Category Archives: Equality

Is Critical Citizenship Critical?

Oct 1, 2012 Camille NelsonEqualityJotwell

Camille Nelson

It is a good thing when those of us in education are urged to be more thoughtful about what we seek to achieve through our teaching and scholarship. An analysis of the possible impact that education can have moves beyond the standard questioning of pedagogy, and speaks to the societal value of education as transformative, not just for the student and future graduate but also for society. Such higher order questions, as I like to call them, are not typically the stuff of faculty meetings, but they are at the core of a recent article by Professors Angela Mae Kupenda and Michelle Deardorff.

In their article, Negotiating Social Mobility and Critical Citizenship: Institutions at a Crossroads, the authors juxtapose two seemingly inconsistent struggles faced by institutions of higher education – improving the socioeconomic possibilities of our students versus preparing students for what they theorize as “Critical Citizenship.”: Continue reading "Is Critical Citizenship Critical?"

One Engagement – Moral Theory of Political Reconciliation

Sep 4, 2012 Val NapoleonEqualityJotwell

Val Napoleon

For anyone interested in a critical, practical, and political exploration of reconciliation, Colleen Murphy’s book is a wonderful resource. It is a fast-paced and well-written book that compels the reader to keep going. And, it is useful in the everyday world.

In Canada, over the past thirty years, almost 600 indigenous women and girls have gone missing or have been slain.¹ Between 2000 and 2008, there were 153 new cases. Most of the disappearances and deaths occurred in the western provinces in British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan.²  The majority of these women and girls were mothers. Some were students. Almost half of these cases remain unsolved. Time and time again, these women and girls are described as sex trade workers and addicts as if somehow that designation defines them all or explains them away. What is so disturbing is that their murders and disappearances seem to have become normalized – a part of Canada – but in the background or in the shadows. Continue reading "One Engagement – Moral Theory of Political Reconciliation"

Equality vs. Fairness

Jun 11, 2012 Ruthann RobsonEqualityJotwell

Ruthann Robson

Americans know that there is something wrong with a guilty verdict rendered by “an all-white jury.”  But translating that something into a constitutional issue, never mind a constitutional right, is not straightforward. Indeed, it has become downright complicated and, as Nina Chernoff argues, totally wrong.

Often, the first impulse when faced with the “all white jury” problem is to conceptualize the problem as one of equality.  It seems discriminatory–unequal–when the person on trial is a member of a racial minority and is not “represented” on the jury.  And indeed, this may violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.  But not necessarily.  The Equal Protection Clause, as presently construed in American constitutional doctrine, generally requires discriminatory intent.  On the other hand, persons accused of crimes are afforded rights in the Bill of Rights that are not grounded in equality, but in fairness. The Framers of the Constitution, most of whom had committed the crime of treason during the Revolutionary War, were quite invested in fairness of process. For example, the Sixth Amendment guaranteeing an accused person assistance of counsel, confrontation of the witnesses against one, and a speedy and public trial.  The Sixth Amendment also guarantees an “impartial jury.”  In common parlance, this is a “jury one one’s peers.”  In constitutional doctrine, it requires that the jury members be “drawn from a fair cross-section of the community.” Continue reading "Equality vs. Fairness"

No Conflict About this Non-Essentialist Reading

May 9, 2012 Kim BrooksEqualityJotwell

Kim Brooks

This engaging article is motivated by the complexity of framing (forget resolving) concepts of culture, by concerns that at least some feminists have become bogged down in their efforts to theorize veiling, clitoridectomy, and polygamy, among myriad other issues, and by a commitment to reasoning from law.  In addition, deep into the piece, the authors explicitly state that they chose the direction of the piece in part to highlight that feminists tend to prioritize culture and leave unaddressed the role of economics in constructing tensions, identities, and concerns.  Even if the article wasn’t so nicely written, even if it didn’t hold hints of something very interesting and hopeful, I would have been captivated by these motivations.

The authors drive the piece in surprising directions.  Part I outlines feminism’s engagement with culture as concept.  Part II situates a specific dispute (although in stylized form) that gives rise to a “clash” of cultures.  Part III illustrates how the technique of conflict of laws assists in reasoning through the particular dispute.  Part IV addresses possible objections and in Part V the authors argue that the approach delineated provides an intellectual style that might be adopted by feminists or cultural theorists.

