If your faculty is not ready to offer that particular “Law and …” course, do not despair. Read Susan Frelich Appleton’s article “Toward a ‘Culturally Cliterate’ Family Law?” 23 Berkeley J. Gender, L. and Justice 267 (2008). The article is available here for download from SSRN.
-Bridget Crawford
Horace Anderson has been selected by vote of the 2009 graduating class as Pace Law School’s “Outstanding Professor of the Year.” Students use words like “brilliant” and “dedicated” to describe Professor Anderson, who is an IP specialist. He is also a Feminist Law Prof, Hip Hop Law blogger, my law school classmate, an all-around fantastic teacher, a wonderful colleague and a treasured friend.
Congratulations, Horace!
-Bridget Crawford
When speakers use the phrases”baby daddy”and”baby mama”in non-colloquial contexts, do they mock African-Americans or do they embrace one way that the American vocabulary has been enriched by the contributions of African-Americans? Both? Neither?
These phrases seem to pop up everywhere. Shawn Wayans plays one in the spoof movie Dance Flick and Amy Poehler plays one in the comedy Baby Mama. Angelina Jolie’s”baby daddy”is Brad Pitt (here). Heck, even the President of Paraguay is dubbed a”baby daddy“(here).
Whether one consults the OED, reads the Urban Dictionary or absorbs by cultural osmosis, the phrases’ meanings are the same. A”baby daddy”is the father of a woman’s child, especially in cases where the child’s parents are not married. A”baby mama”is … well, you understood it already. The monikers are pervasive. The OED provides more background information:
baby-daddy n. colloq. (chiefly in African-American usage) = baby-father n.
baby-father n. (orig. Caribbean and in British Afro-Caribbean usage) the father of a woman’s child, who is not her husband or (in most cases) her current or exclusive partner.
One Slate writer speculates (here) that,”The terms probably arose in Jamaican Creole:where they would have been pronounced “biebifaada” and “biebimada”:before taking hold in standard Jamaican English.”
I don’t want to”turn baby mommas into wives,”as does Maryann Reid, the proponent of”Marry Your Baby Daddy Day“(she appeared on ABC’s 20/20 here). But there is something self-conscious about the popularization (or is it appropriation?) of the phrases that crosses into twenty-first century blackface minstrelsy, to my ears.
-Bridget Crawford
Complicating the abortion discussion, the NYT reports:
[There are] seemingly minute deviations in the proportion of boys and girls born to Americans of Chinese, Indian and Korean descent. In those families, if the first child was a girl, it was more likely that a second child would be a boy, according to recent studies of census data. If the first two children were girls, it was even more likely that a third child would be male. Demographers say the statistical deviation among Asian-American families is significant, and they believe it reflects not only a preference for male children, but a growing tendency for these families to embrace sex-selection techniques, like in vitro fertilization and sperm sorting, or abortion.
The rest of the article can be found here.
Another reason it’s important to open the tent. Chinese feminists have always viewed abortion as a feminist issue – but the issue was forced or coerced abortions. For all women, of course, the real issue is reproductive control – whether it’s being able to refuse intercourse, insist upon protection, gain access to birth control, get or refuse an abortion. Feminism strives to address the reality of women’s lives. It’s important to recognize that reality is not the same for all women.
-Nancy Kim
South Africa will host the World Cup in 2010. The Zimbabwe-based Women and Law in Southern Africa Research and Educational Trust isn’t rejoicing.
[T]here are fears that the world’s most prestigious football event will negatively impact women and girls of Southern Africa as many acts of human trafficking are certainly expected, looking at the high levels of poverty in the region.
As observed by the Women and Law in Southern Africa Research and Educational Trust (WLSA) Malawi national coordinator Seodi White, the vulnerable groups that might also include boys are expected to travel to RSA in pursuit of all the real and imagined opportunities associated with the major event.
“The low social and economic status of women in this part of Africa, many women and young girls will find themselves in South Africa during the 2010 World Cup and they will be vulnerable to sexual exploitation,”White said this in Blantyre on Monday.
According to WLSA, a grouping of lawyers and social scientists who conduct research that supports action to improve the socio-legal position of women in the southern part of Africa, the region remains one of the areas in the world with increasing trends of human trafficking for sexual exploitation.
The full story from the Malawi-based Nyasa Times newspaper is here.
According to a report issued by the U.S. State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, South Africa “does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking,” and so that country is on the State Department “Watch List” for its “failure to show increasing efforts to address trafficking over the last year.”
The connection between big international soccer matches and human trafficking is not a new discovery (see prior blog post here). The question is what will South Africa and all other FIFA countries — including the U.S. — do to prevent more trafficking?
The Federation International de Football Association, World Cup soccer’s govering body, is comprised of 204 teams from all over the world — Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Central America, the Caribbean, Oceania, South America. FIFA makes some big promises on its website (here):
The world is a place rich in natural beauty and cultural diversity, but also one where many are still deprived of their basic rights. FIFA now has an even greater responsibility to reach out and touch the world, using football as a symbol of hope and integration.
Basic rights. Hope. Integration. We know those words shouldn’t mean “sit back and wait for the trafficking to happen.”
-Bridget Crawford
Here’s a CFP from another journal at my home institution:
Pace International Law Review 2009-2010 Symposium
Call for Submissions
Pace International Law Review is planning a symposium entitled Comparative Constitutional Law: National Security Across the Globe to be held in November of 2009. The day-long symposium will feature multiple panelists and guest speakers. The editors of Pace International Law Review invite proposals for articles, essays and book reviews from scholars, researchers, practitioners, and professionals. Contributions to be considered for presentation at the symposium and subsequent publication or for publication only.
SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
Please submit proposals of no more than 500 words to pilr@law.pace.edu by June 30, 2009. All proposals should include the intended author’s name, title, institutional affiliation and contact information. The proposals should address issues pertinent to the interrelationship between national security concerns and constitutional law of a particular nation or nations. Article proposals that provide a comparative analysis of issues and concerns faced by various nations are preferred. The proposals should be as thorough as possible and may include suggestions for other panelists who experts in the proposed topic.
Book review proposals also should include (a) the title and publication date of the book proposed for review; (b) a description of the importance of the book to the general topic; and (c) any other information relevant to the book or proposed review (e.g., the reviewer’s expertise or any relationship with the author). All authors are welcome, but not required, to submit a CV.
We expect to make offers to the selected guest speakers in August, 2009. We encourage clear, concise, and an accessible proposals for articles, essays and book reviews that will interest lawmakers, attorneys and students. All proposals will be considered for publication even if not selected for the symposium. Complete manuscripts for work that will not be presented at the symposium will be due by August 31, 2009.
We look forward to receiving your submissions.
I know that scholarship concerning women’s issues is very welcome!
