Supreme Court of the United States Commons^™

What Best To Protect Transsexuals From Discrimination: Using Current Legislation Or Adopting A New Judicial Framework, S. Elizabeth Malloy

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This article specifically examines the issues and controversies that transsexual individuals have encountered as a result of their lack of protection under anti-discrimination laws, particularly the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Title VII. Part I is an overview of our society's binary sex/gender system and how this system serves to exclude and disenfranchise transsexuals. Part II examines the relationship between disability law and transsexuals, both explaining why they were excluded from the ADA and how state disability laws have provided more protection. Part III discusses how transsexuals have fared under a Title VII sex discrimination approach. This section also …

Rethinking Consent In A Big Love Way, Cheryl Hanna

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This Article is based on a presentation at the Michigan Journal of Gender and Law as part of their symposium "Rhetoric & Relevance: An Investigation into the Present & Future of Feminist Legal Theory." In it, I explore the problem of categorical exclusions to the consent doctrine in private intimate relationships through the lens of the HBO series Big Love, which is about modern polygamy. There remains the normative question both after Lawrence v. Texas and in feminist legal theory of under what circumstances individuals should be able to consent to activity that takes place within the context of a …

Past As Prologue: Old And New Feminisms, Martha Chamallas

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Each "stage" of feminist legal theory-and each brand or strand of feminism- stays alive and is never completely replaced by newer approaches. When I first attempted to synthesize the field of Feminist Legal Theory for a treatise I was writing at the end of the twentieth century, I thought it would be useful to think chronologically and to analyze the major developments of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. I crudely divided feminist legal theory into three stages roughly corresponding to the preceding decades: the equality stage of the 1970s, the difference stage of the 1980s, and the diversity stage of …

Converging Trajectories: Interest Convergence, Justice Kennedy, And Jeannie Suk's "The Trajectory Of Trauma", Jennifer S. Hendricks

Publications

This essay responds to Jeannie Suk's recent article in the Columbia Law Review, The Trajectory of Trauma: Bodies and Minds of Abortion Discourse. Suk argues that feminists are responsible for legitimizing a paternalistic attitude towards women that came home to roost in Gonzales v. Carhart. This essay argues that Suk's critique of feminist paternalism needs to be supplemented with a discussion of traditional paternalism and its influence on how feminist advocacy enters the law. In particular, it suggests that Derrick Bell's theory of interest convergence provides a useful framework for understanding the cultural, legal, and rhetorical evidence adduced …

Body And Soul: Equality, Pregnancy, And The Unitary Right To Abortion, Jennifer S. Hendricks

Publications

This Article explores equality-based arguments for abortion rights, revealing both their necessity and their pitfalls. It first uses the narrowness of the "health exception" to abortion regulations to demonstrate why equality arguments are needed--namely because our legal tradition's conception of liberty is based on male experience, no theory of basic human rights grounded in women's reproductive experiences has developed. Next, however, the Article shows that equality arguments, although necessary, can undermine women's reproductive freedom by requiring that pregnancy and abortion be analogized to male experiences. As a result, equality arguments focus on either the bodily or the social aspect of …

Contingent Equal Protection: Reaching For Equality After Ricci And Pics, Jennifer S. Hendricks

Publications

The Supreme Court's decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District #1 has been extensively analyzed as the latest step in the Court's long struggle with the desegregation of public schools. This Article examines the decision's implications for the full range of equal protection doctrine dealing with benign or remedial race and sex classifications. Parents Involved revealed a sharp division on the Court over whether government may consciously try to promote substantive equality. In the past, such efforts have been subject to an equal protection analysis that allows race-conscious or sex-conscious state action, contingent on existing, de …

'Struck' By Stereotype: Ruth Bader Ginsburg On Pregnancy Discrimination As Sex Discrimination, Neil S. Siegel, Reva B. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

This is an attempt at recovery. This Essay hopes to call attention to then-Professor Ruth Bader Ginsburg's merits brief in Struck v. Secretary of Defense. The brief has been under appreciated in part because the Supreme Court declined to decide the case. But anyone seeking to understand the origins and nature of Justice Ginsburg's views on sex discrimination would be well advised to read this brief. So would anyone interested in reimagining the bounds of constitutional possibility in the realm of gender equality.

