Feminist Law Professors

Via.

Today the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law will launch it’s Public Rights/Private Conscience Project – a new think-tank created to reconceptualize and reset the intractable standoff between religious liberty and equality/sexual liberty.  The Project is funded with substantial grants from the Ford and Arcus Foundations, and we have hired Kara Loewentheil to direct the Project.

Copied below is the press release announcing the new project.

Best,

Katherine
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Katherine Franke
Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law
Director, Center for Gender & Sexuality Law
Columbia Law School
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New York, NY 10027
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Columbia Law School Launches New Project on Religious Exemptions and Civil Rights

Katherine Franke, Director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law, Creates Public Rights/Private Conscience Project, a New Think-Tank Designed to Reset the Conflict Between Sex Equality, Reproductive Rights, and Religious Liberty

Media Contact: Public Affairs, 212-854-2650 or publicaffairs@law.columbia.edu

New York, March 24, 2014—Katherine Franke, director of Columbia Law School’s Center for Gender and Sexuality Law, announced today the launch of the Public Rights/Private Conscience project, a new think-tank created to address the increased use of religion-based exemptions from compliance with federal and state laws securing equality and sexual liberty.

The scope of religious exemptions will feature prominently at the U.S. Supreme Court today, March 25, when owners of the craft store chain Hobby Lobby and furniture manufacturer Conestoga Wood argue that their religious beliefs justify an exemption from the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that employers include contraception coverage in their employee health plans. The cases are Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. and Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. v. Sebelius.

With increasing frequency, opponents of same-sex marriage, reproductive rights, and gender equality have sought a safe harbor in religion to justify otherwise illegal employment and business practices. Arizona Governor Jan Brewer recently vetoed a bill that critics argued would allow businesses to discriminate against gays and lesbians if the discrimination were attributed to religious beliefs. Similar bills are making their way through other state legislatures.

“With greater and greater frequency, respecting equality rights is seen as optional while respecting religious liberty is mandatory,” Franke said. “The Public Rights/Private Conscience project will bring the considerable academic resources of Columbia University to bear on rethinking this intractable standoff between religious liberty and other rights.”

Read more about the project in this ProPublica Q&A with Franke.

The Public Rights/Private Conscience project will:

·      map the arguments being made in the religious exemptions context in court cases, academic scholarship, policy papers, and the media;

·      mobilize scholars, lawyers, and advocates in an effort to reframe the debate so that compliance with civil rights norms is seen as compatible with faith-based doctrines;

·      develop model language that can be included in proposed legislation that strikes the constitutionally required balance between religious liberty and other fundamental constitutional rights;

·      develop best practices to address entities or individuals that refuse service on the basis of religion;

The project will be directed by Kara Loewentheil, currently a postdoctoral associate-in-law and fellow in the Program for the Study of Reproductive Justice at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. Loewentheil previously served as a Blackmun Legal Fellow at the Center for Reproductive Rights and as a clerk for the Honorable James L. Dennis on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

“The project is uniquely positioned to develop new theoretical frameworks for understanding the role and impact of religious exemptions on liberty and equality rights in a modern multi-cultural society,” said Loewentheil, who will be joining Columbia Law School as a research fellow in addition to her role as director of the Public Rights/Private Conscience Project. “Our goal is to promote innovative framings of these questions in policy, advocacy, scholarship, and litigation.”

The Public Rights/Private Conscience Project is funded by grants from the the Ford Foundation, which aims to strengthen democratic values, reduce poverty and injustice, promote international cooperation, and advance human achievement, and the Arcus Foundation, a leading global foundation advancing pressing social justice and conservation issues.

Franke is available for interviews about the launch of the Public Rights/Private Conscience project and about the religious exemptions cases in the Supreme Court. She can be reached directly at kfranke@law.columbia.edu or via the Law School’s Public Affairs Office at 212-854-2650, or email publicaffairs@law.columbia.edu. 

The Law School also has a studio on campus equipped with an ISDN line and IFB capability for radio and television interviews. Please contact the Public Affairs Office for bookings.

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Columbia Law School, founded in 1858, stands at the forefront of legal education and of the law in a global society. Columbia Law School combines traditional strengths in corporate law and financial regulation, international and comparative law, property, contracts, constitutional law, and administrative law with pioneering work in intellectual property, digital technology, tax law and policy, national security, human rights, sexuality and gender, and environmental law.

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Carole Vance is a pioneering feminist academic.  Her writing and her constant political engagement pressed feminist thinking and action forward in innumerable ways. Her sometimes-controversial insistence on integrating sexuality into sex equality debates, as well as her infinitely sophisticated thinking about transnational equality, have made her one of my role models for a long time.

