Category Archives: Equality
Oct 31, 2017 Cyra Akila ChoudhuryEquality
Cynthia Grant Bowman,
Recovering Socialism for Feminist Legal Theory in the 21st Century, 49
Conn. L. Rev. 117 (2016), available at
SSRN.
In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential campaign and the dramatic defeat of an avowedly feminist Hillary Clinton to a demonstrably misogynistic Donald Trump, many have called into question the future of feminism. Clinton’s loss to a significantly less qualified candidate and the startling statistic that fifty-three percent of white women voted for her opponent raises questions about the persuasive power of mainstream feminism. Clinton’s campaign revealed the stubbornness of misogyny both in the political system and socially. Yet, even as misogyny became increasingly apparent in the primaries and then more blatant in the presidential race, for progressive women, Clinton’s gender identity and her liberal positions on women’s issues were not enough to overcome their economic concerns and social concerns. Rather, they were drawn to Senator Bernie Sanders’ reinvigorated socialism in the primary race even though they eventually voted for Clinton in the general election.
Prior to this recent campaign, as Cynthia Grant Bowman notes in her article Recovering Socialism for Feminist Legal Theory in the 21st Century, socialism had been largely absent from mainstream party politics in the United States. However, it was critical in the ideological development of a number of social movements in the 1960s and 70s, including those for civil rights, labor rights, and women’s rights. In her article, Bowman seeks to now reintroduce this work to feminist legal theorists to advance an “agenda for both research and legal reform.” (P. 119.) Continue reading "A Socialist Feminist Legal Theory for Our Time"
Oct 11, 2017 Camille NelsonEquality
Using the fatal shooting of Laquan McDonald by Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke as the starting point, this article seeks to address the common articulation of fear by police officers in the wake of such fatalities. Initially highlighting the question of why an unarmed teenager who did “not appear to be threatening anyone” (P. 145) was shot a total of sixteen times, Professor Lee addresses the data, which are officially underreported, on the number of fatal shootings that occur annually in the United States. Despite the lack of official data, the article notes that, “nongovernmental sources … indicate that the actual number of persons killed by police is probably double [the reported figure of 420 fatal encounters with police annually.]” (P. 146-47.)
Turning to focus on the disparate number of Black individuals who are shot and killed by police, Prof. Lee notes that, despite constituting only six percent of the U.S. population, “Black men accounted for approximately forty percent of the total number of unarmed individuals shot and killed by police.” (P. 149.) This is the central problem that Lee seeks to address. She makes two proposals, which are based on the failures of perception that often take place in such encounters. Continue reading "Over and Under-Policing: Thoughts on Remedying Shooter Bias"
Jun 21, 2017 Ruthann RobsonEquality
Ruth Colker,
Public Restrooms: Flipping the Default Rules, 78
Ohio St. L. J. (forthcoming, 2017), available at
SSRN.
The site of toilets as a social justice struggle is at least as old as plumbing. Biological necessity and the unacceptability (and often criminalization) of public urination or defecation led to “restrooms” being made widely available. Public toilets– meaning any facility outside the home and including commercial, work, and educational places–are a necessity if one wants to travel, engage in business, be employed, or pursue an education. But while bodily requirements are almost universal, public toilets have been less democratic. At one time, many restroom facilities bore racially restrictive signs. Economic class divisions explicitly and implicitly sorted people. Access to toilets for people with disabilities has been uneven. And restrooms continue to be designated by gendered symbols announcing sex-segregated usage.
Professor Ruth Colker, an established authority in gender, sexuality, and disability law, intervenes in the current debate surrounding sex-segregated restrooms and suggests an elegantly simple solution. This solution sidesteps the convoluted machinations that have recently suffused the problem. Continue reading "Putting the Bathroom Debate to Rest"
May 24, 2017 Kim BrooksEquality
Alice Woolley & Elysa Darling,
Nasty Women and the Rule of Law,
U.S.F. L. Rev. (forthcoming), available at
SSRN.
If you have been called aggressive, incompetent, immoral, nasty, unlikeable, unattractive, unfeminine, or unpleasant, or if you’ve heard someone call a woman lawyer one of these adjectives, or if you think they accurately describe a woman lawyer you know, then read Nasty Women and the Rule of Law.