New Groups And Old Doctrine: Rethiking Congressional Power To Enforce The Equal Protection Clause, William D. Araiza

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

How Planned Parenthood V. Casey (Pretty Much) Settled The Abortion Wars, Neal Devins

Faculty Publications

More than twenty-one years after Robert Bork's failed Supreme Court nomination and seventeen years after Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, the rhetoric of abortion politics remains unchanged. Pro-choice interests, for example, argue that states are poised to outlaw abortion and that Roe v. Wade is vulnerable to overruling. In this Essay, I will debunk those claims. First, I will explain how Casey's approval of limited abortion rights reflected an emerging national consensus in 1992. Second, I will explain why the Supreme Court is unlikely to risk political backlash by formally modifying Casey- either by restoring the trimester test …

Pregnancy And Sex-Role Stereotyping, From 'Struck' To 'Carhart', Neil S. Siegel, Reva B. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

The guarantee of equal protection of the laws extends to women as well as men. Yet for the first 100 years of the Fourteenth Amendment’s life, the Supreme Court never found a law unconstitutional on the grounds that it discriminated on the basis of sex. Between 1970 and 1980, social movement advocacy and brilliant litigation by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and others changed our constitutional law. Over the course of the decade, the Court extended the anti-stereotyping principle from discrimination on the basis of race to discrimination on the basis of sex. But fidelity to the principle had its limits. In …

Subverting The Marriage-Amendment Crusade With Law And Policy Reform, Anita Bernstein

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Essentially A Mother, Jennifer S. Hendricks

Publications

This article connects the constitutional jurisprudence of the family to debates over reproductive technology and surrogacy. Despite the outpouring of literature on reproductive technologies, courts and scholars have paid little attention to the constitutional foundation of parental rights. Focusing on the structural/political function of parental rights, this article argues that a gestational mother has a constitutional claim to be recognized as a legal parent.

The article first discusses the "unwed father cases." Despite believing that natural sex differences justified distinctions in parental rights, the Supreme Court crafted a test giving men parental rights if they established relationships with their biological …

Gender Stereotyping: Expanding The Boundaries Of Title Vii: Proceedings Of The 2006 Annual Meeting, Association Of American Law Schools, Section On Employment Discrimination Law, Michelle A. Travis, Arthur S. Leonard, Joann Williams, Mirriam Cherry

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Twin Pillars Of Judicial Philosophy: The Impact Of The Ginsburg Collegiality And Gender Discrimination Principles On Her Separate Opinions Involving Gender Discrimination, Rebecca L. Barnhart, Deborah Zalesne

City University of New York Law Review

No abstract provided.

Are Single-Sex Schools Inherently Unequal?, Michael Heise

Michigan Law Review

In chess, a "fork" occurs when a player, in a single move, attacks two or more of an opponent's pieces simultaneously, forcing a necessary choice between unappealing outcomes. Similar to the potentially devastating chess move, single-sex public schooling forks many constitutionalists and feminists. Constitutionalists are forced to reexamine the "separate but equal" doctrine's efficacy, this time through the prism of gender. Although the doctrine - forged in the crucible of race and overcome in the monumental triumph we know as Brown v. Board of Education - rested dormant for generations, persistent (and increasing) single-sex education options are forcing scholars to …

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 …

The Domesticated Liberty Of Lawrence V. Texas, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

In this Commentary, Professor Franke offers an account of the Supreme Court's decision in Lawrence v. Texas. She concludes that in overruling the earlier Bowers v. Hardwick decision, Justice Kennedy does not rely upon a robust form of freedom made available by the Court's earlier reproductive rights cases, but instead announces a kind of privatized liberty right that affords gay and lesbian couples the right to intimacy in the bedroom. In this sense, the rights-holders in Lawrence are people in relationships and the liberty right those couples enjoy does not extend beyond the domain of the private. Franke expresses …

Lochner'S Feminist Legacy, David E. Bernstein

Michigan Law Review

Professor Julie Novkov's Constituting Workers, Protecting Women examines the so-called Lochner era of American constitutional jurisprudence through the lens of the struggle over the constitutionality of "protective" labor legislation, such as maximum hours and minimum wage laws. Many of these laws applied only to women, and Novkov argues that the debate over the constitutionality of protective laws for women - laws that some women's rights advocates saw as discriminatory legislation against women - ultimately had more important implications for the constitutionality of protective labor legislation more generally. Liberally defined, the Lochner era lasted from the Slaughter-House Cases in 1873 - …

Gender Bias: Continuing Challenges And Opportunities, Rebecca Korzec

All Faculty Scholarship

In 1873 the U.S. Supreme Court denied Myra Bradwell the right to practice law, holding "the paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign office of wife and mother." Now, just slightly more a century later, two women sit on the Supreme Court, and almost half of all law students and law school faculty are women.