-Bridget Crawford
Here’s what then-Senator Barak Obama said about DOMA in a 2004 letter to a Chicago paper:
When Members of Congress passed DOMA, they were not interested in strengthening family values or protecting civil liberties. They were only interested in perpetuating division and affirming a wedge issue. … Despite my own feelings about an abhorrent law, the realities of modern politics persist. While the repeal of DOMA is essential, the unfortunate truth is that it is unlikely with Mr. Bush in the White House and Republicans in control of both chambers of Congress.
So why, or why does the administration’s brief in Smelt v. U.S. (blogged by Ann here). The brief defends the constitutionality of DOMA on the grounds that the statute is:
…a cautious policy of federal neutrality towards a new form of marriage. DOMA maintains federal policies that have long sought to promote the traditional and uniformly-recognized form of marriage, recognizes the right of each State to expand the traditional definition if it so chooses, but declines to obligate federal taxpayers in other States to subsidize a form of marriage that their own states do not recognize.
DOMA isn’t neutral. DOMA takes a clear side in the marriage debate. Now in supporting DOMA, President Obama has taken a side — the side he previously called “abhorrent.”
If you want to tell the White House what you think, there’s an easy email form here. (H/T Tony Varona) Make your views known to the supposedly “most open and accessible administration in American history.”
-Bridget Crawford
The NYTimes reports (here) on unusual employment incentives being offered by hospitals and clinics in the Czech Republic:
When Petra Kalivodova, a 31-year-old nurse, was considering whether to renew her contract at a private health clinic here, special perks helped clinch the deal: free German lessons, five weeks of vacation, and a range of plastic-surgery options, including complimentary silicone-enhanced breasts.
“I would rather have plastic surgery than a free car,”said Ms. Kalivodova, who opted for cosmetic breast surgery that would normally cost €2,600, or about $3,500, as well as liposuction on her thighs and stomach. These were physical enhancements, she said, that she could not afford on her €1,000 a month salary.
“I feel better when I look in the mirror,”she added.”We were always taught that if a nurse is nice, intelligent, loves her work and looks attractive, then patients will recover faster.”
Wow! I can’t quite imagine a cross-over of this type of incentive to the U.S. law school system, but consider the possibilities. Instead of recruiting faculty with details about course loads, research support and scholarly community, talk would shift to the size of each faculty member’s discretionary spending account for “aesthetic procedures.” Our rhinoplasty is great! We have Botox shots at every colloquium! These? They’re not real. They’re from the discretionary Dean’s Budget!
-Bridget Crawford
An advertisement for condoms in China with the tag line “”Such tragedy could have been easily avoided”:
Via. Strikes me as pretty dumb, if startling, but apparently it increased sales.
–Ann Bartow
From Amy Benfer at Salon:
Taking a cue from the title of Belkin’s most famous article, a series in the American Prospect this week titled”When Opting Out Isn’t an Option“takes a long overdue look at the women who make up the vast majority of women who work.
“For too long,”writes Heather Boushey in her introduction to the series,”the narrative about working women has centered on professionals with children.”These women, she points out, make up only about 10 percent of women aged 25 to 44. And yet throughout the past decade, the other 90 percent of female workers were largely absent from what we talked about when we talked about women who work. It may be, Boushey concedes, that it was much”sexier”to trump up a false war between those who”chose”to stay at home and those who”chose”to work because at least it gave us something to argue about.”After all,”she writes,”most women must balance work with caregiving. They don’t have the option of opting out. Where’s the debate in that?”
Props to Ann Friedman on this too.
–Ann Bartow
Other acronyms that come to mind are JFC and WTF? Read the brief here. It makes the same weasel argument (“the states should decide for themselves”) John McCain made during his Presidential run.
–Ann Bartow
Feminist Law Prof Kerry Abrams (UVa) and her co-author Peter Brooks (Yale, Comp. Lit.) have posted to SSRN their article, “Marriage as a Message: Same-Sex Couples and the Rhetoric of Accidental Procreation.”
Here is the abstract:
In his dissent in the 2003 case Goodridge v. Department of Health, Justice Robert Cordy of the Massachusetts Supreme Court introduced a novel argument in support of state bans on same-sex marriage: that marriage is an institution designed to create a safe social and legal space for accidental heterosexual reproduction, a space that is not necessary for same-sex couples who, by definition, cannot accidentally reproduce. Since 2003, every state appellate court considering a same-sex marriage case has adopted Justice Cordy’s dissent until the recent California Supreme Court decision In Re Marriage Cases. In case after case, courts have held that marriage allows states to send a message to potentially irresponsible procreators that ‘marriage is a (normatively) necessary part of their procreative endeavor’ and that same-sex couples do not need marriage because they only procreate after considerable effort and forethought. This article examines the accidental procreation argument through the lenses of anthropological theory, history, literature, and constitutional law. We conclude that marriage has sometimes been used to channel male heterosexuality into reproduction, but to argue that this goal is the sine qua non of marriage is to vastly oversimplify its history in both law and culture. We then undertake a genealogy of the accidental procreation argument and speculate about its possible effects on the institution of marriage. We suggest that if courts continue to insist upon a definition of marriage that is so distinct from the actual practice of the institution, the law may actually be less and less influential in regulating intimate behavior.
The full article is available here.
-Bridget Crawford
In this season’s finale of Desperate Housewives, Lynette discovers she’s pregnant with twins. She and her husband Tom already have an extensive family and clearly don’t want the baby. But the show never even raises the possibility that she could abort. Their disinterest in extending their family aside, pregnancy poses healh risks for older women (not to mention Lynette’s having survived breast cancer). It’s also not just one storyline in the show – in a previous situation, Bree’s daughter Danielle gets pregnant, abortion is never discussed, and they cart the daughter off until she gives birth, fake Bree’s pregnancy and then Bree raises the baby (until Danielle comes back for it later). I know it’s not supposed to be real life, but didn’t Maude deal with this thirty years ago? It’s shows like Desperate Housewives that are paving the way for the shuttering of reproductive choice clinics around the country, not just in Kansas.
Sandra Bullock’s new vehicle, The Proposal, seems equally problematic. She’s a hard-driving evil boss who, to keep her job and avoid deportation (she’s Canadian) forces her sexy male employee into a sham marriage. From this we can draw that Hollywood’s testosterone-driven industry wants us to think that women with corporate power abuse it and that they do so in part through sexual harassment of men. It’s yet another male fantasy of why men should keep their power and how women with power are dangerous.
-Darren Rosenblum
This conference is off to a wonderful start, with a presentation by Dr. Melissa deZwart an Associate Professor at the University of South Australia School of Law. Spent yesterday touring Hong Kong, starting off with a hike up to the top of the mountain behind HKU. Sitting in the room with me are many of my very favorite law prof colleagues. I know how lucky I am to be here.
–Ann Bartow
I’m not a technology expert, but I’m open to trying new gadgets and thinking about how to use them in law teaching. So with all the buzz about the Kindle DX, I wonder how (how soon?) e-texts will make their appearance in the law school classroom.
