Category Archives: Equality
Jun 5, 2025 Maneesha DeckhaEquality
Although still perched on the periphery, scholarship asking how the law can remedy human harms against animals and other nonhuman life is proliferating. A foundational question is how legal systems can embed equality and justice as values that would apply across species and not simply among humans. A corollary is how to influence more humans to support a legal system that regards animals as beings or entities whose interests matter alongside humans’.
When fashioning dramatic reform like this, we may be tempted to focus on the present as we hope for a much less anthropocentric future. But it also helps to look to the past. Jesse Arsenault and Rosemary-Claire Collard’s Crimes Against Reproduction: Domesticating Life in the Animal Trials is instructive in this regard. It helps readers understand how the earliest instances of European human-animal legal regulation centuries ago can shed light today on the need to see the legal treatment of animals and marginalized humans as entwined, and anthropocentrism as an all-species gendered equality problem. Continue reading "Learning from the Animal Trials in the Anthropocene"
Mar 19, 2025 Ann E. TweedyEquality
In Flattening Breast Cancer by Removing the Breasts: Protecting a Woman’s Right to Choose Reconstruction of an Aesthetic Flat Chest After a Mastectomy, Amelia Landenberger centers the experiences of women who carry a genetic predisposition for breast cancer (namely the BRCA1 gene). The article argues that these women should have the option of aesthetic flat chest reconstruction, along with other breast reconstruction options. To vindicate this option as a legal right, Landenberger argues for a broad interpretation of the Women’s Health and Cancer Rights Act of 1998 (WHCRA). The WHCRA is an under-researched federal statute that prevents insurance companies from denying coverage for breast reconstruction after mastectomies. Landenberger maintains it should be read to require coverage for aesthetic flat chest reconstruction when preferred by a patient. Landeberger’s article contributes to the sphere of equality scholarship by centering the experiences of a little-understood group—those who carry the BRAC1 gene—and by bringing to light a little-understood problem, namely difficulty accessing aesthetic flat chest reconstruction.
Landenberger’s article is illuminating in several important respects. First, Landenberger centers the experiences of high-risk women, who are termed “previvors,” for a practical reason, namely because, when they choose mastectomies as a preventative measure, such women have a full-range of options available for reconstruction (whereas the reconstruction options of some breast cancer patients may be more limited). (Pp. 1201-02.) Nonetheless, this approach is a powerful one. Landenberger explains the astronomical risks that these previvors have of becoming afflicted with breast cancer—a 55% to 72% chance, and she further describes the liminal space that such women occupy—the space between sickness and wellness. She also relates that, for many such women, breast cancer is “not merely a hypothetical future,” but it is also “a part of their past,” as many have lost mothers, grandmothers, and/or aunts to breast cancer. (P. 1204.) Continue reading "Supporting the Full Suite of Reconstruction Options Under the Women’s Health and Cancer Rights Act of 1998"
Feb 7, 2025 Doron DorfmanEquality
Healthcare settings have long been sites where minoritized patients have needed to fight to receive adequate quality of care. The recent debates about physicians not wearing masks in hospitals and clinics to protect immunocompromised and vulnerable patients is only the latest example of systemic failures allowing such health-related injustices to appear.
For decades, legal scholars have been discussing the promise and shortcomings of tort law as an avenue to bring about social change and promote equality. In her important and novel article Biased but Reasonable, Maytal Gilboa discusses how one avenue to address health-related injustices—using tort law, specifically medical malpractice (professional negligence)—fails Black patients. Continue reading "How Tort Law Thwarts the Fight Against Biased Healthcare"
Jan 15, 2025 Sheila Vélez MartinezEquality
This article, written by four distinguished Latina legal scholars, provides an analysis of the unique challenges, achievements, and potential future for Latina law professors and educators in the United States. It is framed around the 2022 Graciela Olivárez Latinas in the Legal Academy Workshop (GO LILA), which brought together 74 Latina law professors to foster community, mentorship, and strategic growth.
Much has been discussed in higher education about the impending “demographic cliff”. The consensus view is that the United States will hit a peak of around 3.5 million high-school graduates sometime near 2025. As a result, the college-age population is expected to shrink across the next five to 10 years by as much as 15 percent. Furthermore, even as high school graduation rates have increased in recent years, the percentage of graduates who choose to enroll in college right after high school has been declining. Less attention has been given to an additional demographic challenge for law schools: no matter the size, the future pool of law school applicants will differ significantly from the current one, with a much higher proportion of students of color, first-generation college students, and individuals from low-income or lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Continue reading "LILAs, Can Law Schools Meet the Latinx Demographic Challenge?"
Dec 4, 2024 Ezra YoungEquality
Sherry F. Colb & Michael C. Dorf,
Mandating Nature’s Course, 109
Cornell L. Rev. 101 (forthcoming 2024), available at
SSRN (Sept. 14, 2023).
In the October 2024 Term, the U.S. Supreme Court is poised to decide Skrmetti v. United States. At issue is whether trans healthcare bans which civilly prohibit and criminally punish provision of care, like Tennessee’s SB1, violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Oral argument will be held today, December 4, 2024.
Shery Colb and Michael Dorf’s article, Mandating Nature’s Course, forthcoming in the Cornell Law Review, is a must read for anyone following Skrmetti as well as those more broadly interested in constitutional limits over government health power.
