CFP: It’s a Man’s World: Revealing and Addressing Hidden Gender Bias in Tax Law and Policy

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American Tax Policy Institute Research Roundtable and Symposium

It’s a Man’s World: Revealing and Addressing Hidden Gender Bias in Tax Law and Policy

Expressions of interest due March 31, 2024

Program October 17-18, 2024, Washington DC

The American Tax Policy Institute is pleased to issue this Announcement and Call for Contributions to an event on October 17 and 18, 2024, in Washington, DC, that will explore the intersections between and among gender, taxation, and public policy. Conference co-sponsors include Skadden Arps Meagher & Flom LLP, the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University, the Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Center at New York University School of Law, the Tax Law Center at New York University School of Law, the Pittsburgh Tax Review, the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, and several other organizations (list in formation). The goal of the event is to shine a spotlight on gender issues in taxation and to bring consideration of gender impacts into mainstream discussions surrounding the enactment and administration of tax law and policy. The intended scope of the Conference is broad, focusing not only on gender issues in U.S. tax law but also on gender issues in the tax laws of other countries. It will consider all taxes, including income, consumption, transfer, wealth-related, or other national-level taxes, as well as subnational taxes.

The Conference will take place from 4:00-6:30 p.m. on Thursday, October 17, 2024, and 8:30 a.m.-5:00 p.m. on Friday, October 18, 2024, at the Washington, D.C. offices of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP. The Thursday program will be a roundtable featuring research papers principally from graduate students, junior scholars, other professionals, and those new to work at the intersections of gender, taxation, and policy. This research roundtable will follow the format typical of academic conferences, providing ample time for conversation among participants.

The second day of the Conference will be a policy-oriented program of panel discussions bringing together academics, practicing attorneys, economists, accountants, policymakers, legislators, and others to consider issues related to gender and taxation and to consider strategies for incorporating gender-related concerns into tax policy.

We are now seeking participants interested in presenting a paper during the research roundtable and/or the policy program or serving as a formal discussant for one or more papers presented at the Conference. Participants can be academics, economists, practitioners, government officials, policy researchers, accountants, graduate students, or others with an interest and expertise in tax law and its administration. Contributors from the United States as well as other countries are welcome. 

There likely will be more availability to present at the research roundtable.Presentations at the research roundtable should be works in progress, not published (or committed to publication) prior to the event. Contributions to the policy program may be works in progress or published (or committed to publication) prior to the event. Examples of possible topics include marriage, the family, paid and unpaid labor, international aid, comparative tax studies, and the impact of tax administration on gender equality. This listing provides directional guidance only; in no way does it limit the potential issues for consideration.

Those interested in presenting at either the research roundtable or on a panel during the second day of the Conference should send an abstract of no more than 500 words describing their proposed presentation, an indication of whether the proposal is for the research roundtable or the policy program, and a copy of their CV to Judy Jaeger, Senior Staff Associate (jjaeger@law.pace.edu). If the proposed panel presentation is based on a published or soon-to-be-published work, please also attach a copy or draft of the work.

Expressions of interest are due by March 31, 2024. The Conference Committee expects to notify accepted participants by May 15, 2024. Accepted participants will submit circulation drafts of their work no later than September 17, 2024. Selected participants may receive an invitation to publish their completed papers in one of several respected journals that have expressed an interest in publishing the conference papers (information to be provided) or choose to publish elsewhere.

For those selected to present their work, the program sponsors will cover lodging and selected meals. Reimbursement for travel may be possible, to the extent funds become available. There is no fee for speakers to attend the conference; other attendees will make a $10-$20 contribution to help defray costs. The conference will be webcast and is open to members of the public.

We look forward to hearing from many interested potential contributors.

For further information, please contact Bridget J. Crawford (Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University and American Tax Policy Institute) or Katherine Pratt (LMU Loyola Law School and American Tax Policy Institute)

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Posted in Call for Papers or Participation, Employment Discrimination, Feminism and Culture, Feminism and Economics, Feminism and Families, Feminism and the Workplace, Women and Economics | Comments Off on CFP: It’s a Man’s World: Revealing and Addressing Hidden Gender Bias in Tax Law and Policy

Two Law Profs Named to Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum’s Committee of Scholars

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Congratulations to Nadia Ahmad (Barry) and Mary Ziegler (UC Davis).

Full announcement here.

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What is a “Menstrual Discharge Collection Device”?

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Laura Strausfeld of Period Law explains the term here, and why it matters in the fight to eliminate the sales tax on menstrual products.

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New Book Announcement: Women, Their Lives, and the Law — Essays in Honour of Rosemary Auchmuty

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This news from Hart Publishing:

Women, Their Lives, and the Law

Essays in Honour of Rosemary Auchmuty

Edited by Victoria Barnes, Nora Honkala and Sally Wheeler

This collection of essays honours Rosemary Auchmuty, Professor of Law at the University of Reading, UK. She has fostered the study of women’s academic careers and, more politically, advanced progress on gender and equality issues including same-sex marriage and property law. Her research promotes the case of feminist legal history as a way of revealing the place of women and challenging dominant historical narratives that cast them aside.

The chapters, and the collection as a whole, examine areas of law that have a deep significance for women’s lives.

Victoria Barnes is Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt, Germany.

Nora Honkala is Lecturer in Law at the University of Reading, UK.

Sally Wheeler is Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Dean of Law at the Australian National University, Australia.

Discount Price: £72

Order online at www.bloomsbury.com  – use the code GLR AQ7 to get 20% off!

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CFP: Feminist Approaches to State and Governance

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December 15-16, 2023, Emory University School of Law, Hybrid Workshop

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Feminism and Legal Theory Project (FLT).  During that time, we have held workshops, hosted visitors, and sought to encourage and facilitate feminist analyses of law and institutions. The Project was designed to move thinking from the more assimilationist tendencies of a “women in the law” perspective to explore the transformative possibilities of feminist theory. The participants over the years have contributed important pieces to both the books and special issues of law reviews that FLT has organized, as well as publishing innumerable individual articles on their own.  But these influential publications are not the only FLT legacy.

The FLT archive (preserved at Emory University) contains the audiovisual recordings of each workshop.  It also includes the calls for papers and hard copies of working drafts from sessions over the years (also available in HeinOnline). The archive offers an interesting roadmap for understanding the evolution of the distinctive FLT approach – it is a unique historical record of the processes whereby feminist concepts were explored and applied in conversations and contestations that ultimately helped shape the direction(s), not only of feminist legal theory but critical theory itself. Unfortunately, the archive is an (as of yet) underutilized resource for scholars. In order to pique interest in and encourage more use of the FLT archive, we are holding several workshops centered around some of the past themes the Project explored that remain critically relevant today.

For this session, we seek working papers exploring what a feminist legal theory approach to the State or the process of governance should entail.  We set out some tentative questions to consider on the next page – one set that might benefit (but does not require) using the archive material, as well as a set of some more un-anchored suggestions. We also include below a list of some of the past workshops documented in the archive relevant to this session in particular, along with information as to how to possibly access the archive remotely.

Past FLT Workshops related to this session that are part of the FLT Archive) ·      
“Women in the Welfare State” (1989), “Revisiting Equality” (1993); “Feminism Confronts Economic Theory” (1995); “Women, Children and Poverty” (1995;“Feminism Confronts Economic Theory: Exploring Economic Concepts” (1996); “Feminist Economic Theory and the Difference it Makes” (1997); “Feminism Confronts Economic Theory: Policy Initiatives and Economic Rhetoric” (1997); “Discrimination and Inequality” (1998); “Economic Discourse and the Family” (1998); “Discrimination and Inequality II” (1999); “Children: Public Good or Individual Responsibility” (1999); “Comparative Concepts of Equality” (2000); “Corporations and Capitalism: Policy and Protest” (2001); “Corporate Citizens in Corporate Cultures” (2002).       

Accessing the FLT Archive: You may access workshop workbooks, calls for papers, and schedules electronically through HeinOnline in the Women in the Law repository. For more information on workshops, PDFs, Calls for Papers, or workshop schedules, or if you do not have access to HeinOnline, please email Mangala Kanayson at mkanays [at] emory [dot] edu. Limited electronic access to videos from previous workshops may be available. Contact us for information.
Questions that might benefit from using the FLT archive might include: ·       Are there insights from previous decades of feminist legal scholarship which can help explain or illuminate the current anti-feminist backlash?
How compatible is feminist theory with principles (and limitations) of legal theory?
How does the past help us to understand current feminist critiques of liberal legal theory centered on concepts such as autonomy, equality, and neutrality?
How do ideas from the past illuminate current attacks on liberal ideals?
Does the history of FLT suggest some approaches enshrined in contemporary critical (including feminist) theory may be in need of conceptual reevaluation and re-imagining?
How does the methodology used in the FLT workshops differ from that found in academic events today and might these differences affect perception of issues and their possible resolutions?

More general (non-archive oriented) areas to explore include:
When and where is there a need for state action and involvement?
Do feminist principles justify a more or less expansive notion of public interest in and influence over providing for human needs and social well-being?Is there a feminist view of the state that differs from those presented in many other critical approaches?
How should we conceive of the state and its relationship to “private” institutions and alternative systems or centers of power (religion, corporations, culture, etc.)?
How have feminist proposals for expanded state welfare support or regulatory protections grappled with the problems of abusive state power?
How can feminist scholarship focused on expanding state responsiveness address the critical turn that increasingly focuses primarily on authoritarianism in law, culture, and government?
What is the contemporary role of the concept of gender in law and does it differ from understandings of gender and law in the past?
What have been the unique feminist contributions to critiques of the legal division between public and private?
How has feminist legal scholarship analyzed the role of the law in shaping the social and economic institutions that structure intimate relationships?
How has feminist legal theory critiqued conceptions of autonomy as the basis for resolving conflicts about the legal treatment of intimacy?
What insights from feminist debates can inform current questions of how to protect privacy and intimacy and relate to questions of democracy and justice?