I received a “first generation” Kindle this year as a birthday gift. Quite frankly, I’m not impressed (yet). It’s ok for reading books, but I find the navigation system to be clumsy and inefficient. That makes for awkward reading of newspapers and magazines. I wasn’t surprised, then, by this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (sorry – pay site, but day passes available). In “6 Lessons One Campus Learned About E-Textbooks,” writer Jeffrey Young describes Northwest Missouri State University’s experiment with an early version of the Sony Reader:
Students who got the machines quickly asked for their printed books back because it was so awkward to navigate inside the e-books (though a newer version of the device works more gracefully).
Young offers six “lessons” for those assigning e-books or considering them:
1. Judge e-books by their covers. No, not their jacket art, but the device and software used to display them. ***
The university started out last fall by handing out Sony’s Reader devices loaded with textbooks published by McGraw-Hill to about 240 students. The project used the original model of the Sony Reader, which students found difficult to operate. “It was hard to even find where you were supposed to be in those things,” said Thomas M. Spencer, an associate professor of history. Worse, the e-book wasn’t numbered the same way as the printed edition, so it was hard for everyone to get on the same page. *** Nearly 40 percent of the participants surveyed in March agreed that “I study less because the e-textbook makes studying more difficult.” ***
2. Learning curves ahead. Tania Brobst, a junior at the university, is proud of the note-taking techniques she’s developed over the years. She crafts typed study guides for each of her courses, and she carefully highlights material in her printed textbooks.
When she ended up in a marketing course this spring that required her to use a digital textbook, she had to adapt her strategies. ***
3. Professors are eager students. Faculty members are known to be reluctant to change their teaching approaches. So the original goal was to rope five or six professors into volunteering for the spring experiment. But 54 professors said they wanted in. ***
4. Long live batteries. The technical difficulty that came up the most in my interviews with students was battery life. Students said they sometimes forgot to charge their laptops overnight, so they had to find a spot in the lecture hall to plug in if they wanted to use their books in class. ***
5. Subjects are not equally e-friendly. *** Michael J. Wilson, an associate professor of accounting, economics, and finance, said the one problem they had with the e-book in the marketing course was when students needed to refer to a dense table of numbers in the back. He demonstrated for me, noting a pop-up window with a font that was almost illegible. “You can kind of expand them, but it’s not as easy as it could be.”
At least laptops can display color. E-reading devices handle only black and white. That’s a major handicap for science or medical books that rely on illustrations.
6. Environmental impact matters. *** [A]dministrators said they were surprised at the degree to which such consciousness affected students’s opinions.
I teach Tax, so I hear all the time from students that the required texts — especially the statutory volume — are heavy and inconvenient. So students might be eager to ditch the traditional paper version in favor of streamlined e-Code. But for folks who like to underline, circle and highlight in multiple fluorescent colors, e-books aren’t there…yet.
Maybe the Millenials will approach e-books the way some GenXers approach internet research: they might like it, use it, and occasionally crave the “old fashioned” ways. But if the next generation – the generation after the Millenials — grows up with e-texts (the way today’s law students “grow up” with on-line versions of Shepard’s), they likely will think about and use books in new ways. We — current youngsters and not-so-youngsters — will have to adapt to keep up with them.
I look forward to it!
-Bridget Crawford
Here’s a great announcement from one of the journals at my home institution:
As of August 1, 2009, Pace Environmental Law Review (PELR) will use a new Peer Review process to select articles for publication. Submissions will be reviewed internally and then forwarded to a select group of Peer Reviewers – academics, practitioners, and experts in the field, including members of Pace Law School’s world-renowned environmental law faculty. The Peer Review process will offer new and distinctive opportunities to foster continued debate and reflection upon some of the most pressing topics within the field of environmental law. Articles selected for publication will benefit from:
·Expedited editorial processing of 8 to 10 weeks from acceptance
·Single-article hard copy publication
·Inclusion in a bound volume distributed to PELR’s wide-ranging list of subscribers
All articles submitted to PELR must be original scholarship and not previously published.
Established in 1982, PELR was one of the first scholarly environmental law journals. We invite authors to submit articles either via ExpressO or directly in either MSWord or PDF format to the PELR Development & Acquisitions Editor at pelracq@law.pace.edu. More information is available here.
Feminist and other critical perspectives very welcome!
-Bridget Crawford
The website iamdrtiller.com memorializes Dr. Tiller and 
honors the work of all who work for reproductive rights:
Here you will fi
nd stories of individuals who have dedicated their lives to making abortion safe, legal, healthy, and accessible to women and girls. These people may be nurses, counselors, escorts, volunteers at abortion funds, or abortion doctors themselves. You will not see the faces of these providers to protect their safety. What you will see is the story they decide to share – how they came to abortion work, what their function is at their abortion clinic, or their personal abortion story. We want to humanize these individuals to convey the kindness, courtesy, justice, love, and respect they have for women and the health care choices women make. We share our stories in hopes of ending clinic violence, to alleviate the shame associated with the abortion experience, and as an homage to Dr. Tiller’s outstanding and courageous life work.
Please respect this space as one of compassion, dignity and love. We do not cover our faces out of shame. We do so to recognize an unfortunate aspect of the lives of abortion providers — we must always be weary of our safety. No one knew this better than Dr. Tiller.
The stories on the website are very moving and remind us of the importance of reproductive rights.
-Bridget Crawford
Yesterday security guard Stephen T. Johns was killed at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. The suspected shooter was James W. von Brunn, an 88 year-old man. According to news reports (e.g., here):
Von Brunn is said to have been a leading writer in the white supremacist fringe for many years. He also appears to be the author of a recent Internet posting suggesting that President Obama’s background is being hidden from the public.
His online book, “Kill the Best Gentiles,” contains hundreds of pages of conspiracy theories that include Holocaust denial, the ancient hoax of the “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion” and wild webs of fantasy about Jewish plotting against white people. ***
On a rambling, racist and bitterly anti-Semitic Web site, a man who identifies himself as James W. von Brunn says he is a former World War II PT boat captain who was decorated for his conduct in battle and was an advertising executive and film producer in New York.
He says he is a member of Mensa, “the high-IQ society,” and acknowledges being convicted in D.C. Superior Court for a 1981 attempted attack on a government building. He was “convicted by a Negro jury, Jew/Negro attorneys, and sentenced to prison for eleven years by a Jew judge. A Jew/Negro/White Court of Appeals denied his appeal,” the site says.
He describes himself as an artist and author. Neighbors in Annapolis, who asked not to be identified, said that they recently invited the suspect to their home for a drink and that he unexpectedly brought up his belief that the Holocaust did not occur. “It was just off the wall,” said one of the neighbors.
Stephen Jones died doing his job. He died because of his association with the Holocaust Museum. The Museum’s mission is to educate, serve witness, research, remember (see here):
With unique power and authenticity, the Museum teaches millions of people each year about the dangers of unchecked hatred and the need to prevent genocide. And we encourage them to act, cultivating a sense of moral responsibility among our citizens so that they will respond to the monumental challenges that confront our world. Today we face an alarming rise in Holocaust denial and antisemitism:even in the very lands where the Holocaust happened:as well as genocide and threats of genocide in other parts of the world.
