Category Archives: Equality
Jul 15, 2015 Toni WilliamsEquality
Escaping Battered Credit: A Proposal for Repairing Credit Reports Damaged by Domestic Violence expands and develops Angela Littwin’s pioneering work on “coerced debt” within violent and abusive relationships. Littwin’s first study on this topic, Coerced Debt: The Role of Consumer Credit in Domestic Violence, offers a preliminary account of various ways in which “coerced debt” occurs, how it is experienced and its potentially devastating consequences for abused women. Escaping Battered Credit considers potential legal responses to the problem in the context of abusive relationships, and takes on the challenge of crafting a partial remedy that fits within the institutional structure of US consumer credit markets.
Littwin describes coerced debt as occurring “when the abuser in a violent relationship obtains credit in the victim’s name via fraud or duress” (P. 365), and defaults on the debt. Typical practices range from basic identity theft, as when the abuser applies for a credit in his partner’s name without telling her, through resort to physical and psychological violence to coerce abused women to apply for credit or release equity in their homes, to abusers structuring loan transactions to ensure that they enjoy the benefits of credit and the women they have abused are left with the debt liabilities. Coerced debt is related to the well-documented problems of “sexually transmitted debt” in which so-called “surety wives” guarantee loans to their businessmen spouses under circumstances of duress, fraud, or misinformation; and coercive microcredit which occurs when gender specific peer-lending programs expose poor women to the risks of being coerced into borrowing on behalf of their spouses. All three instances subject abused women to risks of liabilities to creditors to which they did not freely consent and against which law offers little protection, illustrating how market relations of credit and debt may constitute specific instruments of oppression within familial and intimate relationships, particularly, although by no means only, as those relationships fail. Continue reading "When Information Wields Power: The Inequalities of Credit Reporting in Abusive Relationships"
Jun 16, 2015 Angela Mae KupendaEquality
Daria Roithmayr’s book, Reproducing Racism: How Everyday Choices Lock in White Advantage, situates the reproduction of racism outside of intentionally inflicted racist acts. She argues that even if racism by individual design ceases, everyday decisions by Whites lock in the many decades’, and even centuries’, of entrenched structures of White advantage. Tracing the history of race in America especially from Jim Crow, Roithmayr illustrates how White advantage was locked in through wealth accumulation protections given Whites and denied Blacks, through the real estate market practices favoring Whites, in educational policies perpetuated through a de jure then a de facto system, through the use of incarceration and its rise against Blacks soon after the end of slavery, and even in the levels of Black infant mortality.
Using antitrust theories, Rotihmayr’s work explaining the cartel like structure of White advantage can be juxtaposed against Lani Guinier’s analogously familiar book from over twenty years ago. In Guinier’s book, The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy (1994), Guinier discusses the many statutory protections given to those who hold less than the majority votes in corporations. Guinier argues that just as minority ownership interests are given “a turn” in corporate law, such could also protect minority racial interests in our governmental democracy. Similar to Guinier’s use of principles from corporate law, Roithmayr uses principles from antitrust law. Guinier’s book focuses more on arguing the corporate law principles as remedies. Roithmayr’s book focuses more on identifying the antitrust cartel structure and showing the way for our own creative construction of remedies to break these cartels to stymie the reproduction of racism. Continue reading "Breaking Cartels to Stymie the Reproduction of Racism and Breaking them in Time"
May 18, 2015 Ruthann RobsonEquality
Nancy Leong,
Identity Entrepreneurs, 104
Cal. L. Rev. ___ (forthcoming 2016), Available at
SSRN.
Have you ever invoked an outsider aspect of your identity? Maybe, like many applicants in academia, you’ve discussed how you would contribute to the diversity of the institution you hope to join. Possibly, like Sarah Palin, you’ve found an occasion to emphasize the “unique perspective” of women; or like John Edwards and Rick Perry, you’ve highlighted your working class roots. Or, perhaps less likely, you’ve needed to revive your fan base and found that coming out as a sexual minority could be a good career move; or you’ve embarked on stardom in adult films and discovered Asian femininity is a great asset; or your celebrity as a rap artist includes not only race and gender, but also geographic credibility.
If so, Nancy Leong contends you are hardly the only “identity entrepreneur.” While Leong acknowledges the postmodern work on “performativity,” her conceptualization is Marxian and stresses the value of identity in our capitalist society underwritten by the rule of law. For Leong, being an identity entrepreneur is neither necessarily good nor bad. Entrepreneurs, she states, are increasingly respected and popular in America, even as to be “entrepreneurial” connotes a person who is “self-promoting, grasping, inauthentic, a climber.” For Leong, the term “appropriately reflects ambivalence about the practice of identity entrepreneurship.” It is a “complicated phenomenon with both positive and negative consequences.” Continue reading "Bargaining for Equality"
Apr 17, 2015 Ann TweedyEquality
In The Fourth Trimester, Saru Matambanadzo braids personal narratives of her own pregnancy and birthing experience with legal analysis and with concepts and research from nursing and midwifery to craft a rich and courageous critique of current employment law’s application to pregnant women and new mothers. Matambanadzo’s thesis is that the law erroneously treats pregnancy as a discrete nine-month timeframe when in fact the physical and emotional effects of pregnancy linger, extending “into the first three months after delivery, and sometimes beyond.” (P. 124). She also addresses the shortcomings of laws that protect against pregnancy discrimination more generally. The Fourth Trimester concretely illuminates the ways in which the limitations of the current framework of federal law disadvantage workers who become pregnant and give birth by, for example, failing to adequately support breastfeeding and to provide the time needed after birth for the mother-infant dyad to become less interdependent.
