Law and Gender Commons^™

P*Law 2025: Immigration For Lgbtq+ Individuals: Laws, Barriers, And Insights, Center For Public Service Law, Victoria Nielson, Lermán Montoya, Fernanda Gianesella, Noemi Masliah, Gleozyl Saavedra, Natalia Palacino Camargo

2024–2025 Flyers

A P*LAW 2025 event focused on the legal challenges and barriers faced by LGBTQ+ individuals in the immigration system. The panel featured legal experts and advocates discussing policy insights, representation, and protections for LGBTQ+ immigrants.

Episode 9: Update From The Sidelines, Sara Gras

Season 01

This episode provides an update on developments related to the inclusion of trans athletes in interscholastic sports, including the Second Circuit’s en banc decision in the Soule v. Connecticut case, the general Title IX Final Rule litigation, transvestigation during the Summer Olympics, and a recent Senate hearing on an entirely different subject that foreshadows what the next four years holds for trans athletes. My guest for this episode is one my research assistants, Emily Raedisch, a 2nd year law student at Seton Hall Law. She researched and wrote this episode. Court opinions and documents: Soule v. Connecticut Ass’n of Sch., …

Pushing Boundaries, Paula A. Monopoli

Faculty Scholarship

This essay was originally published in Balkinization as part of an online symposium and it is reprinted with permission. The essay engages with Julie Suk's book, After Misogyny: How the Law Fails Women and What to Do About It. It suggests that feminist legal scholars have been considering their intellectual options in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. In After Misogyny, Professor Suk offers a conceptual path forward in a post-Dobbs world. Suk’s trenchant analysis of the failure of law to render substantive gender equality and her …

Transformative Experiences, Anticipatory Regret, And Informed Consent, Elizabeth Lanphier, Shannon Fyfe

Scholarly Articles

Regret risk is not consistently part of information sharing within informed consent. Yet two kinds of decisions that often invoke concerns about future regret, abortion and sterilization, raise considerations for the role of regret in clinical decision-making and informed consent, particularly regarding decisions about potentially transformative experiences. We distinguish between first-personal and second-personal anticipatory regret and argue that first-personal anticipatory regret can play a productive role, but second-personal anticipatory regret can function in ways that are pernicious. Introducing second-personal anticipatory regret into medical informed consent processes is, we argue, not only not required for informed medical decision-making, but impermissible within …

State Legislatures And Trans* Genocide (?) In The United States, Shannon Fyfe

Scholarly Articles

Certain state legislatures in the United States have targeted trans* people and other members of the queer community through an onslaught of legislative efforts since early 2020. Many of these efforts have targeted trans* youth specifically, by banning or limiting their access to gender-affirming care. As I have shown, gender-affirming care is necessary health care for trans* youth and is crucial for their mental and physical health and well-being. Some have argued that these legislative efforts targeting trans* youth are genocidal, that they are intentionally aimed at destroying the trans* community. I agree that the harm experienced by the trans* …

Battered Woman Syndrome: A Legal Defense To Homicide, Savannah Plaisted

Northwestern Law Journal des Refusés

No abstract provided.

Transnational Legal Violence: Undocumented Women V. U.S. Immigration Law, Luis A. Mendoza

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis examines how undocumented women, particularly Latinas, experience "transnational legal violence" within the U.S. immigration system. Transnational legal violence extends the framework of legal violence by identifying how immigration policies weaponize absence and distance across national boundaries, forcing women to choose between physical safety and legal recognition. The thesis is guided by a central question: What immigration system are migrant women, specifically Latinas, responding to?

The analysis rooted in the intersections of gender and citizenship reveals how immigration law remains rooted in coverture traditions that historically rendered immigrant women dependent on male U.S. citizens. For these women, deportation presents …

Voting Matters: Materiality Considerations And The Shareholder Vote, Renee M. Jones

Seattle University Law Review

For the shareholder franchise to have meaning, shareholders must have access to relevant information to inform their voting decisions. The securities laws’ disclosure requirements play an essential role in informing the shareholder vote.

This Essay focuses on the question of the materiality of information in the context of shareholder voting. It addresses the question of whether ESG-related information is material, positioning the materiality inquiry within the context of shareholders’ voting decisions. It explores the definition of materiality with a focus on the “reasonable investor” concept embedded within the definition. The Essay argues that the implicit expectations of many commentators that …

Vulnerability In The Law, Sara Aziz, Aisli Ali, Casey Williams, Lindsey Nye, Saya Khandhar, Sofia Bazdekis

Human Rights Brief

On Monday, February 24, 2025, the Human Rights Brief (“the Brief”) at American University Washington College of Law (“WCL”) held its annual spring symposium with the theme of “Vulnerability in the Law.” This year’s theme aimed to highlight areas where legal systems fall short in protecting vulnerable populations, as well as highlighting where the law itself is vulnerable. The symposium was organized by Symposium and Education Editor Sara Aziz, in collaboration with the Junior Symposium Staff: Asli Ali, Casey Williams, Lindsey Nye, Saya Khandhar, and Sofia Bazdekis. The team worked relentlessly to coordinate panels on legal issues, including technology, environmental …

Femicide Is A Human Rights Violation, Not A Cultural Consequence: Why Nigeria Is Violating The Maputo Protocol, Bolu Jegede

Human Rights Brief

Femicide, the most extreme form of gender-based violence, is the intentional killing of women simply because they are women. It is driven by harmful societal norms, such as oppressive gender roles, systemic discrimination towards women and girls, and gender power imbalances. Femicide is a universal problem but gaps in data on this issue mask the true scale of violence. For the first time since 2013, when the UNODC began publishing regional estimates, Africa surpassed Asia as the region with the highest number of victims.