Anti-semitism hurts all of us.
For Stephen T. Johns, may he be written in the book of life.
מ××™ ×”×•× ×™×”×™×” כתוב בספר ×”×—×™×™×
-Bridget Crawford
The last several weeks have been busy ones in the battle for marriage equality. The governors of Maine and New Hampshire signed laws that allowed same sex couples to marry. California’s Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Proposition 8, and we expected the New York State legislature to have a darn good chance of passing a marriage equality bill this session since the measure had already passed the Assembly and was working its way through the Senate – but then things all went haywire in Albany. All of these efforts were plotted, led, coordinated and largely controlled by lesbian and gay litigation and policy organizations. GLAD ran the plays in New England, and Lambda Legal, the ACLU’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Project, and the National Center for Lesbian Rights all played key roles in picking the plaintiffs, picking the state courts, and picking the state houses where the battles would be fought from Iowa to California to New York. Almost without exception, the struggle and the strategy to secure marriage rights for same sex couples have been orchestrated by organizations that “belong to” the lesbian and gay community. These groups have held the view that it was best to take a state-by-state approach, working through state courts and state legislatures and staying clear of any federal court or congressional effort to secure marriage rights.
The whole thing took an odd turn the other day however when a newly formed group innocuously called the American Foundation for Equal Rights announced that it had filed a complaint in federal court in northern California challenging the constitutionality of California’s law restricting marriage to different sex couples. AFER held a press conference on May 27th in which it produced two couples – one lesbian, the other gay – and two high powered and famous lawyers, Ted Olson and David Boies – both straight – who had filed a lawsuit in federal court the week before alleging that the California law violated the U.S. Constitution’s rights to Equal Protection and Substantive Due Process. The complaint in the case is available here, other papers here. It appears that AFER was formed exclusively or at least largely for the purpose of bringing this lawsuit. It’s board, which it revealed in a press release issued several days after the announcement of the lawsuit, is made up, in part, of prominent Los Angeles movie business types/good guys -some of them straight, such as Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle Singer Reiner.
At the AFER press conference Olson and Boies stated emphatically that the California marriage/domestic partnership system established a separate and unequal regime that discriminated against lesbian and gay couples and denied them “the most fundamental of rights,” the right to marry the person you love. They noted how they had been on the opposite sides of important litigation – most notably Bush v. Gore – and while Olson was a conservative and Boies a liberal, they both agreed that the U.S. Constitution secures same sex couples the right to marry, and analogized the constitutional harm here to that recognized by the Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia.
Katherine Franke, cross-posted from Gender & Sexuality Law Blog
From the FLP mailbox, this CFP:
Beyond Citizenship: Feminism and the Transformation of Belonging
June 30-July 2, 2010, Birkbeck, University of London
The language of citizenship has, in recent years, been mobilized by feminists to articulate a wide range of claims and demands. The notions of economic, political, social, cultural, sexual/ bodily, and intimate citizenship, for example, have all been developed and explored in terms of their normative potential and their actual realization. In Europe, in particular, there has been a strong steer from research funders and policy makers towards research agendas which address the question of citizenship in the context of increasingly diverse and multicultural societies. But, can the concept of citizenship encompass the transformations that feminist politics seek? What are the restrictions and exclusions of contemporary forms and practices of citizenship? How does the concept of citizenship deal with power, inequality, and difference? What are the problems with framing our desires and visions for the future in terms of citizenship in a globalizing world of migration, mobility, armed conflict, economic crisis and climate change? Does the concept of citizenship restrict our imaginations and limit our horizons within nation-state formations? Can it ever really grasp the complexity of our real and longed-for attachments to communities, networks, friends and loved ones? Is it able to embrace the politics of embodiment and of our relationships with the non-human world? How have feminists historically and cross-culturally imagined and prefigured a world beyond citizenship? Is a feminist, queer or global citizenship thinkable, or should we find a new language for new forms of belonging?
We invite proposals for papers that address these questions and the broad theme of the conference. We particularly welcome papers which explore the interface between the feminist academy and feminist activism, and which are interdisciplinary and innovative in method and approach.
Individual paper proposals (max. 200 words) or proposals for panels of three or four related papers (max. 300 words) should be submitted by 1st December 2009 to: abstracts.beyondcitizenship@bbk.ac.uk
The conference will take place in central London.
More information is available here.
-Bridget Crawford
From the FLP mailbox:
“Gender, Bodies and Technology”
Proposals are invited for an Interdisciplinary Conference
April 22-24, 2010
Roanoke, Virginia
Sponsored by the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Virginia Tech
Proposal Deadline: September 15, 2009
We invite proposals from scholars in the humanities, social and natural sciences, visual and performing arts, engineering and technology for papers, panels, new media art and performance pieces that explore: the technological production of gendered and racialized bodies, historical and contemporary feminist appropriations of technology in aesthetics and representations of embodiment, and the gendered implications of technology in contexts ranging from classrooms to workplaces to the Internet. We construe technology broadly to include material culture and the apparatus of daily life, such as writing, books and the built environment.
Specific topics might include, but are not limited to:
Proposals will be reviewed by Virginia Tech Women’s and Gender Studies faculty/affiliates with appropriate expertise and notification of the outcome will be made no later than October 15, 2009.
More information is available here. The proposal submission form is here.
-Bridget Crawford
A cartoonist at the Oklahoma City newspaper The Oklahoman responds to criticism of his drawing of Judge Sotomayor as a pinata to be struck by waiting GOP elephants.
The cartoon by Chip Bok of Creators Syndicate ran in The Oklahoman on Tuesday. It shows Obama wearing a sombrero and saying “Now, who wants to be first?” to a group of elephants in suits holding sticks. The underline says, “Fiesta Time At The Confirmation Hearing.”
Jean Warner, chair of the Oklahoma Women’s Coalition, said there was nothing funny about the image.
“Here’s a woman wearing a judge’s robes and she’s about to get the crap beaten out of her because she has the audacity to think she can sit on the Supreme Court,” Warner said. “But most young girls who look at the cartoon, don’t even understand that. They just see guys with sticks about to hit a woman.”
Rossana Rosado, publisher and chief executive officer of El Diario La Prensa in New York, also said the cartoon was offensive.
“On first view you just see her hanging by a rope and that’s a very disturbing image,” she said. “It’s offensive mostly because it’s not funny. It’s supposed to be satirical and humorous and it simply isn’t funny.”
Bok said Friday that his point was that Republicans will look bad if they are too rough on Sotomayor. He added that editorial cartoons sometimes offend to make a point.
“A cartoon is disrespectful, it is insensitive,” Bok said. “That’s what we do. We’re not in the business of carrying out socially responsible dictates. That’s somebody else’s job. That’s not my job.
