Law and Gender Commons^™

Gender Equity Through Human Rights: Local Efforts To Advance The Status Of Women And Girls In The United States, Human Rights Institute

Human Rights Institute

Because human rights are experienced close to home, local governments have jurisdiction over a range of human rights issues, including those related to employment, education, housing, and public safety. Indeed, local agencies and officials are essential to the promotion and protection of human rights in the United States. They work every day to create conditions under which individuals and communities can flourish, and they are well-situated to build and advance a culture of human rights, based on dignity, freedom from discrimination, and opportunity.

With a focus on women’s rights, this resource provides an overview of core human rights principles and …

Justice, Interrupted: The Effect Of Gender, Ideology, And Seniority At Supreme Court Oral Arguments, Tonja Jacobi, Dylan Schweers

Faculty Articles

Oral arguments at the U.S. Supreme Court are important—they affect case outcomes and constitute the only opportunity for outsiders to directly witness the behavior of the Justices of the highest court. This Article studies how the Justices compete to have influence at oral argument, by examining the extent to which the Justices interrupt each other; it also scrutinizes how advocates interrupt the Justices, contrary to the rules of the Court. We find that judicial interactions at oral argument are highly gendered, with women being interrupted at disproportionate rates by their male colleagues, as well as by male advocates. Oral argument …

Vulnerability And Inevitable Inequality, Martha Albertson Fineman

Faculty Articles

The abstract legal subject of liberal Western democracies fails to reflect the fundamental reality of the human condition, which is vulnerability. While it is universal and constant, vulnerability is manifested differently in individuals, often resulting in significant differences in position and circumstance. In spite of such differences, political theory positions equality as the foundation for law and policy, and privileges autonomy, independence and self-sufficiency. This article traces the origins and development of a critical legal theory that brings human vulnerability to the fore in assessing individual and state responsibility and redefining the parameters of social justice. The theory arose in …

Bathroom Laws As Status Crimes, Stephen Rushin, Jenny Carroll

Faculty Publications & Other Works

A growing number of American jurisdictions have considered laws that prohibit trans individuals from using bathroom facilities consistent with their gender identities. Several scholars have criticized these so-called “bathroom laws” as a form of discrimination in violation of federal law. Few scholars, though, have considered the criminal justice implications of these proposals. By analyzing dozens of proposed bathroom laws, this Article explores how many laws do more than stigmatize the trans community—they effectively criminalize it. Some of these proposed laws would establish new categories of criminal offenses for trans individuals who use bathrooms consistent with their gender identity. Others would …

Tampon Taxes, Discrimination, And Human Rights, Bridget J. Crawford

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This Article makes two contributions to the study of taxation. First, it argues that the “tampon tax”--an umbrella term to describe sales, VAT, and similar “luxury” taxes imposed on menstrual hygiene products--illustrates how deeply embedded gender is in legal structures such as the tax system that are thought to be neutral. Second, this Article posits that tax reform is an essential tool in achieving both gender equality and human rights. In recent months, activists around the globe have harnessed the power of the Internet to raise awareness of the tampon tax. In response to pressure from constituents, five states and …

Shame Agent, Joan W. Howarth

Scholarly Works

As a nation, we have recently experienced a significant positive shift in norms against casual campus sexual violence. These changes are perhaps as dramatic as the attitudinal shifts over recent decades regarding drunk driving or cigarette smoking. In a world in which masculinity is too often associated with sexual conquest, and women still suffer under intense and conflicting pressures regarding their sexual behavior, pushing this potential transformation forward is both difficult and necessary. Enforcement of Title IX protections has become a crucial driver of much of this change.

This is an account of some of what I learned as a …

Title Ix In The Technological Age - Challenging Rape Culture And Myths Through Fairer Use Of Electronic Communications, Drew Simshaw

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Telling Stories In The Supreme Court: Voices Briefs And The Role Of Democracy In Constitutional Deliberation, Linda H. Edwards

Scholarly Works

On January 4, 2016, over 112 women lawyers, law professors, and former judges told the world that they had had an abortion. In a daring amicus brief that captured national media attention, the women “came out” to their clients; to the lawyers with or against whom they practice; to the judges before whom they appear; and to the Justices of the Supreme Court.