Vulnerability and Resilience Background Reading at: http://web.gs.emory.edu/vulnerability

Submissions Procedure: Email a proposal as a Word or PDF document by Friday, October 27, 2023, to Mangala Kanayson at mkanays [at] emory [dot] edu. Decisions will be made by Friday, November 3, 2023, and working paper drafts will be due Monday, November 27, 2023, so they can be duplicated and distributed prior to the Workshop.

Workshop conveners: Martha Albertson Fineman (Emory University School of Law), Martha T. McCluskey (University at Buffalo School of Law), and Samuel S. Burry (University of Oxford).

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Law Professor Social Media Census

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Over at the Faculty Lounge, I’ve posted my semi-regular call for corrections and new additions to the Law Professor Twitter Social Media Census. Head over to the Lounge (here) to check your info or add yourself for the first time.

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@VHC Initiative Seeks Postdoctoral Fellow

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The Vulnerability and the Human Condition Initiative at Emory University is seeking a postdoctoral fellow for a two-year period. Candidates with a background or interest in jurisprudence, critical theory, philosophy, or political science, as well as vulnerability theory are encouraged to apply.

Job Description: Postdoctoral fellows are generally expected to function responsibly and autonomously within the school’s complex and decentralized environment. Independent thinking and action are in fact requisite to successful careers in research. 

This position will entail coteaching two seminars each year with Professor Martha Fineman, helping organize and conduct various workshops, and hosting visiting scholars from around the world.  

The ideal candidate for this position will have a strong interest in intellectual history and critical legal theory, particularly as developed in feminist and vulnerability theory scholarship. 

Responsibilities of postdoctoral fellows include the following: 

  • Assume primary responsibility for the development of your research and career. 
  • Perform the research required by the faculty supervisor to a high standard and in accordance with all institutional and federal regulations. 
  • Assist in teaching courses aligned with VHC’s mandate when appropriate and attend the Initiative’s workshops and events. 
  • Work in a collegial and cooperative manner with the faculty supervisor and other co-workers. 

Start Date: The appointment will be a one-year full-time Post-Doctoral Fellowship with the expectation of renewal for an additional one-year term and will commence on September 15, 2023. 

Remuneration: Your salary will be set at $60,000.00 per year. Benefits start at 20 hours per week and include medical, dental, vision, life insurance, accidental death and dismemberment, short-term and long-term disability, and retirement savings.

Research Assistance: You will also be provided a research fund of $1,500 to cover some costs of your research and you may apply for additional funding if attending relevant conferences or have business-related travel. 

Minimum Qualifications: A doctoral degree or equivalent (J.D., Ph.D., M.D., etc.) in an appropriate field. Excellent writing ability and strong oral communication skills. The ability to work effectively independently and collegially. 

Application Process: Click here to access the official application.

Please share this announcement widely. 

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Stolzenberg Wins 2023 Haub Law Emerging Scholar Award in Women, Gender & Law

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Emily Stolzenberg (Villanova) has won the 2023 Haub Law Emerging Scholar Award in Women, Gender & Law for her paper Nonconsensual Family Obligations, 48 BYU L. Rev. 625 (2022).  The press release is here. Here is the paper’s abstract:

Even as the pandemic has both highlighted and compounded the challenges many U.S. families face in meeting their members’ basic needs, efforts to expand public subsidies for caretaking have gained little traction. Scholars have identified many historical and practical reasons for Americans’ entrenched skepticism toward the welfare state. Ideas matter, too, and this Article uncovers and critiques one that works to limit collective financial responsibility for families: the conviction that family support obligations must be legitimated through consent.

In family law, as in liberal political theory, consent works to reconcile state regulation with individual freedom. But because consent is a poor way to conceptualize relations of interdependence, consent-based ideas about what family members owe one another make family law doctrine less generous and justifiable than it could be. Such ideas also insulate citizens from financial obligations toward anyone’s family but their own.

Consent-based legitimation endures in part because “consent” can bear different meanings unless it is precisely defined—work that family law scholars have only begun to undertake. Contributing to that project, this Article develops a taxonomy that identifies the distinct roles consent plays in justifying family obligations. It then uses that taxonomy to analyze how uncritical consent-based reasoning contributes to an incoherent body of doctrine that naturalizes economic inequality within and between families.

To begin to address these problems, family law should incorporate additional principles beyond consent for justifying family support obligations. Adopting such a pluralist approach would allow family law to grapple with important normative questions directly and openly, contributing to more defensible (and potentially more egalitarian) doctrine. Recognizing what this Article calls “nonconsensual family obligations” is also the first step toward advocating for the collective responsibility to make the material inputs of family life available to all—rendering family support obligations both broader and more widely spread than we currently imagine them to be.

The full paper is available here.

Congratulations, Professor Stolzenbeg!

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CFP: Women, Gender & the Law Emerging Scholar Award @HaubLawatPace

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Bumping to the front in light of the 7/1 deadline.

Women, Gender & the Law Emerging Scholar Award: Call for Submissions

The Elisabeth Haub School of Law is pleased to announce the competition for its annual Women, Gender & the Law Emerging Scholar Award.  This paper competition is open to all having with five (5) or fewer years of full-time law teaching experience as of July 1, 2023. The deadline for submissions is July 1, 2023.

The purpose of the award is to encourage and recognize excellent legal scholarship related to gender and the law.  The work chosen for the Women, Gender & the Law Emerging Scholar Award should make a substantial contribution to legal literature and reflect original research and/or major developments in previously reported research.

Papers will be reviewed on a blind basis by a committee comprised of members of the Haub Law faculty with expertise in this area.  The winner of the competition will be invited to present the paper to selected students and faculty at Haub Law (located in White Plains, NY) during the 2023-2024 academic year, with reasonable travel expenses from within the continental U.S. paid, or via Zoom, as circumstances permit and by mutual agreement.

ELIGIBILITY:

  • All persons who have held full-time teaching positions for five (5) or fewer full academic years as of July 1, 2023 are eligible for consideration. One does not have to be on the tenure-track or tenured to be eligible. Time as a VAP or Fellow does not “count against” the five (5) year clock.
  • There is no subject-matter limitation for submissions, as long as the paper relates in some way to gender and the law.
  • Jointly authored papers are accepted as long as each author independently meets the eligibility requirements.

PUBLICATION COMMITMENTS/LIMITATIONS:

  • There is no publication commitment associated with the competition. 
  • Papers are eligible regardless of whether they were published prior to submission date, are scheduled to be published after the submission date, or are not yet under submission.
  • Each applicant is limited to one (1) entry.
  • Papers considered in prior years’ competitions are eligible for resubmission.
  • There are no page-length or word-count limitations.
  • All publications (including scholarly articles, book chapters, legal briefs and other writings) are eligible for consideration.

SUBMISSION:

  • We will accept submissions for the Emerging Scholar Award from May 10, 2023, through July 1, 2023. The winner will be announced by August 30, 2023.
  • To participate, please email your work, redacted as necessary to preserve anonymity (for the blind judging process), as a portable data file (PDF) to Judy Jaeger, Senior Staff Associate, at jjaeger@law.pace.edu with the subject line “Emerging Scholar Award.”
  • Please include in the body of the email your name, institutional affiliation and confirmation that you meet the eligibility requirements.
  • Unredacted or late papers will not be considered.

Information on Emerging Scholar Award and the Elisabeth Haub School of Law

The Elisabeth Haub School of Law is pleased to host an annual paper competition for its Women, Gender & the Law Emerging Scholar Award.  The law school at Pace University is one of a small number of schools in the United States named after a woman, and we are proud of our school’s long-standing commitment to gender justice.

Since the establishment of the Women’s Justice Center in 1991, Haub Law has made gender justice a priority.  Students have the ability to pursue a path to practice in Women, Gender & the Law, through which they develop skills and strategies for effective representation and advocacy for women and gender justice, regardless of what career they pursue.  The Haub Law faculty includes nationally recognized academic experts and advocates for women and gender justice. Our faculty teach, research and write about gender equality and justice as it relates to constitutional law, corporate law, criminal law, education, environmental law, estate planning, juvenile justice, legal theory, poverty, public health, social media, and taxation, to name just a few areas.  An important hallmark of Haub Law is that in addition to our specialty classes that focus on gender, issues involving gender are also integrated into a wide range of other courses.

Prior Winners

2020 – Greer Donley, University of Pittsburgh School of Law, Contraceptive Equity: Curing the Sex Discrimination in the ACA’s Mandate, 71 Ala. L. Rev. 499 (2019).

2021 – Marie Amélie George, Exploring Identity, 54 Fam. L.Q. 1 (2021)

2022  –Elizabeth D. Katz, Sex, Suffrage, and State Constitutional Law: Women’s Legal Right to Hold Public Office, 33 Yale J. Law & Feminism 110 (2022)

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Can Chat GPT Learn to Write Like Me?

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Apparently yes, according to this how-to from Forbes. The era of the good written deep-fake is already here!

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Make No Mistake About the Extensive Anti-Abortion Agenda

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The anti-abortion agenda is aiming for nothing less than full legal personhood from the moment of conception, as laid out in this essay in the National Review.

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An Argument in Favor of Menstrual Leave in India

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Bhaghamma G (Mysore) and Prof. (Dr.) Ramesh (Mysore) have posted to SSRN their article Addressing Menstrual Stigma: The Case for Implementing Menstrual Leave as a Legal Provision in India, 5 Indian J. of L. & Legal Research __ (2023). Here is the abstract:

This paper explores the need for a legal provision for menstrual leave in India to address the stigma surrounding menstruation and promote gender equality in the workplace and society. Menstrual leave refers to a policy that allows women to take time off from work or school during their menstrual cycles. While some companies in India have voluntarily introduced menstrual leave policies, there is no legal provision for it yet. The paper argues that a legal provision for menstrual leave is necessary to ensure that women are not discriminated against in the workplace and have the right to take time off during their menstrual cycles. However, the paper also acknowledges concerns about the implementation of menstrual leave policies and suggests that the policy should be carefully crafted, with proper guidelines for its implementation, to address concerns about its misuse and promote gender neutrality. Ultimately, the paper concludes that implementing a legal provision for menstrual leave in India is crucial for addressing menstrual stigma and promoting gender equality in the workplace and society.