“I don’t mean to be gratuitously offensive. It was just a vehicle for the cartoon and I think it worked. It was funny and in some cases they are being too sensitive about it.”
Bok said the cartoon was “an utter exaggeration of the cultural theme. She has used her Latinaness stereotypically as an asset in her effort for the nomination to go through. So I turned it around and tried to exaggerate the cultural part of it. It’s part of the mockery of the cartoon, part of the joke.”
The full AP article is here.
What are the “some cases” in which “they” are being too sensitive? What’s the “cultural part” being exaggerated?
-Bridget Crawford
Blogging by me will probably be sparse for a couple of weeks.
–Ann Bartow
Heart has the story here.
Ugh. Enjoy the great many cringe-worthy moments in this article about Sarah Palin’s recent trip to feminist landmarks in upstate New York here.
-Leigh Goodmark
Under-representation of women in high-impact published clinical cancer research
Reshma Jagsi, MD, DPhil 1 *, Amy R. Motomura, BSE 1, Sudha Amarnath, BS 2, Aleksandra Jankovic, MS 3, Nathan Sheets, BS 2, Peter A. Ubel, MD 3
1Department of Radiation Oncology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan
2University of Michigan Medical School, Ann Arbor, Michigan
3Center for Behavioral and Decision Sciences in Medicine, Department of Internal Medicine, Division of General Medicine, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan
email: Reshma Jagsi (rjagsi@med.umich.edu)
*Correspondence to Reshma Jagsi, Department of Radiation Oncology, University of Michigan, UHB2C490, SPC 5010, 1500 East Medical Center Drive, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-5010
Presented in preliminary form at the American Society of Clinical Oncology 44th Annual Meeting, Chicago, Illinois, May 30-June 3, 2008.
Fax: (734) 763-7370
BACKGROUND.
Adequate representation of women in research has been deemed essential.
METHODS.
Cancer research published in 8 journals in 2006 was reviewed. The percentage of women among study participants was compared with the proportion expected from population-based estimates of sex-specific cancer incidence, using binomial tests. Differences were assessed in sex distribution of participants by funding source, author sex, and focus of research with the Student t test, and in a linear regression model controlling for cancer type.
RESULTS.
A total of 1534 cancer research articles were identified, of which 661 (representing 1,096,098 participants) were prospective clinical studies and were analyzed further. For all 7 non-sex-specific cancer types assessed, the majority of studies analyzed included a lower proportion of women than the proportion of women among patients having cancer of that type in the general population. Among studies focusing on cancer treatment, women constituted a significantly lower overall proportion of the participants in the analyzed studies than expected for 6 of 7 non-sex-specific cancer types (P < .001). Among non-sex-specific studies, the mean percentage of participants who were women was 38.8%. Non-sex-specific studies reporting government funding had a higher percentage of female participants (mean 41.3% vs 36.9%; P = .005). In a regression model controlling for cancer type, lack of government funding (P = .03) and focus on cancer treatment (P = .03) were found to be independent significant predictors of a lower percentage of female participants.
CONCLUSIONS.
Women were under-represented as participants in recently published, high-impact studie
From the full text of the study:
In 2001, the Institute of Medicine issued a report emphasizing that sex was an important basic human variable that should be considered when designing and analyzing studies in all areas and at all levels of biomedical and health-related research.[1] Indeed, sex may be a predictor not only of the incidence of disease, but also of the utility of diagnostic tests, preventive interventions, prognostic markers, and therapeutics. Not only may biologic differences between the sexes be important but also social and cultural influences based on sex, including gender differences in the approach of men and women with regard to their physicians and their own health, and how they communicate their health concerns.[2] The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has similarly recognized the critical role of sex in medicine; its Revitalization Act of 1993 explicitly articulated the importance of including women in each clinical research project and noted that clinical trials should enroll adequate numbers of female participants for performing valid subanalyses of the effect of trial variables on women alone.[3]
Fifteen years after the enactment of the NIH policy, however, it is still unclear whether women are adequately represented as subjects of clinical research. Whereas some analyses have suggested that women are adequately represented, others have suggested otherwise. For example, a study of federally funded randomized trials reported in 9 medical journals in 2004 found that women constituted only 37% of participants in non-sex-specific studies and 24% of participants in drug trials.[4]
Several previous studies have considered participation in cancer research specifically and also yielded mixed results. A study analyzing enrollment in Southwest Oncology Group trials from 1993 to 1996 revealed significant disparities between the proportion of women among enrolled trial participants and the proportion of women among the general population of US cancer patients for 3 of 11 cancer types they examined.[5] Another study of participation in cooperative group trials in 2000 through 2002 found that women were significantly less likely than men to enroll in trials for colorectal cancer (odds ratio, 1.30) and lung cancer (odds ratio, 1.23).[6] Yet, a different study of accrual to cooperative group studies found that overall, women did not accrue at lower rates and in fact, between the ages of 40 and 69 years, accrued at even higher rates than men. However, this finding was driven largely by participation in breast and gynecologic cancer studies; when studies were limited to non-sex-specific cancers, fewer women accrued than men.[7]
Despite the compelling nature of these findings, the researchers who conducted these studies have themselves acknowledged that their results may not be representative because their studies focused exclusively on cooperative group trial participation. Indeed, whereas cooperative group trials are funded by government sources, studies funded by industry or private philanthropy may be less sensitive to the need to enroll and analyze female patients than federally funded studies subject to the mandates of the NIH. Furthermore, patterns of enrollment in trials studying the impact of treatments may differ from enrollment in studies seeking to examine mechanisms of cancer causation and prevention. Therefore, further investigation is warranted to define better the representation of women as subjects in the full range of high-impact, clinical cancer research published today. This is particularly important in light of changes in political priorities that have made the competition for scarce federal research funds increasingly intense, potentially fueling an even greater reliance on private support. Indeed, although several other studies have also examined women’s representation among research participants, they too have generally focused on federally funded clinical trials[8-12] or have been limited in other ways, such as focusing on studies published in only 1 journal.[13] These studies have primarily focused on quantifying the representation of women rather than analyzing the role of various factors, such as funding source, in influencing their representation. The rare exceptions are dated.[14] Therefore, in this study, we sought both to update and build upon this previous work.
In this study, we attempted to quantify the representation of women as subjects in clinical cancer research studies, including not only trials but also prospective cohort studies, that result in high-impact publications. In addition, we assessed whether studies funded privately are as likely to include female participants as those with federal funding.
An illustrated overview of the Happily Ever After myth, monetized, here at StilettoRevolt.
–Ann Bartow
From the FLP mailbox, this CFP:
Call for (Short) Papers
AALS Section on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Issues
On the Cutting Edge: Charting the Future of
Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Scholarship
AALS Annual Meeting
January 6-10, 2010 in New Orleans, Louisiana
Thirty years ago, Rhonda Rivera published”Our Straight-Laced Judges: The Legal Position of Homosexual Persons in the United States,“the first comprehensive law review article of its kind. Since then, the sexual orientation and gender identity legal literature has exploded, with hundreds of articles considering all imaginable aspects of the law’s relationship to gender identity and sexual orientation. At the same time, political demands of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgender have both multiplied and moved to the center of cultural debates, and the body of case law addressing these issues has likewise grown exponentially. What, then, are the next steps for legal scholarship?
