Law and Gender Commons^™

Regulatory Fictions: On Marriage And Countermarriage, Elizabeth F. Emens

Faculty Scholarship

Debates about marriage currently capture much public attention. Scholars have pushed beyond the question of whether gays are worthy of marriage to ask whether marriage is worthy of gays. The present moment of questioning marriage in its current form may be brief Thus, we should take this opportunity to imagine the widest possible range of alternatives to our current marriage regime – what I call countermarriage regimes. This Essay draws on two unlikely sources of legal innovation to expand our thinking about marriage alternatives: literature and anti-gay law. Literature offers an array of countermarriage regimes, including exploding marriage, three-strikes marriage, …

Examining Entrenched Masculinities Within The Republican Government Tradition, Jamie Abrams

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

“May all our citizens be soldiers, and all our soldiers citizens,” Sarah Livingston Jay toasted to revelers celebrating the Revolutionary War in 1789. She expressly conveyed what this article describes as the “foundational fusion” of republican government traditions coupling the military service of citizens-soldiers with male political citizenship. While the core of this fusion is deep, long-standing, and well-documented, this article explores the implicit tensions conveyed in her toast – the dominant masculinity dimensions of this foundational fusion. How do women and black men historically gain full political citizenship and effectuate republican government guarantees given its anchoring in entrenched dominant …

Aryans, Gender, And American Politics, Robert Tsai

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This short essay discusses some of the ways in which the Aryan movement in America activates gendered beliefs for the goal of legal, political, and cultural transformation. In recent years, the community has moved from common law theories of white sovereignty to more robust forms of racial constitutionalism. The piece is drawn from "America's Forgotten Constitutions: Defiant Visions of Power and Community"

Cohabitation And The Restatement (Third) Of Restitution & Unjust Enrichment, Candace Kovacic-Fleischer

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

The Restatement (Third) of Restitution & Unjust Enrichment clarified and modernized a field that had become muddled since the publication of the Restatement (First) in 1937. One area of modernization relates to the changes in law towards women, particularly changes in law toward female cohabitants. Published in 2011, the Restatement (Third) added a new Section 28, which rejected the view that it would be immoral for one cohabitant to bring suit against the other, and relaxed the restriction on recovery in unjust enrichment for "gratuitous" contributions. This Article reviews societal and legal changes for women since 1937 and notes that, …

Rebecca J. Cook & Simone Cusack, Gender Stereotyping: Transnational Legal Perspectives Book Review, Zanita E. Fenton

Articles

No abstract provided.

Judging Women, Mitu Gulati, Stephen J. Choi, Mirya Holman, Eric A. Posner

Faculty Scholarship

Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s assertion that female judges might be “better” than male judges has generated accusations of sexism and potential bias. An equally controversial claim is that male judges are better than female judges because the latter have benefited from affirmative action. These claims are susceptible to empirical analysis. Primarily using a dataset of all the state high court judges in 1998-2000, we estimate three measures of judicial output: opinion production, outside state citations, and co-partisan disagreements. We find that the male and female judges perform at about the same level. Roughly similar findings show up in data from the …

The North Carolina Association Of Women Attorneys: Creating Camaraderie, Nurturing Leaders, And Protecting The Rights Of Women, Carolyn Mcallaster, Jennifer Brobst

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Does Critical Mass Matter? Views From The Board Room, Lissa Lamkin Broome, John M. Conley, Kimberly D. Krawiec

Faculty Scholarship

In this Article, we report and analyze the results of forty-six wide-ranging interviews with corporate directors and other relevant insiders on the general topic of whether and how the racial, ethnic, and gender composition of corporate boards matters. In particular, we explore their views on the concept of “critical mass” — that is, the theory that women and racial or ethnic minorities are unlikely to have an impact in the boardroom until they grow from a few tokens into a considerable minority of the board.

In contrast to other recent qualitative research on corporate boards, we find more limited support …

Children, Parents & The State: The Construction Of A New Family Ideology, Deseriee A. Kennedy

Scholarly Works

More than twenty-five states allow courts to consider parental incarceration or conviction of a crime in determining whether to terminate parental rights. This problem is of increasing significance as a result of dramatic growth in incarceration rates, particularly among women who were often the primary and sole caretaker of their children before their imprisonment. Social scientists have recognized that the reality for parents in many communities is one of widespread and repeated incarceration, which has a devastating effect on families and communities. The problem is magnified by a failed drug policy and the Adoption and Safe Families Act, which, in …

Witchcraft Accusations And Human Rights: Case Studies From Malawi, Chi Adanna Mgbako, Katherine Glenn

Faculty Scholarship

This Article explores potential community-based interventions to assist victims of witchcraft accusations, based on forty-five case studies from an experimental mobile legal-aid clinic in Malawi, a country in southeastern Africa where witchcraft accusations are widespread and often irreparably harm those accused. In Malawi, the accused are mainly older women who are often blamed for bewitching young children.