The full paper is available here.

In our book, Menstruation Matters: Challenging the Law’s Silence on Periods (2022), Emily Waldman and I caution that menstrual leave–at least in the U.S. context–might lead to increased discrimination.

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Bank of America Report on Menopause in the Workplace

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Bank of America has issued a first-of-its-kind (in the U.S., at least) report, Break Through the Stigma: Menopause in the Workplace. It contains lots of good information about the impacts of menopause on the workforce. Here are the report’s recommendations for companies:

  • Talk about menopause openly and often to help increase awareness and understanding of menopause and create a culture of caring where women can feel more comfortable
    to communicate their needs.
  • Offer manager training as well as educational sessions and resources specifically on menopause.
  • Regularly engage employees in a dialogue about how your company can be more supportive of their needs and ask for feedback on the value of your benefits offering.
  • Show you’re listening by following up on their requests.
  • Create an employee network or peer support group focused on menopause, or introduce this topic to an existing group.
  • Consult with professionals who specialize in menopause support to identify ways you might be able to add or enhance menopause-related programs and policies, such as:
  • Access to clinically sound education and health platform
  • Resources and advocates for guidance on symptoms, treatments, referrals and the management of physical and emotional impacts
  • Provider-managed support groups
  • Direct access to specialists on the menopause journey

Emily Gold Waldman (Pace), Naomi Cahn (UVa) and I have written about menopause at work (here and here), and we’re currently at work on a book on the many intersections of menopause and law, so it is interesting to see this issue getting some traction.

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Virtual Summer Feminist Legal Theory Series–June 28 & Aug 2

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2023 VIRTUAL SUMMER FEMINIST LEGAL THEORY SERIES

Looking Back/Looking Forward: The Significance of Feminist Legal Theory

June 28, 2023 and August 2, 2023

Pre-registration (here) required

Zoom link to be provided 1 day prior to event

Overview

This summer, the U.S. Feminist Judgments Project is pleased to host the Summer Feminist Legal Theory Series on June 28, 2023 and August 2, 2023 from 2:00pm-3:45 Eastern/11am-12:45pm Pacific.

Attendees from all parts of the academy with a verified academic email address are welcome to attend with pre-registration. There is no charge to attend. All sessions are held via Zoom.

Session 1 – June 28, 2023, 2:00pm-3:45 Eastern/11am-12:45pm Pacific

Reflecting Back on 40 Years of the Feminism and Legal Theory (FLT) Project: Innovation and Assimilation

This workshop will consider the historic and contemporary significance of the Feminism and Legal Theory Project, launched at the University of Wisconsin in 1984.

Chair: Bridget J. Crawford (Pace)

Moderator: Martha Albertson Fineman (Emory)

Panelists: Samuel Burry (Oxford), Deborah Dinner (Cornell), Martha Albertson Fineman (Emory), Risa Lieberwitz (Cornell), Linda McClain (Boston University), Martha McCluskey (Buffalo), Laura Spitz (New Mexico)

Session 2 – August 2, 2023, 2:00pm-3:45 Eastern/11am-12:45pm Pacific

How Feminist Legal Theory Can Make a Difference 

In this second session we will look at the Feminist Judgments Project, considering its approach to integrating feminist theory into law by rewriting (and thus critiquing) judicial opinions to reflect feminist principles and methods in major areas of law. 

Chair: Kathryn M. Stanchi (UNLV)

Speakers TBD

Registration

Preregistration for all participants (speakers and attendees) is required via this link: https://pace.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYpce2trzojH9yR8jjH3Jjie9yJJxlb9Kow

Zoom log-in information will be sent one day prior to the event. An academic email address is required to pre-register. Anyone without an academic email address who wishes to be added should contact Bridget J. Crawford (Pace) to be added to the registration list: bcrawford at law dot pace dot edu. 

All attendees including speakers must register. Attendees need to register only once and then can attend either or both of the sessions in the summer series.

Sponsors

The Summer Feminist Legal Theory Series is co-sponsored by the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University and the William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, together with The Feminism and Legal Theory Project, The Vulnerability and the Human Condition Initiative, the Institute for Feminist Legal Studies at Osgoode, the Family Law Center at the University of Virginia School of Law, and the AALS Section on Women in Legal Education. The series is coordinated by Bridget J. Crawford (Pace), bcrawford at law dot pace dot edu, and Kathy Stanchi (UNLV), kathryn dot stanchi at unlv dot edu.

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Barbara Bader Aldave, 1938-2023

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From the University of Oregon, here:

Barbara Bader Aldave passed on May 23, 2023, at the age of 84, in Eugene, Oregon.

Born December 28, 1938, Aldave earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Stanford University before earning her law degree from University of California at Berkeley in 1966. That same year, she married Ralph Theodore Aldave, also a lawyer and UC Berkeley graduate. Aldave was admitted to practice law by the Oregon State Bar in 1966 and by the State Bar of Texas in 1982.

Before her 43-year academic career, Aldave practiced law at Shell Development Company in Emeryville, California; Krause, Lindsay & Nahstoll in Portland, Oregon; and Johnson, Johnson & Harrange in Eugene, Oregon.

In 1970, Aldave was hired as Oregon Law’s first woman faculty member. She was only the third woman to teach corporate law at an accredited U.S. law school, and she was the one of the first to teach securities regulation. Aldave educated current and future lawyers and leaders, supported the work of Oregon’s entrepreneurs, and championed the cause of justice. Recognizing Aldave’s hard work, the Oregon Law chapter of Phi Delta Phi Legal Fraternity awarded her with the Outstanding Teacher Award for three years in a row!

During the 1970s and 1980s, Aldave’s academic career continued at the law schools of University of California at Berkeley, University of Texas at Austin, Northwestern University, Boston College, and Cornell University. In 1976, the University of Texas School of Law gave Aldave their annual teaching excellence award. She was the first woman to receive this recognition, and only after teaching at the law school for two years. Other accomplishments at the University of Texas include being named as a James R. Dougherty co-chair for faculty excellence from 1981 to 1982, as a Piper professor in 1982, and as a Joe A. Worsham centennial professor from 1984 until 1989.

From 1989 through 1998, Aldave served as the first female dean of St. Mary’s University Law School in San Antonio, Texas, which also made her the first female law school dean in Texas history. Aldave set out to make the law school more diverse and especially sensitive to people of color. During her deanship, minority enrollment rose from 11 to 38 percent. The school also won a national award from the American Bar Association for its commitment to preparing its students for public-interest careers.

“Barbara was a pioneer among women law professors who influenced and helped many women across the country. She was particularly kind to me when I was a young visiting professor at the University of Texas,” said Oregon Law Professor Emerita Leslie Harris. “We were so delighted when she rejoined the Oregon faculty, for she gave so much to both her business law students and those enrolled in her class about legal issues facing women in prison. She was a great soul.”

In 2000, Aldave returned to Oregon Law as the Loran L. Stewart Professor of Business Law and the director of the Center for Law and Entrepreneurship, where she continued her energetic and innovative teaching career. Professor Aldave retired from teaching at Oregon Law in 2013.

Professor Aldave was a decisive “larger than life character.” Her faith and compassion moved her to study, practice, and teach law, and she was deeply motivated to remedy inequality within the law. Students described Aldave’s classes as organized, lively, provocative, and “a grand intellectual adventure.”

In 2002, Aldave founded The Portia Project, an Oregon non-profit corporation that provides legal assistance to women in prison, with a special emphasis on helping them remain connected with their children both during their incarceration and following their release.

Aldave participated with many organizations, including the Federacion Interamericana de Abogados, the American Bar Association, Amnesty International, Bread For the World, the Gray Panthers, and the National Coalition To Abolish the Death Penalty. Many awards came her way, including the Annual Inspirational Award, The Women’s Advocacy Project (1989); Appreciation Award, San Antonio Black Lawyers Association (1990); Special Recognition Award, National Convention of National Lawyers Guild (1990); Outstanding Law Professor Award, St. Mary’s University Chapter of Delta Theta Phi (1990 & 1991),  the Biographical Record in “Who’s Who in American” (1986-87 & 1988-89 & 1990-91), and the Frohnmayer Award for Public Service for her work with the Portia Project at UO (2009).

Aldave is survived by her husband Rafael, daughter Anna Alkin and son Dr. Anthony Aldave, a chaired professor of ophthalmology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Funeral arrangements are set for Thursday, June 1, at Mt. Calvary Cemetery in Eugene, with a 1:00 P.M. viewing and a 2:00 P.M. graveside service. 

Plans are in the works for a big, multi-day party in her honor in the year to come.

The Oregon post has some lovely pictures, so feel free to head over to the school’s notice (here) to view them.

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Call for Proposals for 2024 AALS WILE Main Program: Obstacles to Gender Equality in the Legal Academy

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Call for Proposals for 2024 AALS WILE Main Program:   

“Obstacles to Gender Equality in the Legal Academy”  

Panel Description:  

Despite the progress made in recent years, gender inequality remains a pervasive issue in the legal profession, particularly in academia. Women remain underrepresented in influential positions, and face systemic bias, discrimination, harassment, and other obstacles that limit their advancement and overall success. Law schools place a premium on statuses that have largely been defined by and through patriarchies. Visible and invisible status lines and distinctions are perpetuated by a legal academy that voices an often-empty commitment to equity. 

We invite proposals for the 2024 AALS WILE Main Program, dedicated to exploring the obstacles that face a diversity of women in the legal academy. We welcome proposals that address, but are not limited to, the following themes: 

  • The impact of implicit bias and gender stereotypes on hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions in law schools.  
  • The impact on career advancement and earning potential (or “motherhood tax”) for professional women due to parenting and/or caretaking responsibilities.  
  • The role of institutional policies and practices in perpetuating inequality, such as implicit curricula, exclusionary practices, and lack of support for work-life balance. 
  • The experiences of women of color, LGBTQ2S+ women, women with disabilities, and other marginalized groups in the legal academy. 
  • The effect of gender disparities on teaching, research, and service activities. 
  • The potential of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives to foster a more equitable academic environment. 
  • The implications of gender inequality for legal education, scholarship, and the legal profession at large. 
  • The ways in which laws attacking tenure and prohibiting DEI trainings/offices will perpetuate gender inequality.   

