Law and Gender Commons^™

Sexual Liberty And Same-Sex Marriage: An Argument From Bisexuality, Michael Boucai

San Diego Law Review

This article proposes that same-sex marriage bans channel individuals, particularly bisexuals, into heterosexual relationship and relationships, impermissibly burdening sexual liberty interests protected under Lawrence v. Texas. A claim from sexual liberty departs dramatically from the legal paradigms and advocacy strategies that currently dictate the terms of constitutional debate on this issue. This article proceeds in four parts. Part II develops the legal argument that same-sex marriage bans are unconstitutional under Lawrence because they substantially burden the right to choose homosexual relations and relationships. Part III posits bisexuality, understood as dual-sex desire, as an illuminating perspective on the coerced heterosexuality of …

The Constitutional Right To (Keep Your) Same-Sex Marriage, Steve Sanders

Michigan Law Review

Same-sex marriage is now legal in six states, and tens of thousands of same-sex couples have already gotten married. Yet the vast majority of other states have adopted statutes or constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage. These mini-defense of marriage acts not only forbid the creation of same-sex marriages; they also purport to void or deny recognition to the perfectly valid same-sex marriages of couples who migrate from states where such marriages are legal. These nonrecognition laws effectively transform the marital parties into legal strangers, causing significant harms: property rights are potentially altered, spouses disinherited, children put at risk, and financial, …

Deciphering A Duality: Understanding Conflicting Standards In Sex & Violence Censorship In U.S. Obscenity Law, Rushabh P. Bhakta

Political Science Honors Projects

This research examines the division in US obscenity law that enables strict sex censorship while overlooking violence. By investigating the social and legal development of obscenity in US culture, I argue that the contemporary duality in obscenity censorship standards arose from a family of forces consisting of faith, economy, and identity in early American history. While sexuality ingrained itself in American culture as a commodity in need of regulation, violence was decentralized from the state and proliferated. This phenomenon led to a prioritization of suppressing sexual speech over violent speech. This paper traces the emergence this duality and its source.

Sexing Harris: The Law And Politics Of The Movement To Defund Planned Parenthood, Mary Ziegler

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Changing Social Security To Achieve Long-Term Solvency And Make Other Improvements: Background Factors, Issues, Options, Peter W. Martin

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

For years those responsible for Social Security and policy analysts have acknowledged that the present statutory framework for determining and financing program benefits is unsustainable. Nonetheless, despite the work of Presidential commissions, countless Congressional hearings, proposals for reform advanced by individuals and groups across the political spectrum, changes to Social Security that would restore its fiscal balance into the foreseeable future have repeatedly been deferred or deflected by the nation's law-makers.

This paper aims to assist analysis of and reflection on the range of options for ensuring Social Security's future while not adding yet another solvency proposal to the already …

Nguyen V. Ins And The Application Of Intermediate Scrutiny To Gender Classifications: Theory, Practice, And Reality, Norman T. Deutsch

Pepperdine Law Review

The Supreme Court has articulated three theoretically different standards of review for determining whether government action has denied any person equal protection of the laws: rational basis, intermediate scrutiny, and strict scrutiny. One area of this tri-level jurisprudence that continues to be troublesome in practice is the application of intermediate scrutiny to gender classifications. Nguyen v. INS is significant because it is the first case in which all nine Justices unequivocally applied that standard in such a case. Nonetheless, the application of the standard remains problematic since the Court split five to four on its application to the facts. This …

Stopping The Chronic Batterer Through Legislation: Will It Work This Time?, Prentice L. White

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Game Plan To Fight Human Trafficking: Lessons From Super Bowl Xlvi, Abigail Lawlis Kuzma

DePaul Journal of Women, Gender and the Law

No abstract provided.

Ongoing Employment Discrimination Against Women In The Wake Of Wal-Mart V. Dukes, Joelle M. Shabat

DePaul Journal of Women, Gender and the Law

No abstract provided.

Attempting To Slice Out Male Circumcision, Brandon Baseman

DePaul Journal of Women, Gender and the Law

No abstract provided.

Responsible Pornography: Respecting Women's Interests And Rights In The Industry, Kelly Cronin

DePaul Journal of Women, Gender and the Law

No abstract provided.