The program’s aim is to highlight new issues, new theories, possibilities for linking theory and practice, and visions of the field for the decade(s) to come.
Because the program aims to spark new ideas, this Call for Papers is for short essays – from 1000 to 2000 words – rather than for full-length papers. Submissions will be considered for two purposes:
Program participation – One submission will be selected for presentation at the SOGII program at the Annual Meeting, which will be held from 10:30 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. on Saturday, January 9, 2010, in New Orleans. The selected author will have to rely on his or her own institution for funding to attend the conference.
Publication – Up to twenty submissions will be selected for publication in a special volume of the Sexuality & Law Journal (published at Tulane Law School) dedicated to the panel topic.
The SOGII Section executive committee will serve as the selection committee. For both purposes, essays must be no longer than 2000 words, including footnotes.
The deadline to submit a draft essay is Tuesday, September 1, 2009. Essays can be revised, subject to the approval of the Journal editors, through the fall semester, although 2000 words will remain the outer length limit. Please submit the draft paper to Professor Suzanne B. Goldberg, Chair of the Section on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Issues, as an attachment to an e-mail at suzanne.goldberg@law.columbia.edu. Submissions will be reviewed by members of the SOGII Section’s Executive Committee. Decisions will be communicated by late September 2009.
Sara talks about being sent to prison for life for killing her pimp when she was 16 years old.
In this 100-page report, Human Rights Watch found that in many cases where juveniles were prosecuted with an adult, the youth received heavier sentences than their adult codefendants. There are 227 inmates in California sentenced as juveniles to life in prison without parole.
That is the second paragraph of this story at Inside Higher Ed.
Here, at Genderberg.
As I write this message, I am sitting in a panel at the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar meeting, in Indianapolis, on”Rethinking Legal Education in Hard Times.”Here are a few highlights:
Tom Sullivan, Provost of the University of Minnesota, and former dean at three law schools, spoke about the need for law schools to think strategically to weather the economic storm, which he described in terms of a”sea change”in the structure of educational institutions. Tom noted that this past week, he had to cut $200 million from the UM budget, but observed that these problems will trickle down to law schools and other departments, not only in his but in other universities. Of course, Minnesota is the second largest university in the United States with 66,000 students on four campuses, so we may be tempted to discount his comments as inapplicable to [other schools], but I fear he is not off base, when he asks how we can grow a school when our sources of revenue are declining and the opportunities for our graduates are diminishing.
Tom was preceded on the panel by Jim Leipold, Executive Director of NALP, who reminded everyone (of something we already knew) that the job market for law graduates is very bad, and that most observers predict long-term changes in hiring patterns (fewer hires), salaries (lower), and law firm expectations (grads will need to be”practice ready”).
Judge Solomon Oliver, U.S. District Judge from Ohio, discussed the status of efforts to increase diversity in law schools and the profession. He noted anecdotally that he almost never sees an African-American lawyer arguing cases in his court. Despite increases in diversity enrollment in the 70s and 80s, the numbers have not increased since the mid-90s, despite the addition of some 13,000 law school seats. The number of lawyers who represent racial minorities is significantly less than the percentage of these groups in the overall population. Law schools need to address the real problems associated with attracting, admitting, graduating and employing diverse individuals, and in doing this, business as usual will not be enough. He noted that the US News ranking system for selectivity cuts against efforts to increase diversity enrollment, and that financial barriers often exclude diverse students.
Professor Michael Olivas from the University of Houston (and a founding director of The Access Group) noted that while diversity in law schools may have increased, the percentage of Mexican-American law student has declined. Financial issues pervade the population of minority students, and many do not seek loans, work through law school, and float to the bottom of the class. The formula of working for a couple of years before coming to law school does not work for diversity students; they need to borrow for education, and get through school as early as possible in life. For these graduates, there ARE unmet job opportunities in the marketplace. However, first generation law students, which many of these students are, do not have the financial and business acumen to make sound decisions about their careers, and need special guidance to help them get through law school. Olivas said,”If you live like a lawyer while you are in law school, I promise you will live like a law student when you are a lawyer.”
AALS Executive Director (and former dean, as well as MacCrate Task Force member) asserted that we should not change our agenda regarding legal education, because of the tough economic times. The largest cohort of graduates go to work in small firms, and this is not likely to change; law schools need to do more to prepare these students to practice law. There is more foment about law school curriculum today than at any time in the past forty years. During this time, the two major developments, the introduction of law and economics and clinical education, arrived, but did not change the basic curriculum. Today, faculties everywhere are asking fundamental questions about what we are doing and how to structure a curriculum for a globalized, interconnected world. There is a sense that we need to teach students to do the tasks that lawyers are required to perform. This is partly because of the influence of clinical faculty, but it is more than this. The Carnegie Foundation Report (authored by many individuals who were not legally-trained) has given us permission to talk about curriculum again. The Socratic Method tends to strip out professional values and ignore skills; we need to integrate the teaching of legal analysis with the teaching of skills and values. We need to continue this dialogue through this period of economic downturn, so that we can institute change when times get better.
Pauline Schneider, is a member and former Chair of the Legal Education Council, a former member of the ABA Board of Governors, and a partner Orrick, Herrington, a major Washington, D.C. law firm, asked the old question, with the largest number of lawyers per capita in the world and diminishing career expectations, can we in good faith ask students to borrow vast sums to finance legal education? If most graduates join solo and small firm practices, how will they be able to repay loans given the salaries offered in those firms? Given the relationship between economic marginality and the occurrence of professional disciplinary procedures, what are the implications for legal education generally, the advice law schools give students specifically, and the structure of the educational process in the larger context. We need to be honest with students to help them assess what they can borrow, what kind of lifestyle they should expect, and the consequences of taking on loans they cannot repay. Educators, for their part, must reduce the cost o f attendance for students.
The last speaker, Bryant Garth, Dean of Southwestern Law School and former head of the American Bar Foundation, provided some parting thoughts: Is the current model for legal education”sustainable?”What about law firms? Data from the”After the JD”study suggests that non-elite, tuition-driven schools that send their graduates to smaller firms are less impacted by the current recession than elite schools. It is time to recognize that we have bi-modal education system. There are less than 50 elite schools, where more than 50% of the graduates go to work for elite firms; for non-elite schools, about 10% go to work in elite firms, and most graduates go to work for small firms or open their own practice. The 10% of graduates from non-elite schools who go to work for elite firms are more likely to stay at those firms compared to graduates of elite schools who frequently leave after 2-3 years. Bryant observed that those who have come the furthest in terms of social mobility are often the happiest, compared to graduates who earn the most money. Diversity is also bi-modal, with diverse students at elite schools more likely to come from elite backgrounds, including well-to-do true Africans, Hispanics from Argentina, etc., while non-elite schools are more likely to enroll working class African Americans, Latinos, and first generation immigrants from other cultures. He urged law schools to practice transparency in advising applicants and students about opportunities.