We welcome submissions from law faculty, staff, and administrators at all stages of their careers. Submissions are due on or before Monday July 31, 2023, and should be sent to victoriahaneman@creighton.edu. For more information, please do not hesitate to contact Victoria Haneman.   

 

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Shatzman on “The Clerkships Whisper Network”

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Aliza Shatzman (Legal Accountability Project) has published “The Clerkships Whisper Network: What It Is, Why It’s Broken, and How to Fix It”, in the Colum. L. Rev.Forum.

Here is the opening paragraph (citations and links omitted):

You want to clerk? Great. How will you avoid judges who harass their clerks? Some students say, “I’d ask someone.” But who are you going to ask? Clerkship directors tell students to “do their research.” But what research are you going to do when so little information about judges is available on an equitable basis? I posed this question to Columbia Law students on November 17, 2022, at an event with my nonprofit, The Legal Accountability Project (LAP). I launched LAP in late spring 2022 to correct both the lack of transparency in the clerkship application process and the lack of accountability for judges who mistreat their clerks—injustices that I personally experienced as a law student and law clerk. I now speak with law students and administrators to share LAP’s mission of ensuring positive clerkship experiences while extending support and resources to law  clerks  who  do  not  have  positive  experiences. . I do not dissuade anyone from clerking —in fact, clerking is an excellent option for many new attorneys. But both law students and law schools should prioritize positive clerkship experiences over the prestige of clerkships or number of clerkship placements, period—a balance that some law schools have historically struggled to strike.   Furthermore, clerkship applicants must be intentional about identifying judges who create positive work environments. Under the current clerkship regime, many law students lack access to critical information. Better, more transparent processes are necessary.

The full piece is available here.

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Spindelman on “The New Intersectional and Anti-Racist LGBTQIA Politics: Some Thoughts on the Path Ahead”

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Marc Spindelman (Ohio State) has posted to SSRN his essay The New Intersectional and Anti-Racist LGBTQIA Politics: Some Thoughts on the Path Ahead. Here is the abstract:

This essay, originally presented as a talk at the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis on April 30, 2023, as part of the Midwest LGBTQ+ Rights Conference and the Washington University Public Interest Law & Policy Speakers Series, takes up the new intersectional and anti-racist LGBTQIA+ politics. It offers some reflections on those politics, their meanings, and their possible trajectories in the days ahead in light of recent and soon-to-be-released Supreme Court decisions.

The full essay is available here.

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USF Seeks Legal Writing Faculty

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The School of Law at the University of San Francisco is seeking a full-time non-tenure track Legal Research, Writing, and Analysis Professor for the upcoming academic year. The faculty member guides first-year law students through their first foray into legal writing and research so they are best equipped to analyze and write and research about complex legal issues. The faculty member will teach two sections each semester comprised of approximately 20 students per class. During the fall semester, the professor will teach predictive writing and legal analysis. The spring semester will focus on persuasive writing, legal research, and oral advocacy. The spring semester culminates in a moot court event where alumni attorneys act as judges during oral arguments. The small class size fosters collaboration and allows faculty to adapt instruction to particular classroom needs and provide individualized feedback. This feedback is core to the school’s legal writing program. In addition, the professor may teach an additional class each semester as assigned by the Associate Dean or Dean.

Job Responsibilities

  • Effective teaching and classroom instruction, including delivering lectures and facilitating class discussions and exercises on legal analysis, writing, and legal research
  • Use formative assessment techniques in order to provide students with extensive feedback on their writing, research, analysis, citations, oral presentations, and understanding of course material
  • Observe regular office hours and be available to students during office hours and by appointment
  • Prepare course syllabi, practice assignments, handouts, midterms, final exams, and relevant course materials
  • Grade and evaluate students’ coursework and submit grades promptly by established deadlines
  • Advise students and provide mentorship on legal writing, professionalism, and academic, bar prep, and curricula issues
  • Supervise upper-level students to develop the spring moot court topic
  • Collaborate with other Legal Research, Writing, and Analysis faculty on research and writing assignments, curriculum development, events, meetings, and orientations
  • Additional duties as assigned by the Dean or Associate Dean

 
Minimum Requirements

  • JD obtained at an ABA-accredited law school

 
Additional Skills, Knowledge and Abilities

  • 2-5 years teaching experience preferred
  • Background in litigation, moot court, or other oral advocacy program
  • Excellent legal writing, editing, and research skills
  • Experience with or the ability to work with a diverse student body, faculty and staff
  • Demonstrated ability to provide clear constructive feedback to students with differing educational and social backgrounds
  • Member of the California Bar preferred

 
Additional Details & Application

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Politics Not From Any Dictionary: Theorizing (and Living) a Trans-Welcoming Feminist Movement

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Over at Signs is the most recent Feminist Frictions piece: Exploring Transgender Law and Politics by Catharine A. MacKinnon, with Finn Mackay, Mischa Schuman, Sandra Fredman, and Ruth Chang. It contains some very important insights from the authors, especially Professor MacKinnon, on feminism’s capaciousness:

For the first time in over thirty years, it makes sense to me to reconsider what feminism means. Trans people have been illuminating sex and gender in new and insightful ways. And for some time, escalating since 2004 with the proposed revisions in the UK Gender Recognition Act, a substantial cohort of self-identified feminists have opposed trans peoples’ existence as trans. Male power, which seldom takes seriously anything feminists say, has weaponized the feminist critique against trans people in both the US and the UK. In the process, many issues central to the status of the sexes have been newly opened or sharpened; many are unresolved. I hope to learn from our discussion. My thoughts are provisional and could be subtitled “what I’ve learned so far.”

Much of the current debate has centered on (endlessly obsessed over, actually) whether trans women are women. Honestly, seeing “women” as a turf to be defended, as opposed to a set of imperatives and limitations to be criticized, challenged, changed, or transcended, has been pretty startling. One might think that trans women—assigned male at birth, leaving masculinity behind, drawn to and embracing womanhood for themselves—would be welcomed. Yet a group of philosophers purporting feminism slide sloppily from “female sex” through “feminine gender” straight to “women” as if no move has been made, eventually reverting to the dictionary: a woman is an “adult human female.” Defining women by biology—adult is biological age, human is biological species, female is biological sex—used to be criticized as biological essentialism. Those winging to the Right are thrilled by this putatively feminist reduction of women to female body parts, preferably chromosomes and reproductive apparatus, qualities chosen so that whatever is considered definitive of sex is not only physical but cannot be physically changed into.

Feminism, by contrast, is a political movement. If some imagine a movement for female body parts, the rest of us are part of some other movement, one to end the subordination of women in all our diversity. In other words, what women “are” does not necessarily define the woman question: our inequality, our resulting oppression. Those of us who do not take our politics from the dictionary want to know: Why are women unequal to men? What keeps women second-class citizens? How are women distinctively subordinated? The important question for a political movement for the liberation of women is thus not what a woman is, I think, but what accounts for the oppression of women: who is oppressed as a woman, in the way women are distinctively oppressed?

Women are not, in fact, subordinated or oppressed by our bodies. We do not need to be liberated from our chromosomes or our ovaries. It is core male-dominant ideology that attributes the source of women’s inequality to our nature, our biological sex, which for male dominance makes it inevitable, immutable, unchangeable, on us. As if our bodies, rather than male dominant social systems, do it to us. It is as if Black people’s melanin content is the cause of police violence against them, rather than the meaning police attribute to their appearance (racial markers in this instance) and the law and culture of impunity for their actions. If women’s oppression is defined by what defines women, and that is our sexed biology as this group defines it, the very most we can change is the excesses of male power. Never male power itself.

In reality, women’s inequality—with the oppressive practices that inequality makes possible and that reinforce it through gender, specifically gender hierarchy—has long been recognized as a social and political, not biological, arrangement. Inferiority, not difference, is the issue of hierarchy, including gender hierarchy. On the technical meaning of sex as physical and gender as its social meaning, sex is equal. It is gender that is unequal. Women are not men’s biological inferiors; we are constrained to be men’s social inferiors. Who knew we would have to keep repeating this. It is gender that constructs women as men’s inferiors, as valued less to worthless, as weak and dependent, as stupid and illogical and emotional, as soft and yielding and receptive, as bitchy and ditsy, whiny, seductive, and manipulative, destined only to reproduce. These attributions, this power division, not our bodies, is what makes women a political group, caste, or class; resistance to them is what makes the women’s movement a political movement.

(Citations omitted.) Read the full piece here. It’s very worthwhile.

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Who Benefits from Tampon Tax Repeal? Research Suggests It’s Not Customers

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This article in Reuters has some fascinating coverage of emerging research on who benefits from tampon tax repeal. Here is an excerpt:

“People are using tea towels, T-shirts, socks, toilet paper,” said Tina Leslie, founder of Freedom4Girls, one of several charities that successfully lobbied the British government to scrap a 5% VAT rate on period products in 2021.
 
But two years on, many campaigners say the impact on prices has been disappointing.
 
The lion’s share of the saving has been retained by retailers, giving them an annual windfall estimated at about 15 million pounds ($18 million), according to research published in November 2022 by Tax Policy Associates, a nonprofit.
 
“At most, tampon prices were cut by around 1%, with the remaining 80% of the benefit retained by retailers,” said the study, which factored in the effect of inflation by tracking the prices of period products alongside other common hygiene goods.
 
A spokesperson for the Treasury said the government had kept its promise to scrap the tax, urging retailers “to pass the savings on to shoppers”.
 
Several large retailers, including the pharmacy chains Boots and Superdrug, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation they had cut the price of period products by 5% in January 2021 to reflect the VAT changes. Supermarket chain Waitrose said it had voluntarily reduced its prices four years prior to the tax cut.
 