Matambanadzo’s compelling arguments add a new dimension to legal scholarship on pregnancy in that they challenge not only the treatment of pregnant workers but also the firmly ingrained notion of pregnancy itself. Indeed the dichotomy between pregnant and not pregnant is paradigmatic in American culture—so much so that it exemplifies other black and white dichotomies, as illustrated by the expression that one cannot be “almost pregnant.” Matambanadzo successfully convinces the reader to rethink the notion of pregnancy itself. Continue reading "Moving Beyond the Pregnant/Non-Pregnant Dichotomy in Pregnancy Discrimination Law Based on the Lived Experiences of New Mothers"
Mar 23, 2015 Margaret DaviesEquality
The first thing I liked about Kirsten Anker’s book was its title. The idea of a declaration of interdependence is extremely evocative, and multilayered. It foregrounds values of connection and interdependence as basic to legal relations, within and between cultures, and also between human societies and our ecologies and environments. At the same time, it constitutes an ironic reflection on non-Indigenous histories, with their insistence on independence. Assertions of independence have been vital to shaping the nation-state world we currently live in, and which forms the legal and philosophical backdrop to this book. Declarations of independence may still have a defensible role in a world which oppresses marginalized groups and fails sufficiently to promote the self-determination of colonized peoples. But interdependence goes further, and acknowledges interconnection between peoples and their worlds – it reasserts that there are relations of dependence between groups, and relations between their laws. It also, and this is the real depth of this particular book, shows how the very act of defining and understanding any law in this context brings into play multivocal exercises of recognition, translation, and negotiation.
Throughout the book, Anker emphasizes that she seriously regards all sides of a relation as ‘dependent’ on the others (as well as, to a lesser degree, ‘independent’). In the context of Anker’s study, which primarily concerns legal relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Australia, the ‘sides’ of the relation are primarily two. When the two sides come together to negotiate or determine their legal relations, each is dependent on the other. This is not to deny the existence of state dominance or, on the other hand, to say that there can be no self-determination or autonomy for Aboriginal people. Rather it conveys the way that ‘decisions and their consequences will always be taking shape in relation to other communities and governments, at different scales.’ (P. 194). In order for there to be any real encounter between different legalities, they each have to be open to the other, and in particular to the process of being reconstituted by the other. Anker argues this mutual dependence by reference to philosophical tradition. In particular she points out that approaches to recognition and translation will be extremely problematic if understood or practiced simply in terms of one (sovereign) side having all of the power to recognize the other, or being permitted to assume that their own conceptual tools are sufficient to render the other’s world intelligible. For recognition and translation to work and for justice to be a plausible goal, the interpretive and conceptual horizons of both sides must shift. Even more importantly, Anker also argues this case inductively from detailed readings of significant native title cases, and through an analysis of the nature of negotiated settlements. At their most positive, even within the decision-making framework of state law, these sources show people coming together in a jurisgenerative space, in which ‘law’ appears as a dialogue rather than being given from above. (P. 103). At the same time, the opportunities for state law to misrecognize and mistranslate Aboriginal law, because of doctrinal dogmatism, ideology, or other limitations, remain considerable. The detail provided by Anker to illustrate these points is extraordinary, and quite impossible to do justice to in a short review. Continue reading "Interdependent Legalities"
Feb 17, 2015 Elaine CraigEquality
Michael Boucai’s new article, Glorious Precedents: When Gay Marriage was Radical, explores same-sex marriage in an era when “gay liberation” rather than “gay rights” described the aspirations of a movement aimed at revolutionizing American life. Through detailed archival and interview based research, Boucai offers a delightful recounting of the first three cases to produce reported judicial opinions denying gay marriage in the United States: Baker v Nelson, Jones v Hallahan, and Singer v Hara (all of which were decided in the early 1970s). His unfolding of marriage litigation in the post-Stonewall years captures the historical texture of these initiatives and the individuals that commenced them, but more importantly it reveals an account of the pursuit of gay marriage and its radical potential that differs significantly from the same sex marriage movement in its contemporary form.