A lot to think about!
Comments welcome.
[Gary Munneke is a Professor of Law at Pace University and a member of the ABA House of Delegates. He served on the ABA Board of Governors from 2006 to 2009]
The Library of Congress has created a web page (here) that contains links to Judge Sotomayor’s published law review articles, transcripts from her two prior confirmation hearings and a searchable database of Second Circuit opinions.
-Bridget Crawford
Feminist Law Prof Jennifer Hendricks (Tennessee) has posted to SSRN her article, “Contingent Equal Protection.” Here is the abstract:
The Supreme Court’s decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District #1 has been extensively analyzed as the latest step in the Court’s long struggle with the desegregation of public schools. This Article examines the decision’s implications for the full range of equal protection doctrine dealing with benign or remedial race and sex classifications. Parents Involved revealed a sharp division on the Court over whether government may consciously try to promote substantive equality. In the past, such efforts have been subject to an equal protection analysis that allows race-conscious or sex-conscious state action, contingent on existing, de facto inequality. Recent developments in affirmative action cases, however, have made it increasingly plausible for the conservative plurality to claim that substantive equality is not even a legitimate state interest. The Article demonstrates that this claim is nonetheless a radical departure from existing precedent across a spectrum of equal protection cases. It explores the consequences of the plurality’s view, including the threat to remedial programs ranging from Title VII’s disparate impact rules to the Family and Medical Leave Act. It also suggests some possibilities for developing the opposite view into a more robust and substantive theory of equality enforceable under the Equal Protection Clause.
The full article is available here.
-Bridget Crawford
With so much focus on the bill protecting religious liberty, it seems that little attention has been paid to the actual bill extending the right to marry to same-sex couples in New Hampshire. That bill enshrines differing marriageable ages for different-sex couples and same-sex couples. The bill retains the current marriageable ages for different-sex couples, effectively permitting a 14-year-old boy to marry a 13-year-old girl (a troubling possibility, if you ask me). For same-sex couples, however, the marriageable age is set to be the same as the age of consent (i.e., 18 years old). So, different-sex couples may marry below the age of consent with the permission of their parents and a judge, but same-sex couples must wait until they can themselves consent to the marriage. So much for all of the rhetoric about equality.
-Tony Infanti
Just in case you didn’t know, this ad makes it pretty darn clear: Pepsi Max is a diet soda marketed to men. Diet Pepsi? That sounds so girly. But caffeine-hepped Pepsi Max will help you get your banana pointed in the right direction! Peeled and ready to go!
I will laugh loudly at the next man I see drinking this beverage.
-Bridget Crawford
On January 8, 1989, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran an ad taken out by B.J. Isaacson-Jones. The “ad” was in the form of a poem. At the time, Isaacson-Jones was the Executive Director of Reproductive Health Services (as in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services).
An Open Letter to 21 Million Women-
Where are you?
For over 16 years we have provided
you with choices
Painful choices
I remember
I sometimes cried with you.
Choices, nevertheless, when you were desperate.
Remember how we protected your privacy
and treated you with dignity and respect
when you
were famous
had been brought to us in shackles
with an armed guard, or
were terrified
that you would run into
one of your students?
I remember each of you.
Our clinic was firebombed.
Do you recall?
Exhausted and terrified we had
been up all night.
We rerouted you to another clinic
because you wanted an abortion that day.
Where are you?
Priding ourselves on providing abortions for
those who cannot pay, we have spent millions
of dollars that we never really
had caring for you. We wanted
to give a choice.
I also gave you cab fare and
money for dinner from my own pocket.
Have you forgotten?
I remember you cried and asked me how
you could carry this pregnancy to term when
you
were abusing the children you had,
were having an affair,
tested positive for AIDS,
could not handle another,
were raped by your mother’s boyfriend,
pregnant by your father and
shocked and torn apart when
your very much wanted and loved
fetus was found to be
severely deformed.
Your mother picketed our clinic
regularly. We brought you in after dark.
Have you mustered the courage
to tell her that you are pro-choice?
You are.
Aren’t you?
I recall shielding your shaking body, guiding you
and you husband through the picket lines.
They screamed adoption, not abortion!
You wondered how you could explain your
choice to your young children.
You broke our hearts.
You had just celebrated your twelfth birthday
when you came to us. You clutched
your teddy bear, sucked your thumb
and cried out for your mom who asked
you why you had gotten yourself pregnant.
You replied that you just wanted to be grown.
You’re twenty today.
Where are you?
I pretend I don’t know you in the market,
at social gatherings and on the street.
I told you I would.
After your procedure you told me that you would
fight for reproductive choices (parenthood,
adoption, and abortion) for your mother, daughters,
and grandchildren. You will . . . won’t you?
I have no regrets. I care about
each and every one of you and
treasure all that you’ve taught me.
But I’m angry. I can’t do this alone.
I’m not asking you to speak about your abortion, but
You need to speak out and you need to speak
out now. Where are you?
H/T to David Cassuto
Reading Isaacson-Jones’ poem in the wake of Dr. Tiller’s murder makes her words more powerful than ever. Abortion — which is a difficult, painful and heart-wrenching choice — needs to be safe and legal. We need to speak out. Now.
-Bridget Crawford
Federal Rule of Evidence 801(d)(2)(D) states
Admission by party-opponent. [A] statement is not hearsay if…[t]he statement is offered against a party and is…a statement by the party’s agent or servant concerning a matter within the scope of the agency or employment, made during the existence of the relationship.
How strictly should courts construe this Rule? If a supervisor makes sexist comments to an interviewee/employee, is the supervisor making statements concerning a matter within the scope of his employment, or are his statements beyond the scope of human decency as well as his employment? Thankfully, most courts have acted like the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California in its recent opinion in Johnson v. Proline Concrete Tools, Inc., 2009 WL 1444204 (E.D. Cal. 2009), and reached the former conclusion.
In these times of national debate over the meaning of marriage, it’s important to remember how much feminists have achieved in shifting the meaning of marriage. In a send-up of a Christian fundamentalist, Betty Bowers explains what a traditional Bible-based marriage is in this video.
Some things are shocking, such as a rape victim should marry her rapist. This”traditional marriage”stuff reminds us both how loony the fundamentalist Christian right is, but also reminds us to draw strength in current debates over marriage. It was, after all, only a couple of decades ago that marital rape exceptions were removed. Fortunately, we are further from the Handmaid’s Tale than we sometimes might fear.
H/T Joe. My. God.