But as British campaigners ratchet up pressure on retailers, experts say scrapping the tampon tax is unlikely to reduce prices without stringent controls to ensure implementation, such as detailed price research and monitoring companies for non-compliance.
 
Tax policy changes alone are insufficient: They must be implemented fully, resourced adequately in terms of quality control, and (have the) price change monitored,” said Susan Fox, deputy director at consulting organisation Global Health Visions, in a 2020 study on tax advocacy of menstrual products.
 
Without that, tax cuts can fall flat.
 
In Tanzania, VAT was reinstated a year after sanitary pads were exempted after it became clear that suppliers were not passing lower prices to consumers.
 
Part of the problem is market domination by a few companies who control prices, experts say.
 
Always – which dominates the Kenyan pads market – maintained its prices while other brands set their pricing to align with it following the VAT cut, Fox’s study said.
 
Procter & Gamble, which owns the Always brand, did not reply to requests for comment. Other leading manufacturers contacted by the Thomson Reuters Foundation either declined to comment or said distributors and retailers were responsible for setting prices.
 
The full article is available here.
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Which Countries Have Scrapped the Tampon Tax?

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Writing for Reuters, author Diana Baptista has a nice summary here. An excerpt:

Since Kenya became the first country to scrap VAT on sanitary pads and tampons in 2004, at least 17 countries have followed suit, according to research by the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
 
Among the latest countries to pass laws to abolish the tampon tax are Mexico, Britain and Namibia.
Another 10 countries have designated sanitary products as tax-exempt goods or have exempted the tax on imported raw materials used to make them.
 
Advocates against period poverty usually campaign for sanitary products to be zero-rated for VAT, as this means producers can also claim back taxes on raw materials, making the final product truly tax-free.
 
Although Tanzania and Nicaragua had also scrapped the tax on period products, both countries reintroduced it in 2019.
 
Mainly in Europe, 17 countries have reduced the VAT on sanitary products, with Italy the latest to do so this year.
The European Union last year revised a directive that previously only allowed member states to reduce VAT on sanitary products by 5%. The change means nations can now apply lower tax rates to some goods.
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Catharine A. MacKinnon Receives American Philosophical Society’s Henry J. Phillips Prize in Jurisprudence

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Many people will have read the good news at Brian Leiter’s blog (here) announcing the recent election of three law professors to the American Philosophical Society: James Forman (Yale), Catharine MacKinnon (Michigan/Harvard), and Dorothy Roberts (Penn).

In further good news, in April of this year, Professor MacKinnon received the American Philosophical Society’s Henry M. Phillips Prize, established in 1888. Formerly an award for “the best essay of real merit on the science and philosophy of jurisprudence,” since 1999, the Henry M. Phillips Prize is awarded to “recognize outstanding lifetime contributions to the field of jurisprudence and the important publications, which illustrate that accomplishment.” Prior winners include Karl Llewellyn, John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Louis Henkin, Bruce Ackerman, Frank Michelman, Cass Sunstein, Martha Nussbaum, Jeremy Waldron, Laurence Tribe, and Owen Fiss. Rare company, indeed.

Professor MacKinnon’s award was presented by Linda Greenhouse who began by noting that in the 125 years since the prize’s inception, the American Philosophical Society has bestowed this award only 27 times. Linda Greenhouse read Professor MacKinnon’s citation:

In recognition of her intellectual and political leadership in international law, constitutional law, political and legal theory, and jurisprudence, and in particular her pioneering work on gender equality, sexual abuse, and sexual exploitation, including sexual harassment, rape, prostitution, sex trafficking and pornography, and her effective framing of such harms as civil rights violations in the United States, in other countries, and in international law, bringing recognition and transformation in theory and practice.

Professor MacKinnon accepted the award with these remarks (reprinted with permission):

This is astounding. Thank you to the Committee and to this Society for this honor of a lifetime.

It is especially meaningful to me to be honored in the memory of Henry M. Phillips, who practiced law for a living.  

I am grateful for your understanding that a vision of equality, critical of the realities of the dominance of men and subordination of women, is philosophy.

Thank you for knowing that practicing law for change in the real world for survivors of sexual violation counts as jurisprudence.

And thank you for lifting up someone whose method is to listen to people designated to be silenced and to act on what they say, someone made “controversial” who acts on seeing and saying what power doesn’t want seen and said.

Thank you especially for seeing through all the lies about my work. 

And thank you to all my angels out there, which is why I am able to be here.

I hope that giving this prize to me inspires young people to choose meaningful work over the lures of conventional career advancement, and encourages them to take real risks to their self-interest and not be corrupted by dangled success.

And I hope that many more women, nonbinary people, trans people, and people of color will be given this high honor and this award in the years to come.

Thank you.

Congratulations to Professor MacKinnon! 

 

 

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CFP: Fifth Annual Equality Law Scholars’ Forum

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Call for Proposals for the Fifth Annual Equality Law Scholars’ Forum

November 10-11, 2023 – Boston University School of Law

Building on the success of the Equality Law Scholars’ Forum held at UC Berkeley Law in 2017, at UC Davis Law in 2018, at Boston University Law in 2021, at Loyola Los Angeles Law in 2022, and in the spirit of academic engagement and mentoring in the area of Equality Law, we (Tristin Green, Loyola Los Angeles; Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Boston University; and Leticia Saucedo, UC Davis) announce the Fifth Annual Equality Law Scholars’ Forum  and Reunion, to be held in Fall 2023.  

This Scholars’ Forum seeks to provide junior scholars with commentary and critique and to provide scholars at all career stages the opportunity to engage with new scholarly currents and ideas.  We hope to bring together scholars with varied perspectives (e.g., critical race theory, class critical theory, queer theory, feminist legal theory, law and economics, law and society) across fields (e.g., criminal system, education, employment, family, health, immigration, property, tax) and with work relevant to many diverse identities (e.g., age, class, disability, national origin, race, sex, sexuality) to build bridges and to generate new ideas in the area of Equality Law.  

This year, because this year’s gathering also will include a reunion, we will be selecting fewer Equality Law Scholars than in prior years. Specifically, we will select three to five relatively junior scholars (untenured, newly tenured, or prospective professors) in the United States. to present papers from proposals submitted in response to this Call for Proposals. In so doing, we will select papers that cover a broad range of topics within the area of Equality Law.  Leading senior scholars will provide commentary on each of the featured papers in an intimate and collegial setting.  The Forum and Reunion will take place all day Friday through lunch on Saturday.  Participants are expected to attend the full Forum and Reunion. The Equality Law Scholars’ Forum will pay transportation and accommodation expenses for participants and will host a dinner on Friday evening.  

This year’s Forum will be held on November 10-11, 2023, at Boston University School of Law.

Junior scholars are invited to submit abstracts of proposed papers, 3-5 pages in length, by June 15, 2023.   

Full drafts of papers must be available for circulation to participants by October 20, 2023.  

Note: We urge submission of proposals for drafts that will still be substantially in progress in October/November 2023 over drafts that will be in late-stage law review edits at that time.

Proposals should be submitted to:

Leticia Saucedo, UC Davis School of Law, lmsaucedo@ucdavis.edu.  Electronic submissions via email are preferred.

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Women’s Health Research is Underfunded

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The publication Nature has some informative graphics here.

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Miami Faculty Hiring Announcement 2024-2025

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The University of Miami School of Law seeks several entry-level and lateral candidates (Tenure-Track or Tenured) to join our intellectual community beginning in the 2024-25 academic year. We welcome applications from outstanding scholars in any area of focus who will add to the diversity of our faculty, contribute to the intellectual life of the school, enhance our teaching mission, and engage in meaningful service.  We have particular needs in Civil Procedure, Civil Rights, International Law (public or private), and Law & Technology. Juris Doctor degree required. 

Applicants may apply for the position via the University of Miami employment portal https://www.hr.miami.edu/careers/  and submit a cover letter, curriculum vitae, the names of three references, and teaching evaluations (if available) in PDF format.  Questions can be directed to Professors Donna Coker and Kele Stewart, Co-Chairs, Faculty Appointments Committee, at AppointmentsCommittee@law.miami.edu 

The University of Miami is an Equal Opportunity Employer – Females/Minorities/Protected Veterans/Individuals with Disabilities are encouraged to apply. Applicants and employees are protected from discrimination based on certain categories protected by Federal law. Click here for additional information.

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The Macroeconomic Cost of Menopause? $1.8 bn in the US Alone

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There is a new study from the Mayo Clinic, here: Impact of Menopause Symptoms on Women in the Workplace.

The NY Times has a nice write-up here (paywall; sorry):

Menopause costs American women an estimated $1.8 billion in lost working time per year, according to a Mayo Clinic study published this week. The paper examined how hot flashes, night sweats, mood swings and the myriad other symptoms associated with this time of life affect women in the workplace. It’s the largest study of its kind to have been done in the United States.

Stigmas at the intersection gender, aging and disability have long kept discussions of menopause out of public discourse (and legal scholarship). Naomi Cahn (UVa), Emily Waldman (Pace) and I are working on changing that. We have a series of three articles that are relevant:

Working Through Menopause, 99 Wash. U. L. Rev. 1531 (2022) 

Contextualizing Menopause and the Law, 45 Harv. J. L. & Gender 1 (2022) 

Managing and Monitoring the Menopausal Body, 2022 U. Chi. L. Forum 41 (2022).

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Siegel on How “History and Tradition” Perpetuates Inequality: Dobbs on Abortion’s Nineteenth-Century Criminalization @HoustonLRev @YaleLawSch

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Reva Siegel, Yale University Law School, is publishing How “History and Tradition” Perpetuates Inequality: Dobbs on Abortion’s Nineteenth-Century Criminalization in volume 60 of the Houston Law Review. Here is the abstract.