The claim of the paper is modest: women who enter the legal profession risk being labelled “nasty women.” And by that, the authors mean that women risk attack arising from “the intersection between the normative structure of the lawyer’s role and sexist stereotypes.” (P. 3.) Continue reading "Committing to Critically Interrogating Our Conversations About Women We Think We Don’t Much Like"
Apr 25, 2017 Ann TweedyEquality
Andrés Reséndez,
The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (2016), available at
Amazon.
The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America is a devastating encyclopedic account of slavery in the Spanish colonial New World. For me, the ultimate effect was a surprising combination of a renewed sense of the intractability of old problems like racism and slavery and an acute sense of having awoken to a new historical reality that I previously knew next to nothing about.
As a professor of federal Indian law, I begin my class each semester with a brief overview of early colonialism, including the Requerimiento, a document that Spanish explorers read to Indigenous peoples before attacking them. Drafted in 1510, the Requerimiento threatened the original inhabitants of the Spanish colonies with slavery and war if they did not accept Christianity and the primacy of both the Pope and the Spanish monarchs. Despite my knowledge of the widespread use of this document, I had no idea of the breadth of the system of enslavement that Indians in the Spanish New World, ranging from New Mexico, California, Utah, and Florida down to Chile, were subject to. Author and UC Davis historian Andres Reséndez posits remarkably that Indigenous peoples’ precipitous population declines from the end of the fifteenth century through the mid-sixteenth century were due more to “slavery, overwork, and famine” than to disease. (P. 17.) While shocking given the prevalence of the disease theory, this idea makes intuitive sense to me because I can see the popularity of the disease hypothesis standing alone possibly being fueled by its resonance with old but unfortunately not quite extirpated Western ideas of the supposedly divinely ordained superiority of Europeans and European-Americans compared to their Indigenous counterparts. Given slavery’s overtly oppressive character, the idea that Indigenous populations were decimated through slavery (in addition to disease) is undoubtedly more difficult for European-Americans to reckon with. In short, the book pierced me and changed me, and I will never see American history or Latin American history the same way again. Continue reading "The Staying Power of Injustice and the Prolonged History of the Trafficking of Indian Children in The Other Slavery"
Feb 27, 2017 Margaret DaviesEquality
For a number of years, Drucilla Cornell has been studying and reflecting upon ubuntu, an African term expressing the idea that humans come into being through interconnectedness and that therefore they have a being, understanding, and set of obligations that emerge in their interconnections. The 2015 article authored by Cornell and South African scholar Karin van Marle summarises ubuntu, compares it with classical Western individualist notions of the self, and considers what it has to offer to Western feminism. The article not only serves as an introduction to a significant African concept, but also challenges Western legal feminism to reflect on its foundational concepts. Although this particular article is relatively short, it is very rich in detail and offers a number of intriguing directions for further reflection and action. In this brief review, I will summarise some key features of ubuntu as presented by Cornell and van Marle, and offer a few comments about its broader significance. My intention is to inspire readers to go to the original article: the ideas are new to me and my rendition of them is short and lacking in depth.
By contrast to Western philosophy, the idea of ubuntu does not permit questions such as “who am I?,” “what do I know?,” and “what ought I to do?” to be addressed separately in the abstract. We are not abstract beings, but become beings in a time and a place, and are always already surrounded by others. Who we are, what we know, and our ethical obligations are connected. As Cornell and van Marle explain, Continue reading "Being Interconnected"
Dec 12, 2016 Cyra ChoudhuryEquality
Since the 2003 Lawrence v. Texas (539 U.S. 558) decision in which the United States Supreme Court overruled the criminalization of private homosexual conduct in the United States, the argument that the ruling would lead to same-sex marriage and also to the recognition of polygamous marriage has been made with regularity by Supreme Court Justices and law professors. Most recently, in the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision, the Court proved Justice Scalia right and extended the fundamental right to marry to same-sex partners. (Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. __ (2015)). In his dissent in Obergefell, Justice Roberts reprised the Scalian slippery slope argument and asked whether “States may retain the definition of marriage as a union of two people….Indeed from the standpoint of history and tradition, a leap from opposite-sex marriage to same-sex marriage is much greater than one from a two-person union to plural unions, which have deep roots in some cultures around the world.” (Id. (Roberts, J., dissenting).) Invariably, when asked to legally justify the prohibition of polygamy against constitutional challenge, proponents of exclusively monogamous marriage rely on a host familiar Orientalist tropes as well as assertions of social dangers with little empirical proof.