For those of you who do not know, Carole was recently told by Columbia University’s Mailman School that they would not renew her contract. The school insists that faculty raise the money to pay their salaries in grants, and Carole has not done so.

Tenure is controversial even among those of us who have it, but if there is one kind of work that necessitates the protection of tenure, it is the work of Carole Vance. Scott Long has written most persuasively about how wrong this decision is, and the Nation  jumped in to describe why firing Carole and her colleague Kim Hopper matters immensely.

Please join us to make it clear to Columbia that their actions violate the most basic norms of academic freedom and integrity. There are a few efforts afoot to help Carole, and most of these have been described on this page. Please sign the academic petition here. Our voices will join those of esteemed scholars and civil society leaders in support of Carole.

If you choose to write SEPARATELY from the petition, please write to the President, Provost and Dean of the Mailman School, and in your communication please stress is that the “letter of non-renewal” should be rescinded, and Carole’s contract should be renewed. If you choose to write separately from the petition, please write to: Lee C. Bollinger, President Columbia University bollinger@columbia.edu; John H. Coatsworth, Provost jhc2125@columbia.edu; Lee Goldman, Executive Vice President for Health and Biomedical Sciences and Dean of the Faculties of Health Sciences and of Medicine lgoldman@columbia.edu; Linda P Fried, Dean of the Mailman School of Public Health lpfried@columbia.edu; Lisa Metsch, Chair, Department of Sociomedical Sciences, lm2892@columbia.edu Please also send copies of this letter to beckjordanyoung@gmail.com, as the organizers would like to keep a record of everything sent.

I am looking for law review articles that are a good primer for students to understand transgender rights and its connected issues. If you have suggestions please email me at johnmkang@gmail.com
Thank you!

The deadline for the 2014-2016 Columbia Law School – Center for Reproductive Rights Fellowship (CRR-CLS Fellowship) has been extended to February 28, 2014!

The CRR-CLS Fellowship is an exciting opportunity for recent law school graduates who are interested in careers in teaching law. Please keep your eye out for promising scholars and keep in mind that experience in reproductive rights is not required. You can download the application here.

Here is our track record thus far:

• 2008-2010 Fellow, Professor Khiara Bridges is teaching at Boston University School of Law in a tenure-track position with a joint appointment to the Anthropology Department;
• 2010-2012 Fellow, Professor Elizabeth Sepper is in a tenure-track position at Washington University School of Law;
• 2011-2013 Fellow, Professor Erez Aloni is teaching at Whittier Law School;
• 2012-2014 Fellow, Margaux Hall is in residence; and
• 2013-2015 Fellow, Rana Jaleel is in residence.

Here is a little more information about the Fellowship:

The CRR-CLS Fellowship is a two-year, post-graduate fellowship offered by the Center for Reproductive Rights (the Center) and Columbia Law School (CLS). Those committed to women’s rights and/or human rights would be a great fit for this fellowship – although we don’t require experience in these areas. More than anything, this is a fellowship for serious emerging academics. Fellows will be affiliated with the Center and CLS, and will participate in the intellectual life of both programs. Applicants do not need to be graduates of Columbia Law School to be eligible for this program and do not need prior experience in reproductive rights.

The deadline for applications for the 2014-2016 cycle is now February 28, 2014.

If you would like to learn more about CRR’s Law School Initiative, which supports the Fellowship, please visit our website here; email the Senior Director of the Law School Initiative, Diana Hortsch, atdhortsch@reprorights.org; or email Columbia Law School’s Center for Gender & Sexuality Law, gender_sexuality_law@law.columbia.edu.

We would be grateful if you could forward these materials to your colleagues and to promising recent graduates interested in academic careers.

If he didn’t jump the academic shark with that rape-by-deception article (see here), then Jed Rubenfeld certainly did with his new book, co-authored with wife Amy Chua.  Even the New York Post senses that something is not right in Rubenfeldville:

In “The Triple Package,” Chua and her husband, co-author Jed Rubenfeld, gather some specious stats and anecdotal evidence to argue that some groups are just superior to others and everyone else is contributing to the downfall of America.

Unsurprisingly, the Chinese Chua and the Jewish Rubenfeld belong to two of the eight groups they deem exceptional. In no seeming order of importance, they are:

• Jewish
• Indian
• Chinese
• Iranian
• Lebanese-Americans
• Nigerians
• Cuban exiles
• Mormons

These groups — “cultural,” mind you, never “ethnic” or “racial” or “religious” — all possess, in the authors’ estimation, three qualities that they’ve identified as guarantors of wealth and power: superiority, insecurity and impulse control.

If you have never clicked through to a New York Post article before, this one (here) is worth it.  But then again, what do I know?  My people aren’t exceptional.

-Bridget Crawford