 

In this Commentary, I show how the tradition-entrenching methods the Court employed to decide New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n, Inc. v. Bruen and Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization intensify the gender biases of a constitutional order that for the majority of its existence denied women a voice in lawmaking and restricted women’s roles. The tradition entrenching methods the Court employed to decide Bruen and Dobbs elevate the significance of laws adopted at a time when women and people of color were judged unfit to participate and treated accordingly by constitutional law, common law, and positive law. The methods the Court employs are gendered in the simple sense that they tie the Constitution’s meaning to lawmaking from which women were excluded and in the deeper sense that the turn to the past provides the Court resources for expressing identity and value drawn from a culture whose laws and mores were more hierarchical than our own.

Sampling their recent opinions, Part II of this Commentary shows that the conservative Justices have repudiated past practices when those practices expressed racism or nativism to which the Justices objected. Yet, Part III of this Commentary shows that in Dobbs the conservative Justices embraced past practices as the nation’s history and tradition, counting abortion bans enacted with the support of the nineteenth-century anti-abortion campaign without scrutinizing evidence that the campaign mixed arguments for protecting unborn life with arguments that banning abortion would prevent ethnic replacement and would enforce wives’ marital and maternal roles. In Part IV, I suggest that Justice Alito might have refused to defer to prejudice of the past as he did in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue if he saw religious liberty, rather than abortion rights, at stake.

There are several reasons for revisiting the claims about abortion, history, and tradition on which the Dobbs decision rests. Even if the Supreme Court itself never acknowledges Dobbs’s selective and inaccurate account of the historical record, as it acknowledged historical errors of Bowers v. Hardwick in Lawrence v. Texas, there is value in recognizing that the Court’s claims about the past have a politics. In demonstrating that the Court selectively defers to the past, this Commentary shows how the Court’s history-and-traditions method provides new justifications for enforcing old forms of status inequality. This Commentary builds the historical record critical to debates over the criminalization of abortion in state courts and legislatures. And it contributes to Professor Melissa Murray’s remarkable and wide ranging account of how the jurisprudence of Bruen and Dobbs is gendered: Children of Men: The Roberts Court’s Jurisprudence of Masculinity.

 

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

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Monopoli on Situating Dobbs @ProfMonopoli @ConLawCenter

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Paula A. Monopoli, University of Maryland School of Law, has published Situating Dobbs at 14 ConLawNOW 45 (2023). Here is the abstract.

The recent decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health has been characterized as an outlier because its effect is to erase a previously recognized constitutional right. This paper situates Dobbs in a broader feminist constitutional history. It asks if this retrenchment is really such a unique turn in American jurisprudence when it comes to protections or “rights” that matter most to women’s lived experience. The paper argues that if one opens the aperture of constitutional history to embrace a more capacious view of rights, those afforded to women have often been eroded or erased by state legislatures, Congress, and courts. Using Reva Siegel’s work on constitutional memory, it theorizes about why commentators have not identified this thread in American constitutional history when discussing Dobbs. The paper then highlights three examples that illustrate a historical pattern of such erosion or erasure: voting, Prohibition, and protective labor legislation. It concludes that we can both note Dobbs’ outlier status and situate the decision in a historical continuum to correct the erasure of previous retrenchment in our constitutional memory. In so doing, we can more effectively respond to Dobbs’ implications for reproductive self-determination.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

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U San Francisco Seeks Visitors

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The University of San Francisco School of Law is seeking applicants for a visiting professor in Criminal Law for the 2023-2024 academic year. The Visitor may also have the opportunity to teach an elective/seminar, if the schedule permits, as part of a commitment to two courses each semester.

Details/Application

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Gender-Based Price Discrimination in Germany

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For anyone doing comparative anti-discrimination work, a fact sheet (here) prepared by Iris an der Heiden and Maria Wersig and published by the German Federal Anti-Discrimination Agencyprovides insight into gender-based price discrimination. Here is a summary:

The survey systematically examines the gender-based differentiation of prices (gender pricing) in case of the same or very similar products and services in Germany. Moreover, on the basis of empirical findings on gender pricing a legal evaluation with regard to the General Equal Treatment Act (German abbreviation: AGG) is conducted. The survey is based on empirical research into the product and services category of the basket of goods and services of the Federal Statistical Office.

Some of the most salient conclusions are:

Of the 1,682 products which could be identified as similar in the survey only 3.7 per cent had different prices. In 2.3 per cent of those cases women pay higher prices for the female variant of the same product, in 1.4 per cent of those cases men pay higher prices for the male product variant. The average surcharge for women and men amounts to approximately 5.00 .

The more obvious gender-based price differences refer to services offered by dry cleaners and hairdressers: 89 per cent of the hairdressers offer different rates for the same short haircuts for women and men, whereas women pay an average surplus amount of 12.50 . One third of the dry cleaners have different flat rates for men’s shirts and women’s blouses. The price difference in this case, too, is borne by women, who on average have to pay 1.80 more for the dry cleaning of blouses than men for shirts.

Read the full piece here.

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20% Discount On all US Feminist Judgments Books

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Cambridge University Press is offering a 20% discount on all titles in the US Feminist Judgments Series. Use the code Fem23 at Cambridge.org. 

Here are all the published titles in the series:

Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Opinions of the United States Supreme Court

Edited by Kathryn M. Stanchi, Linda L. Berger, Bridget J. Crawford

 

Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Tax Opinions

Edited by Bridget J. Crawford, Anthony C. Infanti

 

Feminist Judgments: Reproductive Justice Rewritten

Edited by Kimberly M. Mutcherson

 

Feminist Judgments: Family Law Opinions Rewritten

Edited by Rachel Rebouché

 

Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Trusts and Estates Opinions

Edited by Deborah S. Gordon, Browne C. Lewis, Carla Spivack

 

Feminist Judgments:Rewritten Employment Discrimination Opinions

Edited by Ann C. McGinley, Nicole Buonocore Porter

 

Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Tort Opinions

Edited by Martha Chamallas, Lucinda M. Finley

 

Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Property Opinions

Edited by Eloisa C. Rodriguez-Dod, Elena Maria Marty-Nelson

 

Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Criminal Law Opinions

Edited by Bennett Capers, Sarah Deer, Corey Rayburn Yung

 

Feminist Judgments: Corporate Law Rewritten

Edited by Anne M. Choike, Usha R. Rodrigues, Kelli Alces Williams

 

Feminist Judgments: Health Law Rewritten

Edited by Seema Mohapatra, Lindsay Wiley

 

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Yale Journal of Law & Feminism Symposium – Meeting the Moment: Legal Frameworks for Feminist Futures

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The Yale Journal of Law & Feminism invites you to register for our symposium: Meeting the Moment: Legal Frameworks for Feminist Futures. This event will be held on Friday, March 31—the last day of Women’s History Month—at Yale Law School from 8:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. It is free and open to the public. 

Both globally and domestically, trans and nonbinary people, women, the LGBTQ+ community, and racially subjugated groups are under attack from political regimes hostile to our rights and liberation. Against this backdrop, it is vital that we envision and build feminist futures. The purpose of this symposium is to grapple with the relationship between feminist legal theory and practice, with an eye toward what you can do to meet the moment. We’re bringing preeminent feminist scholars together with legal advocates and practitioners to discuss some of the most pressing issues of our times. We hope you’ll join the conversation.

Meeting the Moment

Legal Frameworks for Feminist Futures

(This schedule is tentative. More speakers will be added!)

8:30 a.m. – 9:00 a.m.

Registration & Breakfast

(Registration will be open all day.)

Morning Panels

9:00 a.m. – 10:10 a.m.

We, the Feminists

The Symposium’s opening panel will reflect on how the field of feminist legal thought emerged and grapple with the question of which groups of people have been integral, or marginal, to its development.

Sarah Deer

University Distinguished Professor at the University of Kansas and Chief Justice for the Prairie Island Indian Community Court of Appeals

Deborah Dinner

Professor of Law at Cornell School of Law

Joanna L. Grossman

Ellen K. Solender Endowed Chair in Women and the Law and Professor of Law at SMU Dedman School of Law

Serena Mayeri

Professor of Law & History at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School

10:20 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.

Meeting the Moment: Why Feminist Legal Thought Matters

This panel will frame the Symposium and address why feminist legal thought matters—and why it matters now.

Alexandra Brodsky (moderator)

Staff Attorney at Public Justice & Visiting Lecturer in Law at  Yale Law School

Elizabeth F. Emens

Thomas M. Macioce Professor of Law at Columbia Law School

Catharine A. MacKinnon

Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at University of Michigan Law School & James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School

Keina Yoshida

Barrister Ass. at Doughty Street Chambers, Legal Adviser at Center for Reproductive Rights & Visiting Fellow at the Center for Women, Peace & Security

11:40 a.m. – 12:40 p.m.

Keynote Address

Welcome Remarks: Jelani Hayes (J.D. ’23, Ph.D. candidate in History at Harvard University)

Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Journal of Law & Feminism  

Keynote speaker to be announced!

12:40 p.m. – 1:40 p.m.

Lunch

(Lunch will be provided to the first 150 attendees.)

Afternoon Panels

1:50 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. 

Beyond “Choice”

Contributing to the post-Dobbs reproductive justice dialogue, this panel is designed to move the discussion beyond the question of “choice” and give weight to the ways in which discourses around the right to have an abortion have shaped law and public opinion.

Aziza Ahmed

Professor of Law and R. Gordon Butler Scholar in International Law at Boston University School of Law

Michele Goodwin

Chancellor’s Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law

Patrice D. Douglass

Assistant Professor in Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley

Patrice D. Douglass holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Culture and Theory from the University of California, Irvine and a M.A. in Ethnic 

3:10 p.m. – 4:20 p.m.

Challenging Carceral Feminism

This panel engages with the critique of carceral feminism–and the critique of the challenge to the feminist reliance on the criminal legal system.

Kate D’Adamo

Policy & Advocacy Advisor at Reframe Health & Justice Consulting

Aya Gruber

Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Law School

I. India Thusi

Professor of Law at the Maurer School of Law at the Indiana University Bloomington & Senior Scientist at the Kinsey Institute

4:30 pm. – 5:40 p.m.