According to Boucai, despite criticisms of the same sex marriage movement as assimilating for sexual minorities and reifying of problematic social institutions, these first cases were much more about gay liberation generally than gay marriage specifically. His documentation of the stated ambitions of the three couples, the legal arguments advanced by their lawyers, and details of the sexual and domestic lifestyles and the activist activities engaged in by many of the litigants persuasively disrupts the dominant account of early marriage litigation as out of step with the radical spirit of gay liberation at the time. Interestingly, Boucai’s account re-politicizes the litigant couples – as couples – by, in part, desexualizing them. For two of the couples, theirs was neither a story of romantic love, nor even a story of notable sexual attraction. Rather, it was coupledom based on political aspirations, friendship, and shared worldviews. For them the litigation – which everyone accepted “stood no chance of winning” – was rooted not in a desire to marry, nor a desire for state sanction and recognition of the value of their love and affinity for one another, but in efforts to challenge the gendered oppression perpetuated by the institution of marriage and to perform their same sex relationships in public and confrontational ways. Continue reading "A Queer Story of Same Sex Marriage"
Jan 16, 2015 Davina CooperEquality
What has happened to the vocabulary of justification associated with the welfare state – that language of need, equality and social justice so crucial for anchoring and grounding public action? Have the terms of justification become appropriated and re-aligned, articulated to neoliberal concepts of entrepreneurship, discipline and waste, or simply abandoned? And does anything remain of a more progressive set of significations (or chains of meaning)?
In a thoughtful, wide-ranging and nuanced article, the eminent public governance scholar, Janet Newman, explores some ways of diagnosing the present, situating contemporary strategies of governing, in nations such as Britain, in relation to concerns about the securing and unsettling of political consent. What causes people to sign up to or acquiesce in current governance arrangements, and what challenges to this often reluctant acquiescence are posed, as nations struggle to define, mobilise and respond to political moments of ‘crisis’? Continue reading "Entering the Spaces of Power"
Dec 5, 2014 Robert LeckeyEquality
It will not surprise readers alive to anti-discrimination law’s limited capacity to transform systems that Ireland’s reform to protect workers in certain care relationships from discrimination based on their family status has reinforced gendered assumptions about care and workforce participation. However much its findings line up with our pessimistic hunches, Olivia Smith’s study is worth reading because it exemplifies an admirable kind of feminist scholarship: quantitatively and qualitatively empirical; theoretically grounded; alert to the intersection of gender with other grounds of disadvantage, such as class; and self-conscious of its limits.
Smith offers a “contextualized assessment” of a dozen years’ tribunal litigation under the “family status” discrimination ground. Prior to this ground’s adoption in the Employment Equality Acts 1998-2011, women had challenged discrimination associated with their care obligations under the ground of gender. As Smith notes, that tack had confirmed the gendered view of care as women’s work. Yet while the gender-neutral ground of “family status” might signal that care obligations bear on men as well as on women, the litigation record shows it to have reinforced the gendered dynamics of Irish work and family life. Continue reading "The Careless Ideal Worker"
Nov 10, 2014 Kim BrooksEquality
Denise Réaume is Canada’s foremost legal theorist on the concept of dignity. She has committed much of her scholarly work to elucidating its contours and teasing out its complexities. One of my favourite of her earlier pieces is “Indignities: Making a Place for Dignity in Modern Legal Thought”. In that piece, Réaume deduces a distinct dignity interest warranting legal protection in the common law through careful review of the evolving case law addressing intentional infliction of nervous shock.
Jump forward more than ten years and we find Réaume on to the interaction of dignity, choice, and circumstances. The title of her chapter is a little misleading, perhaps, since Réaume’s focus is more on the capacity for choice than its availability. Continue reading "Honouring the Capacity for Choice"
Oct 6, 2014 Toni WilliamsEquality
Thomas Mitchell’s article, “Growing Inequality and Racial Economic Gaps,” argues that reforms to the technicalities through which law constitutes real estate assets and relations may provide a foundation for progressive steps towards racial equality. Published in 2012 as part of a Howard Law Journal symposium on Protest and Polarization, this article starts with a sobering account of the intensification of racialized economic inequality in the US, within a general trend of increasing economic inequality since the 1970s. The first part of the article shows these developments are largely attributable to the large and growing wealth differentials between non-Hispanic whites and the Hispanic and African American populations. By 2009, according to Mitchell, the net worth of the median non-Hispanic White household was 20 times larger that of the median Black household (as compared to the 12:1 ratio in 1988 reported in Oliver and Shapiro’s landmark study and 18 times larger than the net worth of the median Hispanic household). Moreover, Mitchell reports that despite their losing some wealth during the Great Recession, White non-Hispanic households in 2009 generally owned more wealth than they had “for many if not most years between 1984 and 2009” whereas Black and Hispanic households owned “less wealth … than in any year since … 1984” (P. 860).
The second part of the article traces the relationship between rising economic inequality and shrinking intergenerational economic mobility in the US. Again Mitchell synthesizes some potent data to cast doubt on conventional wisdom. It transpires that the American education system no longer enhances social mobility (if ever it did) and indeed “may well be contributing to growing income and wealth inequalities” (P. 865); that the extent of occupational mobility in the United States is no more than average amongst industrialized countries; and that the level of intergenerational income mobility is demonstrably worse than that of neighboring Canada and below the norm for industrialized countries (P. 867). Continue reading "By All Means Possible"