Four reasons to read the piece… Continue reading "No Conflict About this Non-Essentialist Reading"

Womb as Wedge: What We Can Learn from Revisiting the Political History of the Abortion Controversy in the US

Apr 25, 2012 Sonia LawrenceEqualityJotwell

Sonia Lawrence

Sitting in Toronto or maybe Bristol, we have a tendency to watch American politics with both fear and amusement, rather like (or so I hear) some people watch Jersey Shore or Keeping up with the Kardashians: Who are these people? Why do they behave this way?

This is delightfully, smugly, self-satisfying. It is neither analytic nor strategic. And when, inevitably it seems, our relatively open access to abortion (as Carol Sanger has called it, the “luxury of legality”) starts to be challenged, it might leave us rather less than prepared. Greenhouse and Siegel’s article illustrates how a slow burn, not the blast of Roe v. Wade, led to the bitter struggle over reproductive rights in the U.S. today. Continue reading "Womb as Wedge: What We Can Learn from Revisiting the Political History of the Abortion Controversy in the US"

Heroes, Tragedies, and Our Failed Community

Mar 16, 2012 Elaine CraigEqualityJotwell

Elaine Craig

No one talks about what is wrong with rights anymore.  Rights critique, suggests Robin West, has been on a sharp decline since the 1990s and has been particularly muted under current American administration.  This silence, West argues, is both strange and undesirable.

While she offers some hypotheses to explain these observations, West’s focus is not a post-mortem on the critical rights movement of the 1980s.  Instead, and put simply, her aim is to reinvigorate the rights critique in light of both current political, social and economic context and the ways in which rights claims are currently being configured in response to this context. Continue reading "Heroes, Tragedies, and Our Failed Community"

Feminist Judgments

Feb 20, 2012 Margaret DaviesEqualityJotwell

Margaret Davies

‘Before rules, were facts: in the beginning was not a Word, but a Doing. Behind decisions stand judges; judges are men; as men they have human backgrounds.’ (Llewellyn 1931, p. 1222) Gender-neutralised, the sentiments contained in Llewellyn’s famous words and the article which they introduce still hold – the human background of judges is important, and ‘doings’ or ‘tangible realities’ rather than words and abstractions, are what makes law dynamic, purposeful, and responsive (if slowly) to an even more dynamic social context.

How, then, might law be different if judicial decisions were routinely made by feminists? What would a ‘female-gendered mark on the law’ actually look like? (p. 8). Feminist Judgments: From Theory to Practice begins to answer these (and other) questions. It presents twenty-three alternative feminist judgments for actual cases, and commentaries to accompany the cases, written by feminist academics and activists. All of the cases were decided in England and Wales, and most (though not all) were decided relatively recently and reflect current law. The idea of re-writing judgments from a feminist perspective has a Canadian precedent in the Women’s Court of Canada (see Majury 2006) while the idea of rewriting judgments (not necessarily feminist) has a US precedent in two books edited by Jack Balkin (2002; 2005, but see Majury 2006, n14). Whereas the Canadian cases focus on equality jurisprudence under the Canadian Charter of Rights, the cases in Feminist Judgments deal with a very broad range of legal matters: consent to medical treatment, same-sex marriage, capacity to marry, the defence of provocation, refugee law, manslaughter by neglect, trespass to property, custody to children under family law, pregnancy discrimination, consent to bodily harm, evidence and many more. Some of these areas are framed by British and European equality and human rights law, but many rely on development of the common law or interpretations of statutory provisions. Some of the judgments affirm the decision made in the existing case but do so using a different reasoning process, while others reject the original decision. Continue reading "Feminist Judgments"

Thinking About Post-Anarchism

Jan 13, 2012 Davina CooperEqualityJotwell

Davina Cooper

Amongst those who favor equality, there is, it might be said, a reluctance to confront its norms, premises and institutional tendencies. Yet, as a discourse and governance project, it is at least arguable that equality bears (or embraces) conventions of calculation, orderliness, categorization, legitimacy (as a precondition for equality or its result), boundaries and top-down assumptions of implementation and accomplishment. Unsurprisingly, critiques of equality, particularly more anarchist ones, tend to prefer difference, freedom, anti-identity politics, an aesthetic of non-equivalence, and open-ended non-institutional action.

Nail’s (2010) article, invested in building a new radical praxis, poses a way through and between these constructed polarities. While Nail doesn’t address equality directly, the issues he explores are hugely important to thinking more openly, and reflexively, about equality within the context of a radical change politics. At the heart of Thomas Nail’s article is the claim that radical politics needs to rebalance its focus; the almost exhaustive interest in cataloguing and pouring over what is wrong in the present needs to be supplemented more fully with greater interest in the social renewal posed by contemporary social experiments. Continue reading "Thinking About Post-Anarchism"