Rethinking Family Regulation

This panel will interrogate the structural harms imbedded in the family regulation system, including its roots in punitive public welfare regimes, disparate harms in Black and Indigenous communities, discrimination against parents with disabilities, and the system’s recent intramentalization in efforts to remove children from their homes who seek gender-affirming care. 

Douglas NeJaime (moderator)

Anne Urowsky Professor of Law at Yale Law School   

Jennifer Levi

Senior Director of Transgender and Queer Rights at GLAD

Robyn M. Powell

Associate Professor at the University of Oklahoma College of Law

Lisa Sangoi

Co-Founder & Co-Director at Movement for Family Power

BeKura Shabazz

President & Founder at Coalition for Families Against Child Separation

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Call For Applications: Research Associate, Protecting Girls From Harm Project

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From Dr. Kim Barker, Senior Lecturer in Law, Head of Department, Director, Observatory on Online Violence Against Women, The Open University Law School

 

We are seeking to recruit a Research Associate to work on the Protecting Girls from Online Harm (PGOH) project which is funded through the REPHRAIN Centre. The PGOH Project aims to address the challenge of protecting young people (under 18) from online harms and is based at the Observatory on Online Violence Against Women in the Open University Law School. Our vision here is to close the knowledge gap that exists in relation to how young girls from diverse socio-economic and cultural backgrounds experience and respond to harmful online behaviours.

 

We are looking for a proactive post-doctoral researcher with a background in law, education or educational policy, or similar.

 

The successful applicant will lead desk-based systemic literature reviews on online harms affecting children and young people. The role will require the post-holder to collect and analyse data through surveys and focus groups with teenagers in inner city schools, work collaboratively with the project team, and support dissemination activities of the research to stakeholders, including core educational partners, police, academics ad policymakers.

 

Full details, including of terms and conditions are available via the job description. You can find the link to the job advert and full information here: https://www.open.ac.uk/about/employment/vacancies/postdoctoral-research-associate-protecting-girls-online-harm-20804 (scroll down for job description).

 

For queries, or questions relating to the vacancy, please contact Dr Kim Barker via email: kim.barker@open.ac.uk.

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@MarcSpindelman on Dobbs & State-Level Constitutional Amendments

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Marc Spindelman (OSU) has posted to SSRN a version of his essay Countering Dobbs: A Sex Equality Approach by States Could Protect Abortion Rights, and then Some, published earlier this month in the American Prospect (Feb. 21, 2023), here.

Here is the abstract:

This brief commentary engages state-level constitutional amendment efforts to counter the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling. It urges reformers to consider a sex equality approach to state constitutional amendments (and interpretation), given the benefits of such an approach over autonomy-focused rivals presently advancing in different jurisdictions.

You can read the essay on SSRN here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4366225.

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Posted in Women's Health | 1 Comment

Is Testosterone the New Frontier of Menopause Treatment?

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Depends on who you ask.  Over in the UK, television presenter Davina McCall has been touting its benefits to her. The London Mail has some coverage in an article here.

Some excerpts:

Topping up testosterone levels can transform a woman’s flagging libido, [testosterone advocates] say, banish brain fog, and improve energy and mood. In the longer term, advocates add, it could even stave off dementia, improve bone strength and maintain muscle mass. * * *

Last week, figures revealed how powerful the so-called ‘Davina effect’ has been. NHS prescriptions for testosterone gels have rocketed ten-fold in the last seven years, with a significant uptick following the airing of Davina McCall’s documentary on the subject.

The data, from a Freedom of Information request by the Pharmaceutical Journal, revealed 4,675 women over 50 were prescribed testosterone in November 2022 alone – up from 429 in November 2015. The same pattern was true for women aged 49 and under.

But experts have pointed out these figures are only the tip of an iceberg. GPs remain cautious about prescribing the hormone – partly because there is no licensed testosterone drug specifically for women in the UK.

Far more patients are thought to get it privately, at a significant personal cost, from private doctors: the same doctors who are extolling its benefits the loudest. It means the true number of women taking it remains unknown, but it could run to more than 100,000.

***[D]octors and scientists say there is no evidence to justify most of the claims regarding testosterone.

Women are being exploited, they argue, by those who say the hormone gels are ‘the answer’ to their menopause problems.

They warn that, without appropriate supervision, patients could end up taking the hormone when they don’t need it, or taking too much – risking a wide range of side effects including acne, excess hair growth, greasy skin and even voice changes. They also warn of a condition called clitoromegaly, which causes the clitoris to become permanently enlarged.***

Hormone specialist Dr Annice Mukherjee said: ‘Women are being hood winked to some extent. Testosterone is a trend, driven by social media, which promises a one-size-fits-all approach to the menopause which is simply not the reality. When the right women get it, it’s transformational. When the wrong women get it, it can cause harm.

‘Some are struggling to feed their families during a cost-of-living crisis, and are being rightly told by their GP they don’t need testosterone. Yet they feel they’re being deceived because of what they’ve heard online. Many pay hundreds of pounds a year privately for it.

‘I’ve never seen so much confusion and distress among women because they feel they can’t get hold of what they think they need. It is so wrong.’

Read the full article here.

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Posted in Women's Health | 1 Comment

On the Origins of the Term “Cis Gender”

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Over at HuffPo, Dana Dufosse writes, “I Coined The Term ‘Cisgender’ 29 Years Ago. Here’s What This Controversial Word Really Means.”

I coined the term “cisgender” in 1994. Nearly three decades later, the word has had ramifications I never dreamed of.

It began innocently enough. I was in graduate school and writing a paper on the health of trans adolescents. I put a post on alt.transgender to ask for views on transphobia and inclusion on the campus of the University of Minnesota. I was struggling because there did not seem to be a way to describe people who were not transgender without inescapably couching them in normalcy and making transgender identity automatically the “other.”

I knew that in chemistry, molecules with atoms grouped on the same side are labeled with the Latin prefix “cis–,” while molecules with atoms grouped on opposite sides are referred to as “trans–.” So, cisgender. It seemed like a no-brainer. I had no idea that hitting “enter” on that post would start an etymological time bomb ticking.

It took years for the term to take off….

Before now, I have not spoken publicly, or even disclosed my role in the origin of the word cisgender to anyone beyond a few close friends and colleagues. Although I’ve not yet experienced personal attacks for being associated with its creation, it is painful when people imply it was intended to hurt others. I never believed that adding the word to the lexicon caused problems ― it only revealed them. Whatever the fate of the word, I feel compelled to speak out against the idea that it is hateful.

Read the full piece here.

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Posted in LGBT Rights | 1 Comment

Breanne Fahs on What “Radical Feminism” Really Means

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Breanne Fahs (Women and Gender Studies, ASU) has a smart essay over at Signs (here) called The Urgent Need for Radical Feminism Today. Here is an excerpt:

Though in some ways short-lived, and certainly not without its limitations, second-wave radical feminism opened up new understandings of gender and power, reimagined solidarity between movements, made space for angry and impatient agitators, and embodied notions of feminist praxis. For example, radical feminists demanded the outright abolition of abortion laws and argued for a constitutional amendment that guaranteed women the fundamental right to bodily autonomy. They also demanded deep-seated revisions to the economic distribution of resources and the commutation of prison sentences for women who acted in self-defense against domestic violence. Far more than their liberal counterparts, radical feminists understood the role of race and class in women’s liberation, and that the links between the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and labor movements were critical. * * *

Given the rich and varied histories of radical feminism and their ties to other radical movements, it is all the more tragic that radical feminism is now seen, particularly online, as synonymous with the figure of the TERF: an acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist. Indeed, most of the time radical feminism is mentioned on social media is in the context of the rejection of TERF-dom. This fusion links the histories, ideologies, and practices of radical feminism to the figure of the TERF, reducing the complexity of radical feminism to trans exclusion. This not only falsely represents radical feminism, it also promotes the false narrative that trans activism and radical feminism do not have common origins, goals, and enemies. The belief that one must either be for trans rights or identify as a radical feminist has problematic implications for trans liberation and women’s liberation.

The full piece is here.

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Five Colleges Women’s Studies Research Center Call for 2023-24 Research Associates

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From the Five Colleges Women’s Studies Research Center:

Are you a feminist thinker, writer, artist, scholar, or activist seeking interdisciplinary community to help build your work? Are you local to the Five Colleges or Western Massachusetts and trying to carve out dedicated time to move your ideas forward? Are you a non-local or international feminist thinker looking to be in conversation with a vibrant scholarly and cultural community?

The Five College Women’ s Studies Research Center is now accepting applications for its 2023-24 Research Associates (Visiting Scholars) program. Located on Hampshire College campus, the FCWSRC provides Research Associates with access to resources in the Five College Consortium and surrounding area, including important archival and museum collections. Research Associates, in residence for a semester or academic year, have opportunities to network with preeminent scholars, workshop and present their projects, and build feminist community across discipline, methodology, and geography.

The deadline is Friday, February 24, 2023.

The program is holding a Zoom information session Monday, January 23, 2023, 1-2pm EST.

More information is available here.

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Symposium 2/24—The Federal Income Tax: Racially Blind But Not Racially Neutral

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Boso on “Religious Liberty, Discriminatory Intent, and the Status Quo Constitution”

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Luke Boso (U San Francisco) has posted to SSRN his working paper, Religious Liberty, Discriminatory Intent, and the Status Quo Constitution. Here is the abstract:

The Supreme Court shocked the world at the end of its 2021-22 term by issuing landmark decisions ending constitutional protection for abortion rights, expanding gun rights, and significantly weakening what remained of the wall between church and state. The thread uniting these blockbuster cases is originalism — a backwards-looking theory of constitutional interpretation focused on founding-era meaning and intent. The Court has been clear that preserving the status quo and insulating the Constitution from change is originalism’s core function.

Originalism is not the only mechanism by which an increasingly conservative Court has sought to protect traditional social norms and hierarchies from disruption. This Article identifies the discriminatory intent doctrine as another useful tool for fortifying status quos. The Burger and Rehnquist Courts laid the contemporary foundation for discriminatory intent’s manipulation in the equal protection context, effectively shielding many racist and sexist legal structures from constitutional reproach.