The Principle And Practice Of Women's "Full Citizenship": A Case Study Of Sex-Segregated Public Education, Jill Elaine Hasday

Michigan Law Review

For more than a quarter century, the Supreme Court has repeatedly declared that sex-based state action is subject to heightened scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause. But the Court has always been much less clear about what that standard allows and what it prohibits. For this reason, it is especially noteworthy that one of the Court's most recent sex discrimination opinions, United States v. Virginia, purports to provide more coherent guidance. Virginia suggests that the constitutionality of sex-based state action turns on whether the practice at issue denies women "full citizenship stature" or "create[s) or perpetuate[s) the legal, social, …

Some Effects Of Identity-Based Social Movements On Constitutional Law In The Twentieth Century, William N. Eskridge Jr.

Michigan Law Review

What motivated big changes in constitutional law doctrine during the twentieth century? Rarely did important constitutional doctrine or theory change because of formal amendments to the document's text, and rarer still because scholars or judges "discovered" new information about the Constitution's original meaning. Precedent and common law reasoning were the mechanisms by which changes occurred rather than their driving force. My thesis is that most twentieth century changes in the constitutional protection of individual rights were driven by or in response to the great identity-based social movements ("IBSMs") of the twentieth century. Race, sex, and sexual orientation were markers of …

Looking Back On Planned Parenthood V. Casey, Christina B. Whitman

Articles

Scholarship that tells us what is really at stake in the lives of people affected makes the law honest and responsive. Whether or not it directly shapes doctrine, this type of scholarship can capture imagination and influence judgment. The Michigan Law Review has published some of the best of this work: Yale Kamisar's articles on coerced confessions, Terry Sandalow's essay on affirmative action, Joe Sax and Phillip Hiestand's description of the emotional impact of living in a slum, Martha Chamallas and Linda Kerber's demonstration of how injuries that uniquely befall women have been dismissed as merely emotional wrongs, and, most …

Conflating Scope Of Right With Standard Of Review: The Supreme Court's Strict Scrutiny Of Congressional Efforts To Enforce The Fourteenth Amendment, Melissa Hart

Publications

No abstract provided.

Ending Male Privilege: Beyond The Reasonable Woman, Stephanie M. Wildman

Michigan Law Review

A Law of Her Own: The Reasonable Woman as a Measure of Man by Caroline A. Forell and Donna M. Matthews aspires to provide a solution for an enigmatic jurisprudential problem - the systemic failure of the legal order to recognize and to redress the injuries that women experience. Feminist scholars have agreed that, for women, the legal separation of public and private spheres often insulates from legal review behavior that harms women. But even in the so-called public sphere, women suffer harms that remain invisible and unnamed. The authors identify four legal arenas in which the "spectrum of violence …

Private Remedies For Public Wrongs Under Section 5 (Symposium: New Directions In Federalism), Evan H. Caminker

Articles

The Supreme Court has ushered in the new millennium with a renewed emphasis on federalism-based limits to Congress's regulatory authority in general, and Congress's Section 5 power to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment in particular. In a recent string of cases, the Court has refined and narrowed Section 5's enforcement power in two significant ways.1 First, the Court made clear that Congress lacks the authority to interpret the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment's substantive provisions themselves, and may only "enforce" the judiciary's definition of Fourteenth Amendment violations. 2 Second, the Court embraced a relatively stringent requirement concerning the relationship between means …

Gay Rights For Gay Whites: Race, Sexual Identity, And Equal Protection Discourse, Darren L. Hutchinson

Faculty Articles

My argument proceeds in four parts. Part I situates my discussion of the synergistic relationship among race, class, gender, and sexuality within a broader body of research on the "intersectionality'' of systems of oppression and of identity categories. Part I then examines how my scholarship attempts to advance this literature both substantively and conceptually. Part II expounds my claim that the comparative and essentialist treatment of race and sexuality within pro-gay and lesbian theory and politics marginalizes gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans­gendered persons of color and constructs and reinforces the notion that the gay and lesbian community is uniformly white …

Foreword (Symposium: Finding A Path To Gender Equality: Legal And Policy Issues Raised By All-Female Public Education), Nadine Strossen

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Gender Sex Agency And Discrimination: A Reply To Professor Abrams, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

According to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, sexual harassment is the fastest-growing area of employment discrimination. In fact, the annual number of sexual harassment complaints filed with the EEOC has more than doubled in the last six years. No one, or at least no one who has given this problem her serious attention, can deny that workplace sexual harassment is a grave problem and that it significantly impedes women's entrance into many sectors of the wage labor market.

Notwithstanding these impressive numbers, sexual harassment legal doctrine remains remarkably undertheorized – particularly by the Supreme Court. For these and other reasons, …

Subtracting Sexism From The Classroom: Law And Policy In The Debate Over All-Female Math And Science Classes In Public Schools, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Publications

No abstract provided.

Treating Sexual Harassment With Respect, Anita Bernstein

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.