The past three years have seen an explosion of such “voices briefs,” 16 in Obergefell and 17 in Whole Woman’s Health. The briefs can be powerful, but their use is controversial. They tell the stories of non-parties—strangers …

Using Feminist Theory To Advance Equal Justice Under Law, Linda L. Berger, Bridget J. Crawford, Kathryn M. Stanchi

Scholarly Works

This essay provides an overview of the purposes, themes and scholarly methodologies evidenced at the October 2016 conference, The U.S. Feminist Judgments Project: Writing the Law, Rewriting the Future, a two-day conference hosted by the Center for Constitutional Law at the University of Akron School of Law. This essay provides some of the background to the development of the path-breaking book, Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Opinions of the United States Supreme Court (Cambridge University Press, 2016). It also focuses attention on the importance of diversity on the bench, with a particular need for judges who understand or experience the intersecting …

Reinvigorating Commonality: Gender & Class Actions, Brooke D. Coleman, Elizabeth G. Porter

Faculty Articles

The modern class action, the modern feminist movement, and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were all products of the creativity and turmoil of the 1960s. As late as 1961 — one year after Justice Felix Frankfurter rejected new law school graduate Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a law clerk because she was a woman — the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the constitutionality of a Florida statute that required men, but not women, to serve on juries, on the ground that women’s primary role was in the home. As Betty Friedan put it in 1963’s The Feminine Mystique, …

Leisure/Crime, Immaterial Labor, And The Performance Of The Teenage Girl In Harmony Korine’S Spring Breakers (2012) And Sofia Coppola’S The Bling Ring (2013), Maryn Wilkinson

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers (2012) and Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring (2013) introduced audiences to girls exploring criminal behavior both for and as leisure. The films introduce an idea of leisure/crime: criminal acts that appear to develop as natural, fruitful extensions of leisure activities, circumnavigating conventional laws of capitalism, yet still allow its actors to access, attain, and consume goods, money, value, and status. Through close analysis of the films’ style and character performances, this article proposes that the films and their enactments of leisure/crime in fact offer complex critical commentary on contemporary relations between the representation of teenage girls, …

The Transgressive Girl, Nicole Killian

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This paper imagines the Internet as a potentially utopian girl-space by looking at how girls, and pop-cultural depictions of girls, use the language, signs, and symbols of the Internet, an inherently patriarchal system, in transgressive ways. I propose the 1990s media representations as the touchstone moment when the conditions of possibility for imagining the hacker as a weaponized girl emerged visually in popular culture. The girl, exemplified by various figures within popular television and film culture, is a precursor to and postulates an entry point into the ways Internet today is used in transgressive nature.

Close Encounters: A Feminist Legal Theory Analysis Of The State Treatment Of Female Child Sexual Abuse Victims, Jessica Dixon Weaver

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This article explores the way in which the law currently deals with sexual violence against female children in the home – evaluating the ways in which the state has access to the private realm of the family and the ways in which civil and criminal legal systems deal with this type of trauma to girls across a spectrum of time. Research shows that the child protection system only captures a small percentage of sexual abuse right after it happens. However, research also shows that female child sex abuse survivors appear in statistically significant numbers among other groups – drug and …

The Divide - Press Release, Sally Brown

Promotion

No abstract provided.

Fathers And Feminism: The Case Against Genetic Entitlement, Jennifer S. Hendricks

Publications

This Article makes the case against a nascent consensus among feminist and other progressive scholars about men's parental rights. Most progressive proposals to reform parentage law focus on making it easier for men to assert parental rights, especially when they are not married to the mother of the child. These proposals may seek, for example, to require the state to make more extensive efforts to locate biological fathers, to require pregnant women to notify men of their impending paternity, or to require new mothers to give biological fathers access to infants.

These proposals disregard the mother's existing parental rights and …

A Prescription For Overcoming Gender Inequity In Complex Litigation: An Idea Whose Time Has Come, Suzette M. Malveaux

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Impact Of Wal-Mart V. Dukes On Employment Discrimination Class Actions Five Years Out: A Forecast That Suggests More Of A Wave Than A Tsunami, Suzette M. Malveaux

Publications

No abstract provided.

Uniform Rules: Addressing The Disparate Rules That Deny Student-Athletes The Opportunity To Participate In Sports According To Gender Identity, Chelsea Shrader

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Who Is Parent And Who Is Child In Same-Sex Family? - Legislative And Judicial Issues For Lgbt Families Post-Separation, Part Ii: The U.S. Perspective, Mary Kay Kisthardt, Richard A. Roane

Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Using Feminist Theory To Advance Equal Justice Under Law, Bridget J. Crawford

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This essay provides an overview of the purposes, themes and scholarly methodologies evidenced at the October 2016 conference, The U.S. Feminist Judgments Project: Writing the Law, Rewriting the Future, a two-day conference hosted by the Center for Constitutional Law at the University of Akron School of Law. This essay provides some of the background to the development of the path-breaking book, Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Opinions of the United States Supreme Court (Cambridge University Press, 2016). It also focuses attention on the importance of diversity on the bench, with a particular need for judges who understand or experience the intersecting relationships …