Today, discriminatory intent rules are creating radical change in religious liberty jurisprudence. In free exercise claims, the Court has gone out of its way to infer even the possibility of discriminatory intent against Christians when the government seeks compliance with pandemic-era public health measures and LGBTQ-inclusive antidiscrimination laws. In establishment claims, the Court has seemingly abandoned longstanding intent rules prohibiting favoritism or hostility towards religion; instead, the sole relevant question is now whether majoritarian founding-era practices support the government’s religious involvement. Together, these shifting roles for discriminatory intent effectively protect conservative Christian interests from encroaching progressive change, leaving religious minorities and non-believers with diminished constitutional protection.

The full paper is available here.

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Advice from Gender & Law Journal Editors: Tips for Prospective Authors—Free Webinar Sponsored by @usfemjudgments

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Advice from Gender & Law Journal Editors: Tips for Prospective Authors

Live Zoom Webinar Sponsored by the U.S. Feminist Judgments Project

January 20, 2023 2-3 pm Eastern/11am-12n Pacific

advance registration required (here; free)

Specialty law journals are important outlets for legal scholars working on gender-related issues. What are gender journal editors looking for when they review articles? How can authors improve their chances of receiving an offer of publication? What is the best time to submit an article to a gender journal? What role do the author’s cover letter and CV play in the selection process? Hear from current student editors at three journals—the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender, the Michigan Journal of Gender & Law, and the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism—with answers to these questions along with advice and tips for navigating the submission process. 

Moderators: Bridget J. Crawford (Pace) & Kathryn M. Stanchi (UNLV)

Participating Editors: Renée Mihail, Yale Law ’24; Hannah Mezzacapa, Michigan Law ’23; Addie Davies, Harvard Law ‘23

The webinar is free  and open to all with pre-registation (here). The event is co-sponsored by the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University and the William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, together with The Feminism and Legal Theory Project, The Vulnerability and the Human Condition Initiative, the Institute for Feminist Legal Studies at Osgoode, and the AALS Section on Women in Legal Education.

 

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Posted in Academia | 1 Comment

States Where Schools Are Required to Provide Menstrual Products

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There’s an interactive map over here at Aunt Flo. Some state legislation is more (or less) comprehensive.

And in related news, USA Today reports here that the Department of Education is considering making menstrual product provision part of schools’ Title IX mandate, at least in part in response to the public comments filed (here) by Professors Marcy Karin (UDC), Margaret Johnson (Baltimore), Elizabeth Cooper (Fordham), Naomi Cahn (Virginia), Emily Waldman (Pace) and me, here. A group of public health scholars and clinicians made similar recommendations in their comments (here).

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Posted in Women and Economics, Women's Health | 1 Comment

How Much Would It Cost to Put “Free” Tampons and Pads in All School Bathrooms in the US? $60 Million a Year

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I have previously blogged here, here, and here with speculation about how much it costs for schools to provide “free” menstrual products in bathrooms.

Based on actual data from the Cambridge (MA) Public Schools, the figure appears to be approximately $2.48 per menstruating student (see here). If that number is correct, I ask myself, how much would it cost to provide menstrual products to all public school students nation-wide? My rough (and admittedly inaccurate) estimate is approximately $60 million.  States like Texas would have a big bill (about $6.4 million per year); states like Wyoming would be paying about $117,00 per year.

While these seem like big dollar amounts, in most jurisdictions, the outlay would represent an extremely small share (less than two one-hundreths of one percent) of total current spending on students and likely would boost student attendance numbers.

My back-of-the-envelope calculations (extremely rough) on a per state basis appear after the fold.

Continue reading

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The Time Students for Life America Got Punk’d by Two Yale Undergrads

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A few weeks ago, two Yale undergrads, Zoe Larkin and Ella Attell, interviewed Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life America, Borat-style. Their spoof video (embedded above) is a funny-not-funny commentary on the absurd rhetoric deployed by anti-abortionist activists (Hawkins endorsed the concept of a clothing line targeted toward pregnant tweens….!).

Apparently, Hawkins and Students for Life America did not take too kindly to finding out that the interview was satire (did she miss the red flags that one of her interlocutors would be “Bertha Child”? How about some of the absurd questions the student interviewers, in character, asked Hawkins?). Hawkins has threatened to sue the students and gone so far as to contact the Dean of Yale College and summer employers (!) of the students.

Brava, Larkin and Attell!

The Yale Daily News has coverage here.

You can follow the student filmmakers on Instagram @saveyalenow

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Who Benefits from #TamponTax Repeal? In Germany, Consumers Do

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A UK study suggests that consumers there did not benefit from repeal of the tampon tax (see here).  A new study out of Germany suggests contrary results in that country.

Here is the abstract of VAT Pass-Through: The Case of a Large and Permanent Reduction in the Market for Menstrual Hygiene Products by Alisa Frey and Justus Haucap, both of the Heinrich Heine University Dusseldorf – Department of Economics:

This paper is about the price effects caused by a VAT (value-added tax) reduction for menstrual hygiene products in Germany. Several aspects make this VAT reduction particularly interesting: The exogeneity of the reduction under otherwise constant economic conditions, the reduction was substantial and permanent, demand for the products is inelastic and in many cases, pass-through rates are more than 100 percent. We find that the VAT reduction is completely passed through to consumers. Despite this complete pass-through, we still detect a significant effect of retailer competition: When more retailers offer a product, the price reduction is larger.

The full paper is available here.

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The Gender Wealth Gap in Retirement Savings: A German Case Study

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Carla Cardova (Pomona College), Markus Grabka (German Institute for Economic Research — DIW Berlin) & Eva Sierminska (LISER; DIW Berlin) have posted to SSRN their working paper, Pension Wealth and the Gender Wealth Gap. Here is the abstract:

We examine the gender wealth gap with a focus on pension wealth and statutory pension rights. By taking into account employment characteristics of women and men, we are able to identify the extent to which the redistributive effect of pension rights reduces the gender wealth gap. The data for our analysis come from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), one of the few surveys collecting information on wealth and pension entitlements at the individual level. Pension wealth data are available in the SOEP for 2012 only. While the relative raw gender wealth gap is about 35% (or 31,000 euros) when analysing the standard measure of net worth, it shrinks to 28% when pension wealth is added. This reduction is due to redistributive elements such as caregiver credits provided through the statutory pension scheme. Results of a recentered influence functions (RIF) decomposition show that pension wealth reduces the gap substantially in the lower half of the distribution. At the 90th percentile, the gender wealth gap in net worth and in augmented wealth remains more stable at roughly 27-30%.

The full paper is available here.

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Did the Pandemic Disrupt Your Period?

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You’re not alone.

Here’s the abstract for Martina Anto-Ocrah et al., Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)–Related Stress and Menstrual Changes, Obstetrics & Gynecology (October 27, 2022; DOI 10.1097/AOG.0000000000005010).

A total of 354 women of reproductive age across the United States completed both the menstrual and COVID-19–related stress components of our survey. More than half of these women reported at least one change in their menstrual cycles since the start of the pandemic (n=191), and 10.5% reported high COVID-19–related stress (n=37). Compared with those with low COVID-19–related stress, a greater proportion of women with high COVID-19–related stress reported changes in cycle length (shorter or longer; P=.008), changes in period duration (shorter or longer; P<.001), heavier menstrual flow (P=.035), and increased frequency of spotting between cycles (P=.006) compared with prepandemic times. After adjusting for age, smoking history, obesity, education, and mental health history, high COVID-19–related stress was associated with increased odds of changes in menstrual cycle length (adjusted odds ratio [aOR] 2.32; 95% CI 1.12–4.85), duration (aOR 2.38; 95% CI 1.14–4.98), and spotting (aOR 2.32; 95% CI 1.03–5.22). Our data also demonstrated a nonsignificant trend of heavier menstrual flow among women with high COVID-19–related stress (aOR 1.61; 95% CI 0.77–3.34).

CONCLUSION: 

High COVID-19–related stress is associated with significant changes in menstrual cycle length, alterations in period duration, and increased intermenstrual spotting as compared with before the pandemic. Given that menstrual health is frequently an indicator of women’s overall well-being, clinicians, researchers, and public health officials must consider the association between COVID-19–related stress and menstrual disturbances.

The full article is available here.

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Who Benefits From #Tampon Tax Repeal? Not Consumers, Says New Report

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A copy of the report by the (UK) Tax Policy Associates is here. Some highlights:

5% VAT applied to tampons and other menstrual products until January 2021. Then, following the high-profile “tampon tax” campaign, it was abolished. Many expected that the benefit of the tax saving would go to women, in the form of reduced prices.

However, an analysis of ONS data by Tax Policy Associates demonstrates that the 5% VAT saving was not passed onto women. At least 80% of the saving was retained by retailers (and very possibly all of it).

The key piece of evidence is this chart showing price changes before and after the abolition of the “tampon tax” on 1 January 2021. Ignoring the large spike in December 2020, average prices after the change are only slightly lower than before the change. For reasons explained further below, this likely reflects normal market movements rather than the passing on of the VAT saving.

Read the full report here.

A related news article appears in the  (UK) Daily Mail here.

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The Contribution of Shareholder Primacy to the Racial Wealth Gap @lenorepalladino @rooseveltinst

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Lenore Palladino (Roosevelt Institute) has posted a working paper, The Contribution of Shareholder Primacy to the Racial Wealth Gap. Here is an excerpt:

I find a Blackwhite ratio of 0.013 and a Hispanicwhite ratio of 0.016 for total shareholder payments made over the period from Q1 2004 to Q2 2019. Total shareholder payments made to white households during that time frame totaled $13 trillion, while $181 billion went to Black households and $212 billion to Hispanic households. This measure gives a clear sense that shareholder payments, in the form of corporate dividends and stock buybacks, are flowing disproportionately to white households.

The full paper is available here.

H/T Francine Lipman

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