The Report Of The Military Leadership Diversity Commission: An Inadequate Basis For Lifting The Exclusion Of Women From Direct Ground Combat, Kingsley R. Browne

Law Faculty Research Publications

The recommendation of the Military Leadership Diversity Commission to lift the exclusion of women from ground combat is deeply irresponsible and cannot be taken seriously. The CommissionÕs lodestar was diversity, not military effectiveness, and it failed to take into consideration a wealth of information bearing on its recommendation. The CommissionÕs recommendation was based primarily on sources that cannot be considered authoritative, and the CommissionÕs analysis of the sources that it did consult was superficial and in conflict with some of the facts, as opposed to the Òspin,Ó contained in these very sources. The Commission substantially downplayed the sex difference in …

Finding Women In Early Modern English Courts: Evidence From Peter King's Manuscript Reports, Lloyd Bonfield

Chicago-Kent Law Review

This article constitutes a preliminary report on cases involving women that appear in a manuscript authored by Chief Justice Peter King during the first seven years of his tenure as Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas in early eighteenth century England. While the 327 cases he reported in the manuscript run the gamut of the procedural and substantive matters that vexed early modem Englishmen, the cases isolated and discussed hereinafter are the fifty-five cases in which women were a party to the litigation observed. By so doing, isolating cases in which women appeared as litigants, we may catalog …

Law, Land, Identity: The Case Of Lady Anne Clifford, Carla Spivack

Chicago-Kent Law Review

This article presents the case history of Lady Anne Clifford, a seventeenth century Englishwoman who spent most of her adult life fighting to regain her ancestral estates, which she felt her father had unjustly left to her uncle instead of to her. Although, as the article explains, she had the better of the legal argument, that was no match for the combined forces of her two husbands and of King James I, who sought to deprive her of her land. Finally, however, because Clifford outlived her uncle's son, the last male heir, she did inherit the estates.

The article examines …

Globalization And The Re-Establishment Of Women's Land Rights In Nigeria: The Role Of Legal History, Adetoun Ilumoka

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Much has been written on women's limited legal rights to land in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa, which is often attributed to custom and customary law. Persisting biases against women in legal regimes governing land ownership, allocation and use, result in a situation in which women, in all age groups, are vulnerable to dispossession and to abuse by male relatives in increasingly patriarchal family and community governance structures.

This paper raises questions about the genesis of ideas about women's rights to land in Nigeria today. It is an analysis of two court cases from South Western Nigeria in the early …

Puerto Rican Women Nationalist Vs. U.S. Colonialism: An Exploration Of Their Conditions And Struggles In Jail And Court, Margaret Pour

Chicago-Kent Law Review

This article examines the legal ramifications experienced by several women members of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party as a result of their militant opposition to U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico. These women participated in the 1950 uprising in Puerto Rico or, in the case of Lolita Lebrón, the Nationalist Party's 1954 attack on the U.S. Congress. The article explores their sentences and conditions in prison from a gendered perspective. It also suggests that several of the women were tortured while in prison. The article concludes that the women drew strength from their political commitment to Puerto Rican independence and their …

Engendering The History Of Race And International Relations: The Career Of Edith Sampson, 1927–1978, Gwen Jordan

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Edith Sampson was one of the leading black women lawyers in Chicago for over fifty years. She was admitted to the bar in 1927 and achieved a number of firsts in her career: the first black woman judge in Illinois, the first African American delegate to the United Nations, and the first African American appointed to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Sampson was also a pro-democracy, international spokesperson for the U.S. government during the Cold War, a position that earned her scorn from more radical African Americans, contributed to a misinterpretation of her activism, and resulted in her relative obscurity …

The Global "Parliament Of Mothers": History, The Revolutionary Tradition, And International Law In The Pre-War Women's Movement, Susan Hinely

Chicago-Kent Law Review

In spite of recent literature that examines late nineteenth and early twentieth century transnational movements in innovative ways, the largest transnational movement of that period, the women's movement, remains lodged in academic and popular memory as the "suffrage movement," a single-issue campaign waged by privileged Victorian women, a foregone development in the march of electoral progress that ended in victory with postwar enfranchisement. A fresh approach to the suffrage archive reveals instead a far more radical movement than conventional history suggests, one that explicitly linked its cause with both the revolutionary democratic tradition and with anti-colonial activism. Like the non-Western …

Women's Rights, Public Defense, And The Chicago World's Fair, Barbara Babcock

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Women were an important part of the great public meetings held in connection with the Chicago World's Fair. One of these "Congresses," as they were called, was devoted to the achievements of nineteenth century women, and brought together suffragists, club women, society ladies, and activists of all stripes from around the world. The Congress of Jurisprudence and Law Reform featured two American women lawyers holding their own on a platform with leading professors, judges and advocates. With an extraordinary speech based largely on her own experience in the courts, Clara Foltz launched the public defender movement.

Women Lawyers And Women's Legal Equality: Reflections On Women Lawyers At The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition In Chicago, Mary Jane Mossman

Chicago-Kent Law Review

In Chicago in 1893, for the first time in history, women lawyers were invited to participate with male lawyers and judges at the Congress on Jurisprudence and Law Reform, one of a number of Congresses organized in conjunction with the World's Columbian Exposition. By the 1890s, women lawyers had achieved considerable success for at least two decades in gaining admission to state bars in the United States, and their success provided important precedents for women who wished to become lawyers in other parts of the world. Yet, as Nancy Cott explained, although women's admission to the professions had been seen …