The genius of Colb and Dorf’s article is its observation that defenders of laws which severely restrict personal liberties recast these incursions as simply prohibiting interference with nature taking its course (NTIC) (P. 109). So construed, bans on abortion, trans healthcare, and euthanasia are cast as merely prohibiting wrongful acts against nature’s will. So conceptualized, NTIC arguments effectively mask that these laws impose affirmative obligations upon individuals. Continue reading "What’s Nature Got to Do With State Power"
Oct 31, 2024 I. India ThusiEquality
The Thirteenth Amendment provides, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Professor Adam Davidson examines the Thirteenth Amendment’s Except Clause in his article, Administrative Enslavement.
Recent attention to the harms of mass incarceration and mass criminalization has included scrutiny of the Except Clause with many critics concerned that it permits the enslavement of incarcerated people. However, Davidson’s critique is a little different than the more common, wholesale disavowal of this clause. Davidson examines how courts have interpreted this clause, critiquing their reimagination of forced labor as merely a prison administrative matter. Continue reading "The Administrative State of Slavery"
Oct 15, 2024 Erez AloniEquality
In Andrew Sean Greer’s Pulitzer-winning novel Less, protagonist Arthur Less embarks on a global journey to avoid his younger ex-lover Freddie’s wedding. Through his adventures, Arthur grapples with his experiences as both the younger and older partner in age-gap relationships. This fictional journey resonates with the real-world dynamics explored in Tony Silva’s sociological study Daddies of a Different Kind: Sex and Romance Between Older and Younger Adult Gay Men. Silva examines these intergenerational relationships—especially common among same-sex male couples, who are more likely to have large age gaps than other types of pairings—and delves into the construction of the “daddy” identity, a role characterized by mentorship, age, and masculinity. His research offers a nuanced analysis of daddy-younger pairings, challenging stereotypes and revealing the emotional depth and cultural significance of these partnerships.
Silva’s research is built on the narratives of 39 men who identify as daddies and 26 younger men who were in relationships with age gaps of at least ten years. Importantly, all the interviewees were adults over 21, and the study exclusively focuses on relationships between adults. This distinction is crucial in avoiding harmful stereotypes, emphasizing instead the mutual emotional enrichment these partnerships often provide. Silva’s book seeks to answer several key questions: Why are gay men more open to such connections compared to heterosexuals or lesbian and bisexual women? What does it mean to be a “daddy,” including the forms of masculinity it involves? What is the quality of these relationships, and how do financial arrangements operate within these dynamics? Along the way, Silva addresses deeper themes such as LGBTQ+ culture, politics, nonmonogamy, and the fluid boundaries between friendship and kinship within the gay community. Continue reading "Queering Daddy Issues"
Jul 22, 2024 Natsu Taylor SaitoEquality
In her very timely Imperialism and Black Dissent, Nina Farnia proposes that the jurisprudence of political speech and association is best explained not by abstract principles of constitutional law but by a context in which domestic movements intersect with the global projection of American political and military power. Using case studies from four phases of racial resistance in the United States—Black Communism, the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power movement, and the Movement for Black Lives—she disrupts the commonly accepted narrative that both First Amendment jurisprudence and the state’s targeting of particular ideologies are “colorblind” processes.
For Farnia, “[b]ecause domestic security in the United States necessarily involves the management and suppression of racialized rebellion and radical dissent, national security ideology and the First Amendment cannot be decoupled.” (P. 403, emphasis added.) What’s interesting here is not the fraught relationship between individual rights and collective security—we’ve circled that rock often enough since 9/11—but Farnia’s thoughtful and detailed discussion of the interplay of ideological and racial repression. Continue reading "Ghosted? Race, Repression, and The First Amendment"
May 21, 2024 Maneesha DeckhaEquality
Equality and patent law may seem to make strange bedfellows. Convincing analyses exist though of how legal definitions related to science and innovation and patents themselves have fostered domestic inequalities as well as global health disparities. Concerns about the intra-human inequities that patent law produces are pressing ones. Still, in remaining anthropocentrically-bound by presuming that only humans can be inventors, these concerns miss the full scope of patent law’s inequality quotient. Laura A. Foster’s recent article Plants as Inventors: Interrogating Human Exceptionalism within Narratives of Law and Vegetal Life refreshingly takes up the inventive capacity of plants themselves as knowledge producers.
Foster seeks to correct her own human-focused examination of patent law’s role in elevating Western science at the expense of Indigenous knowledges in her 2017 book Reinventing Hoodia: Peoples, Plants and Patents in South Africa. With her 2023 article Plants as Inventors, Foster brings attention to plants, and patent law’s role in subordinating them, through telling stories about plants that pivot on the “binary logic of human exceptionalism” (P. 228). The article provides an engaging and instructive analysis inspired by what Foster terms “a vegetal feminist approach” (P. 229). Continue reading "Planting Equality"
Apr 29, 2024 Doron DorfmanEquality
In recent years, and certainly since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, grave concerns about reproductive rights have proliferated. While most of the discussion has been focused on attacks on the right to end a pregnancy and the child welfare system, other issues that fall within the umbrella of the reproductive justice movement also deserve serious attention. One of those aspects is “birth justice.”
In their canonical book Reproductive Justice: An Introduction, Lorretta Ross and Ricky Solinger acknowledge that “all people giving birth are entitled to safe, dignified, and compassionate health care” (p. 85). They view birth justice, defined as “the right to give birth with whom, where, when, and how a person chooses,” as a subset of reproductive justice (p. 96). Birth justice is an issue of equality specifically considering that maternal mortality rates of Black women are 2.6 times than those of white women. Yet, the role that the law plays in ensuring birth justice remains underexplored in the legal literature on reproductive justice. Elizabeth Kukura’s exciting work works to fill this gap in the literature while at the same time situating birth justice within the health law literature. Continue reading "Dealing with Doulas: Birth Justice, Delivery Room Conflicts, and the Rigidity of the Health Care System"
