powerful Ideas, Ann Juergens

Faculty Scholarship

Juergens describes her experience at the Non-Governmental Organizations Forum of the United Nations' Fourth World Conference on Women, where a "Platform for Action", the U.N. action plan for women and girls was created.

A Case For Pregnancy-Based Unemployment Insurance, Mark R. Brown

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Professor Brown argues that unemployment insurance laws should be amended to provide coverage to otherwise eligible, pregnant claimants. Under current law, women who quit because of pregnancy are either disqualified from receiving unemployment benefits altogether or qualify only after childbirth. Those who are fired, meanwhile, often either cannot prove the motivation for their discharge or discover that they are disqualified because of their unavailability for work. Professor Brown uses a case study to illustrate the problems posed by pregnancy and unemployment insurance. He proposes model legislation that extends coverage to all pregnant claimants who temporarily separate from their employment.

Reflections On The Limitations Of Rational Discourse, Empirical Data, And Legal Mandates As Tools For The Achievement Of Gender Equity In American Higher Education, Susan J. Scollay, Carolyn S. Bratt

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Scholars and academicians implicitly accept and subscribe to the notion that reasoned discourse supported by empirical data is at the core of the academic enterprise. Theoretically, then, organizational change within the academy ought to be attainable through the use of rational processes based upon the systematic collection, analysis, and interpretation of data to define the scope of the problem and to identify logical solutions. However, the centuries-long attempt to achieve gender equity for women in institutions of higher education belies the truth of that belief in the power of reason as a catalyst for reforming American higher education.

Beginning with …

Ladies In Red: Learning From America's First Female Bankrupts, Marie Stefanini Newman

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Several years ago, the Honorable Joyce Bihary, a bankruptcy judge in Atlanta, Georgia, asked me3 why our country's first bankruptcy law specifically referred to debtors using “he” or “she” rather than a gender-neutral noun (such as “bankrupts”) or the male possessive pronoun “he.” Implicitly, she was also asking whether there were any women debtors under our early bankruptcy laws. Although I had read the Bankruptcy Act of 1800 more than once, I did not recollect its use of these gender-inclusive pronouns. Nor did I know why the Act employed them. Despite having given considerable thought to contemporary women in debt, …

A False Public Sentiment: Narrative And Visual Images Of Women Lawyers In Film, Louise Everett Graham, Geraldine Maschio

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments claimed for women not only equality of rights under the law, but a cultural status that was not the product of compliance. It sought to enfranchise women across the entire panoply of social activity, and to afford them representation in a number of areas. Whether women have achieved the stature aspired to by the Declaration of Sentiments can be approached in a variety of ways. We have chosen to do so by exploring cinematic images of women lawyers.

Popular film serves as a cultural text. When we look at a group of films on …

Introduction, The Sesquicentennial Of The 1848 Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention: American Women's Unfinished Quest For Legal, Economic, Political, And Social Equality, Carolyn S. Bratt

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

On July 19, 1998, America celebrated the 150th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention. Almost three hundred women and men including Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Frederick Douglass met on that July date in 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York, for a two-day discussion of the "social, civil and religious rights of woman." At the conclusion of the meeting, sixty-eight women and thirty-two men signed their names to a Declaration of Sentiments and this country's organized women's rights movement began. The Declaration of Sentiments was the earliest, systematic, public articulation in the United States of the ideas that fuel …

The Politics Of Collective Security, Anne Orford

Michigan Journal of International Law

Part I argues that conventional international legal analyses about Security Council actions do not consider the gender-differentiated effects of those actions. The universality of male interests is taken for granted by international lawyers. The first level of analysis thus involves adding women in; that is, considering the consequences that Security Council actions have had for women in Kuwait, Iraq, Cambodia, Somalia, Mozambique, Bosnia, and the United States. I argue that many women are in fact rendered less secure by actions authorized by the Security Council in the name of collective security. As a result, women must have a voice in …

Men May Work From Sun To Sun, But Women's Work Is Never Done: International Law And The Regulation Of Women's Work At Night, Christine Haight Farley

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

At the turn of the century in both the United States and in Europe, governments enacted laws to protect women from the most harmful aspects of industrialization. One such piece of protective legislation was the ban on the employment of women at night. Discovering that regulation of working hours had a negative effect on their competition in the world market, these western states looked to impose this standard internationally. Thus in 1919 the International Labor Organization enacted the Convention Concerning Employment of Women During the Night.