Regardless of whether one agrees with the practice of plural marriage or same-sex marriage as a moral matter, it has become a requirement in the marriage cases, at least from Perry, Windsor, and now Obergefell, that objections to legalization be based on logical, discernible evidence rather than vague suppositions or, worse, stereotypes. Professor Jonathan Turley’s article The Loadstone Rock: The Role of Harm in the Criminalization of Plural Unions examines and challenges the proffered justifications for continuing the criminalization of polygamy. Using two cases, one from Canada that he refers to as “The Bountiful” (Reference re: Section 293 of the Criminal Code of Can., 2011 BCSC 1588), and Brown v. Buhman from the United States (947 F. Supp. 2d. 1170 (D. Utah 2013)), Turley argues that post-Lawrence, the ability to show harm from specifically consensual, adult plural marriages is very difficult if not impossible. Continue reading "Liberty, Equality, Polygamy?"
Nov 11, 2016 Toni WilliamsEquality
Inclusion, Exclusion, and the “New” Economic Inequality by Olatunde C.A. Johnson (hereinafter The “New” Economic Inequality) addresses key questions that have arisen in this difficult era of austerity, retrenchment, and increased economic insecurity in rich countries. These questions include: where does racial inequality fit in the high-profile discourse about the (re)discovery of economic inequality? And, in a world of extreme and growing economic inequality, what kinds of inclusionary practices contribute to remedying racial inequality?
I read this article because I’m working on a research project about the role of law in implementing inclusionary practices. This project concerns inclusionary practices in Europe and Latin America, while The “New” Economic Inequality focuses on the legal customs, traditions, and remedial instruments of the United States. Fortunately, the article’s critical analyses of the limitations of historic “remedies” for racial inequalities in the U.S. and of the absence of race from much of the contemporary discourses of economic inequality are of broader significance, as are the article’s insights into the importance of place-centred remedies to struggles for racial equality. Continue reading "Responding to Economic Inequality: The Place of Race"
Oct 14, 2016 Robert LeckeyEquality
Do you want that with fries, salad, or a side order of sexual harassment? Kaitlyn Matulewicz’s paper on sexual harassment in the restaurant industry prodded me to look differently at interactions with servers and to reflect more broadly on the burdens placed on those who experience harassment. Her starting point is the legal standard by which, to qualify as sexual harassment, workplace conduct must be objectively “unwelcome” and outside the “normal.” Drawing on interviews with women full-service restaurant workers, Matulewicz argues that the organization of restaurant work makes women vulnerable to enduring sexual harassment. Structuring elements of restaurant work – hiring and dressing practices, the focus on customer service, and the legally approved wage-tip relation – normalize women workers’ subjection to unwanted sexualized experiences.
Matulewicz gives plenty of space to the women interviewed, allowing us to hear their voices. I appreciated her methodological decision not to ask the participants outright whether they had experienced sexual harassment. Instead, she asked them to talk about their work and to describe their interactions with customers, co-workers, and management. That decision was crucial to the project because her participants “often struggled in defining sexual harassment and thinking about their own experiences in relation to it.” (P. 135.) One reason for this struggle is that sexualized conduct is so “normal” in their workplaces – and that the workers need to please their customers. Continue reading "Where the “Normal” Is Gendered and Unjust"
Sep 14, 2016 Kim BrooksEquality
John Borrows, Outsider Education: Indigenous Law and Land-Based Learning, 32 Windsor Yearbook on Access to Justice (forthcoming 2016).
John Borrows is a lead actor in the cast that makes it worth being part of the play of life. He’s always thoughtful and interesting; his scholarship thick with love. And I love reading his work.
In Outsider Education he appears as himself – teasing the reader with an introductory paragraph that leaves you wondering if he’s going to make an argument for old school legal education by apprenticeship, then turning the whole thing on its head. It’s not an argument for white men training white men in book-heavy chambers over sherry; it’s a reminder that Indigenous legal education in North America prior to European arrival kicks it even more old school. Continue reading "Taking the Classroom Beyond the Building’s Walls"