-Darren Rosenblum
In the heated rhetoric that usually accompanies discussions about abortion, it’s important to remember what happens when the right to choose is taken away from women. Women who can’t take care of a child will find a way to get rid of an unwanted pregnancy, even if it means endangering their own lives. Until women are able to control the conditions in which they live (poverty, lack of political, social and economic power) – and thereby prevent the situations that lead to unwanted pregnancies (rape, incest, coercion, ignorance about or inability to obtain contraceptives) – there will be abortions. A recent article in the New York Times brings this point home quite clearly:
Worldwide, there are 19 million unsafe abortions a year, and they kill 70,000 women (accounting for 13 percent of maternal deaths), mostly in poor countries like Tanzania where abortion is illegal, according to the World Health Organization. More than two million women a year suffer serious complications. According to Unicef, unsafe abortions cause 4 percent of deaths among pregnant women in Africa, 6 percent in Asia and 12 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The full NYT article is here.
In the aftermath of Dr. Tiller’s murder, it’s important to remember that what he did during his lifetime was help keep legal abortions safe.
-Nancy Kim
There has been much made of Sonia Sotomayor’s life, her Puerto Rican background, her modest, if not poor, childhood, her mother, what her Latina-ness means to her, 
her involvement in civil rights organizations, etc. It’s both a big part of why Obama picked her to serve on the Supreme Court and will form the basis of the attacks launched against her – it already has. Rush Limbaugh has likened Sonia Sotomayor to David Duke, a leader of the Ku Klux Klan.
Much can be said about how these attacks/critiques are disingenuous, mean, racist, sexist and offensive. Of course each of us is informed by our past, our experiences, the advantages and disadvantages that we have experienced. It’s just that you notice how the disadvantages more than the advantages shape who you are.
But for the moment I’ll leave to others such as my colleague Patricia Williams to address this aspect of the opposition to Sotomayor’s nomination. Instead I want to focus on what her life history – including but not reduced to her nomination to the Supreme Court – has meant for Latina law students.
One of the things I enjoy most about teaching at Columbia Law School is the diversity of students we have. Our JD students come from everywhere, and have every possible background. Many of them see themselves mirrored in the faculty and on the federal judiciary, but a good number of them don’t. Those who don’t know they don’t, and it often takes a leap of faith or just dogged perseverence for them to feel like they belong at a place like Columbia and that they might one day be in the front of the room teaching or up on the bench judging. Sonia Sotomayor is fully aware of the burden she carries as a role model for female students, Latina/o students, and students who didn’t come from privileged backgrounds. We’ve talked about this over dinner.
In this regard, what follows is a letter written by a former Columbia Law Student (with her permission) to Judge Sotomayor after her nomination to the Supreme Court was announced. Judge Sotomayor has taught a course at Columbia on Federal Court advocacy for a number of years, which students have loved, and she was the speaker at the Columbia Law School graduation in 2004. This student copied us on the letter she sent to Judge Sotomayor:
Dear Hon. Sonia Sotomayor:
Here I sit watching you stand proudly next to President Obama as he announces your nomination to the Supreme Court and I am so incredibly proud and happy for you and your family (especially your mom!). God bless you and keep you always.
Katherine Franke, from Gender and Sexuality Law Blog
At least according to the TTAB which said:
In this case, it is the term PUSSY which is the focus of the refusal and our analysis. The term PUSSY is the most significant element in the mark. Accordingly, when we discuss the term PUSSY alone, we are mindful that the entire mark is the mark shown above. …
… While the boundaries of what is scandalous under Section 2(a) may be difficult to define, we reject the notion that those boundaries are coextensive with the boundaries of permissible, that is, uncensored, artistic expression. Neither vaudeville nor South Park provide a useful guide for applying Section 2(a). See In re Red Bull GmbH, 78 USPQ2d at 1379-1380 (Board rejects argument based on use of BULLSHIT in conjunction with Penn & Teller performance). …
And, the TTAB concluded:
The record, taken as a whole, shows that, in the view of a substantial composite of the public, in particular women, the term PUSSY currently has a vulgar, offensive sexual meaning and that the offensive meaning is the meaning which the relevant public will perceive as applied to the beverage products identified in the application, including energy drinks.
The opinion notes that the mark “is attention grabbing, unique and provocative, the meaning related to female genitalia and sexual intercourse, the meaning which is both vulgar and scandalous in the United States.” Footnote six makes an odd comparison with a slang term for male genitalia, as follows:
Another Board case applying the scandalous standard to the DICK HEADS’ mark refers to evidence showing sensitivity to the use of the term PUSSY or”the P word.”In re Wilcher Corp., 40 USPQ2d at 1931 (“… I have never been taken to task for calling someone a dickhead, but now I won’t even call someone the feline P word when chiding them for lack of bravery.”).
The mark at issue in In re Wilcher looked like this:
It was for a chain of restaurants, which always made me wonder: who wants to look at that while they are eating? In any event, it’s important to note that the “Pussy” mark can still be used in commerce and legally defended against infringers, it just doesn’t get the special protections that federal registration brings.
–Ann Bartow
Via this Salon article, which notes:
… Tiller’s name first appeared on “The Factor” on Feb. 25, 2005. Since then, O’Reilly and his guest hosts have brought up the doctor on 28 more episodes, including as recently as April 27 of this year. Almost invariably, Tiller is described as “Tiller the Baby Killer.”
Tiller, O’Reilly likes to say, “destroys fetuses for just about any reason right up until the birth date for $5,000.” He’s guilty of “Nazi stuff,” said O’Reilly on June 8, 2005; a moral equivalent to NAMBLA and al-Qaida, he suggested on March 15, 2006. “This is the kind of stuff happened in Mao’s China, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union,” said O’Reilly on Nov. 9, 2006. …
… O’Reilly’s language describing Tiller, and accusing the state and its elites of complicity in his actions, could become extremely vivid. On June 12, 2007, he said, “Yes, I think we all know what this is. And if the state of Kansas doesn’t stop this man, then anybody who prevents that from happening has blood on their hands as the governor does right now, Governor Sebelius.”
Three days later, he added, “No question Dr. Tiller has blood on his hands. But now so does Governor Sebelius. She is not fit to serve. Nor is any Kansas politician who supports Tiller’s business of destruction. I wouldn’t want to be these people if there is a Judgment Day. I just — you know … Kansas is a great state, but this is a disgrace upon everyone who lives in Kansas. Is it not?”
This characterization of Tiller fits exactly into ancient conservative, paranoid stories: a decadent, permissive and callous elite tolerates moral monstrosities that every common-sense citizen just knows to be awful. Conspiring against our folk wisdom, O’Reilly says, the sophisticates have shielded Tiller from the appropriate, legal consequences for his deeds. It’s left to “judgment day” to give him what’s coming.
O’Reilly didn’t tell anyone to do anything violent, but he did put Tiller in the public eye, and help make him the focus of a movement with a history of violence against exactly these kinds of targets (including Tiller himself, who had already been shot). In those circumstances, flinging around words like “blood on their hands,” “pardon,” “country club” and “judgment day” was sensationally irresponsible.
–Ann Bartow