By the time the International Labor Organization responded to complaints that the convention was …

Community Culture And Tradition: Maintaining Male Dominance In Conservative Institutions, Christine M. Venter

Journal Articles

"The freer women are to share their gifts with society and to assume leadership in society, the better are the prospects for the entire human community to progress in wisdom, justice and dignified living ... " So argued Mary Ann Glendon, the Vatican delegate to the Fourth World Conference on Women in September, 1995. While Glendon's point is well taken, in many societies, including the Catholic Church which Glendon represented at the Conference, women often do not have the opportunity to choose their roles and share their gifts and talents with society in the manner they deem most appropriate. In …

Homologizing Pregnancy And Motherhood: A Consideration Of Abortion, Julia E. Hanigsberg

Michigan Law Review

In this essay I reconsider abortion in order to bridge what initially seem to be two opposing frameworks: first, the conception of abortion as an issue of women's bodily integrity and liberty, and second, the acknowledgement of the existence and meaning of intrauterine life. The abortion choice is indeed deeply and necessarily tied to women's bodily integrity. I will discuss how taking away women's ability to control their decision not to become mothers can be severely damaging to their very sense of self, for this denial of decisionmaking divides women from their wombs and uses their wombs for a purpose …

Fictionalizing Harassment—Disclosing The Truth, Maria L. Ontiveros

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Disclosure by Michael Crichton, and Bearing Witness: Sexual Harassment and Beyond—Everywoman's Story by Celia Morris

Pragmatism, Feminism, And The Problem Of Bad Coherence, Catharine Pierce Wells

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Reinterpreting Property by Margaret Jane Radin

Constitutional Misconceptions, Radhika Rao

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Children of Choice: Freedom and the New Reproductive Technologies by John A. Robertson

Putting Women First, Mary Coombs

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Gender, Crime, and Punishment by Kathleen Daly

The Countermajoritarian Paradox, Neal Davis

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade. by David J. Garrow

W Stories: Women In Leadership Positions In The Judiciary, Deanell Reece Tacha

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Pregnancy And Unemployment: Problems And Solutions?, Mark R. Brown

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Abstract for a piece in the 1995 Unemployment Compensation: Continuity and Change symposium presented by the Advisory Council on Unemployment Compensation and the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform.

Putting Women First, Mary I. Coombs

Articles

No abstract provided.

Forgotten Victims: Responsibility Under Law For Systematic Sexual Violence Toward Women During Warfare, Linda A. Malone

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

The Ties That Bind: An Interdisciplinary Analysis Of Gender, Ethnicity, And The Practice Of Law, Rosemary C. Salomone

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Over the past decade, fueled in part by Carol Gilligan's controversial book, In a Different Voice, both feminists and scholars of color have critically examined the law from the "outsiders'" perspective. Stretching methodological bounds, this interrelated body of scholarship has utilized narrative form to question the gender and racial implications of social practices and legal rules and to demonstrate the useful purpose that stories serve as a means of including marginalized groups in law's evolution and reform. Women scholars of color have carved out a particular role in this debate, criticizing feminism's categorical conceptualization of "woman." They have advanced …

Myths And Moms: Images Of Women And Termination Of Parental Rights, Odeana R. Neal

All Faculty Scholarship

For most of us, the word "mother" evokes a myriad of often conflicting images and emotions, expectations and disappointments, and gratitude and blame. What a mother is - our own mothers and the class of people who are mothers - means much more than that a woman has given birth. We expect mothers to provide their children with all the love, caring, nurturing, and emotional fulfillment that we perceive those children need and desire; we expect her to be all things that we want her to be when we need her to be them. A woman who can fulfill the …

Marriage And Divorce: Legal Foundations, Azizah Y. Al-Hibri

Law Faculty Publications

This unique reference is a comprehensive encyclopedia dedicated to the institutions, religion, politics, and culture in Muslim societies throughout the world. Placing particular emphasis on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World contains over 750 articles in four volumes on Muslims in the Arab heartland as well as South and Southeast Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

An invaluable resource, the Encyclopedia offers extensive comparative and systematic analyses of Islamic beliefs, institutions, movements, practices, and peoples on an international scale. The alphabetically arranged articles range from brief 500-word essays to major interpretive and synthetic treatment …