Pumpable Hours: Legal Protections For Lactating Individuals Through The Lens Of The Legal Profession, Elise Gonzalez

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

The Supreme Court denied women the right to be admitted to the legal profession in 1872. Since this ruling, women have entered the legal profession with force in growing numbers. Today, women comprise nearly 55% of law students across the country and 40% of practicing attorneys in the United States. Despite the growing number of women in the legal profession, women are often reminded of the profession’s sexist history, particularly during a period that is uniquely connected to women—motherhood.

Through A Glass Darkly: How Securities Disclosures Give A Distorted View Of The Economy, Gerald F. Davis

Seattle University Law Review

Our understanding of the American economy often relies on stylized facts derived from mandatory disclosures by listed corporations. Data vendors like Standard & Poor’s vacuum up 10Ks and proxy statements into databases, and scholars distill these into tentative maps. This may have been adequate for a postwar economy centered on asset-heavy manufacturers, but it is increasingly out of step with an information-based economy. Companies listed on the stock market are fewer in number and less representative than they were, light in tangible assets and people, and heavy on IP. Basic facts such as what industry they are in are increasingly …

Shareholder Expression In A Time Of Heightened Political Tension, Aaron A. Dhir

Seattle University Law Review

In this article, I provide context for my forthcoming research project on shareholder proposals and racial equity audits. Since the murder of George Floyd in May of 2020, progressive shareholder actors have increasingly used the proposal mechanism to advance diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice-related goals. These proposals have frequently gone beyond requesting the usual corporate fare of diversity trainings, intersectionality workshops, affinity groups, etc. Instead, a more ambitious type of proposal asks corporate America to conduct racial equity audits, defined as “an independent, objective and holistic analysis of a company’s policies, practices, products, services and efforts to combat systemic racism …

Who Regulates Abortion Now?, Nathan G. Cortez, Joanna L. Grossman

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Contrary to both conventional wisdom and recent Supreme Court pronouncements, abortion is not simply a matter of state oversight. For a quarter century now, the federal government has been intimately involved in “regulating” abortion through the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s approval and continued oversight over mifepristone and other abortion medications. This Article considers the extent to which federal abortion law both coexists and conflicts with state law, as it does with most areas of medicine. We evaluate which body of law is better able at achieving the goals of modern medicine that is evidence-based, ethical, consistent, and individualized.

The Tenth Anniversary Of Marriage Equality: How Traditional Marriage Law Led To Constitutional Protection For Same-Sex Marriage, Joanna L. Grossman

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This essay explores how the history of interstate marriage recognition law was central to the Supreme Court’s recognition of constitutional protection for the right of same-sex couples to marry. Prior to the 1990s, there were essentially no laws on same-sex marriage in the United States. That changed in the 1990s, when the Hawaii Supreme Court issued a ruling in Baehr v. Lewin that made authorization of same-sex marriage seem inevitable in that state. The threat fueled the adoption first of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in 1996 and then mini-DOMAs in most states. Those laws were broad and …

Who Decides: The Role Of Parental Rights In Abortion And Gender-Affirming-Care Decisions For Minors, Joanna L. Grossman

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The American legal system presumes that children’s interests are best protected by their parents and, secondarily, by the state’s parens patriae authority. Yet this structure falters when parental authority and state power are infused with political and ideological agendas. This Essay examines how these dynamics have distorted decision-making authority in two contexts—minors’ access to abortion and gender-affirming medical care—and allowed children’s welfare and autonomy to be sacrificed to partisan aims. The law is inconsistent on the role of parental rights—typically empowering parents to grant or withhold consent to a minor’s abortion but categorically stripping them of the power to consent …

Why Domestic Violence Offenders Don't Give Up Their Guns, Natalie Nanasi

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Perpetrators of intimate partner violence are barred by federal law and many states' laws from possessing firearms. While such prohibitions enjoy popular support, they are sporadically and inconsistently enforced, placing the lives of survivors at risk when offenders do not voluntarily comply. Many experts, including this author, have offered legal and policy solutions to increase the likelihood that perpetrators of domestic violence will either willingly relinquish their guns or otherwise be dispossessed of them. But these proposals may have been premature.

This Article is the first to take a step back and inquire why offenders do not surrender their firearms …

Blood Cobalt: Unmasking And Charging Corporations For Involvement In International Law Violations In The Democratic Republic Of Congo, Bolu Jegede

American University International Law Review

Joint Criminal Enterprise (JCE) is a legal doctrine developed by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to hold participants in a criminal enterprise equally liable for all results of the group’s criminal actions, even if the individuals were not directly involved in committing the crimes. While traditionally used to prosecute individual criminal actions, JCE provides a legal pathway to hold corporations criminally liable for their actions that further international law violations. Although corporations currently do not have specific, listed responsibilities under international law, they are required to respect human rights and ensure their activities do not perpetrate …

The Feminicide Epidemic In Brazil: An Analysis Considering The Convention Of Belém Do Pará And The Rome Statute, Suzana Coelho Da Silva

Human Rights Brief

Gender-based violence against women is an issue little discussed both in academia and in various sectors of society. Men in positions of power block any attempts by women to be observed in places of influence and visibility, reflecting a patriarchal society that sees women as inferior, fragile beings incapable of exercising functions that requires intelligence, strength, and rationality.

A Woman’S Body Is Not Her Husband’S: Marital Duty And The Right To Refuse At The Ecthr, Dionejala Muhammad

Human Rights Brief

The European Court of Human Rights (“ECtHR”) issued a decision in H.W. v. France on January 23, 2025, ruling that under the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (“ECHR”), specifically Article 8(1), a woman is not required to provide sex to her husband to fulfill marital duty.