After Gender?: Examining International Justice Enterprises: An Introduction, Darren Rosenblum

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Pace Law School founded its Women's Justice Center nearly two decades ago, and since then the school has built a reputation for work on sex, gender, and women's rights. Continuing its commitment to these critical issues, the school hosted Pace Law Review's Symposium, After Gender?: Examining International Justice Enterprises, on November 12, 2010.

When I first proposed this Symposium, I had been writing on international legal regimes related to sex, gender, and sexuality. My work engaged the preeminent international convention concerning these issues, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), a critique …

Unsex Cedaw, Or What’S Wrong With Women’S Rights, Darren Rosenblum

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

CEDAW, signed on July 17, 1980 by sixty-four countries, has as its principal goals the protection and promotion of women's rights and the elimination of discrimination against women. As of March 7, 2011, 186 countries—more than ninety­ percent of the United Nations' member states—are parties to the Convention. The most notable non-party to the Convention is the United States. In addition, as of May 15, 2010, there are seventy-nine Signatories and ninety-nine Parties to the Optional Protocol, a supplement io CEDAW designed to remedy some of the treaty's shortcomings. Although challenges have hobbled implementation of CEDAW, it remains the …

Theorizing The More Responsive State: Transcending The National Boundaries Of Law, Laura Spitz

Faculty Book Display Case

Literature theorizing the state typically focuses on the nation-state as the locus of state power and authority, bounded by territorial and/or geopolitical borders. Within legal scholarship, an even narrower focus is common: the state as adjudicatory apparatus. Yet it may be more productive to shift the conceptual lens to embrace a wider and less vertical conception of state power. Thus, this chapter takes Fineman’s invitation to begin the task of theorizing a “more responsive state” in the US, by looking beyond the US, and putting two groups of scholars in conversation with one another: feminist legal theorists on the one …

Not Of Woman Born: A Scientific Fantasy, Jennifer S. Hendricks

Publications

This Article explores the legal implications of a scientific fantasy: building artificial wombs that could gestate a human child from conception to birth. Because claims about the technological possibility of artificial wombs in the foreseeable future are likely overstated, the focus of the Article is the effect that the fantasy of artificial gestation has on the legal discourse about pregnancy and reproduction today.

The Article first places the fantasy of artificial gestation in the context of theories about reproduction that western science has propounded. The history of scientific theorizing about reproduction is a history of scientists emphasizing the male contribution …

A Diva Defends Herself: Gender And Domestic Violence In An Early Twentieth-Century Headline Trial, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Publications

This short article was presented as part of a symposium on headline criminal trials, organized by St. Louis University School of Law in honor of Lawrence Friedman. It describes and analyzes the self-defense acquittal of opera singer Mae Talbot in Nevada in 1910 on charges of murdering her abusive husband. Based on extensive research into archival trial records and newspaper reports, the article discusses how the press, the court, and trial lawyers on both sides depicted the killing and Mae’s possible defenses. Without discounting the sensationalism and entertainment value, to a scandal-hungry public, of stories about violent marriages, I contend …

Class Actions At The Crossroads: An Answer To Wal-Mart V. Dukes, Suzette M. Malveaux

Publications

The Supreme Court has recently decided to hear argument in the largest private-employer civil rights case in American history, Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. This historic case involves up to 1.5 million women suing Wal-Mart, one of the largest companies in the world, for alleged gender discrimination in pay and promotions, in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Like many employees who challenge companywide employment discrimination, the plaintiffs in Dukes brought their case as a class action pursuant to Rule 23(b)(2) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and sought injunctive and declaratory relief, …

Rethinking Addiction: Drugs, Deterrence, And The Neuroscience Revolution, Linda C. Fentiman

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This article connects the debate about addiction with the fundamental criminal law principle of deterrence. It seeks to bridge the gap between the competing medical and criminal justice approaches by exploring addiction in light of recent research about the brain, gender differences, and what works best from both a treatment and justice perspective. To sharpen the issues, the article deliberately focuses on the emotionally freighted subject of pregnant drug users. This approach will illuminate prevailing assumptions about how biological, genetic, cultural, and other environmental factors shape human behavior and challenge conventional understandings of deterrence in light of new research on …

An Equal Rights Amendment To Make Women Human, Ann Bartow

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Though the Fourteenth Amendment' provides women with partial legal armament (a dull sword, a small shield), equal protection requires something twice as powerful in the form of a Twenty-Eighth Amendment that would expressly vest women with equal rights under the law. The Fourteenth Amendment has completed only half of the job.

Unsex Cedaw, Or What's Wrong With Women's Rights, Darren Rosenblum

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Part I discusses why CEDAW continues to be relevant as the primary source of international law on sex discrimination. Until the advent of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), CEDAW was the most widely-subscribed international treaty. Some of the draft language of CEDAW reflects the tension between category and identity and how "women" won the debate. Part II contrasts CEDAW with the Convention for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD). It points to the identitarian focus of CEDAW as a core reason for its failures. Had CEDAW reflected a category focus, as CERD did, it would more …

Overeducated Achievatrons Unite!, Joan C. Williams

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.