Feminist Law Professors

Via the Legal Writing Prof Blog (here), good news about Feminist Law Prof Sarah Ricks:

Professor Sarah Ricks of Rutgers School of Law-Camden has been appointed by the mayor of Philadelphia to serve on the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations.   The Commission enforces the City’s very broad antidiscrimination ordinance and also has a public education role.  

Sarah resides in Philadelphia and is a Clinical Professor and Co-Director of the Pro Bono Research Project at Rutgers School of Law-Camden.   She teaches Civil Rights, Advanced Legal Writing, Public Interest Legal Research, and Legal Analysis, Writing, and Research.  

She has been congratulated by Mayor Nutter of Philadelphia, by Dean Raymon Solomon and her colleagues at Rutgers-Camden, and now by the national and international legal writing community

Sarah is also the author of a forthcoming book called  Current Issues in Constitutional Litigation: Roles of the Courts, Attorneys, and Administrators.

Sarah joins Feminist Law Prof Regina Austin (Penn)  (blogged  here), among others, as a member of the Commission.  Kudos, Sarah!

-Bridget Crawford

Friday the Iowa Supreme Court held unanimously that the state’s definition of marriage – a union of a man and a woman – violated the Iowa Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.   This is the first court to do so unanimously, and the first mid-western court to do so.   No more can marriage traditionalists dismiss the idea of marriage equality as an elitist liberalism emanating from the People’s Republic of Massachusetts, the liberal sodom of Connecticut, or the Gomorrah of California.   No, we’ve got Iowa now – a rectangular state smack dab in the middle of the country, with the state motto:   “Our liberties we prize, and our rights we will maintain.”   You bet ‘cha.

I’ve got many thoughts about the ruling in Varnum v. Brien – here are some initial takes.   My critique of Justice Cady’s reasoning from the perspective of queer theory will follow later.

There’s no missing the midwestern tone to this decision.   It reads very differently from the decisions granting marriage rights in Connecticut and California.   Coming from the mid-west myself, I recognized its ethos as characteristically workman-like – what I call “lunch-box lawyering” – no fancy language, it’s straightforward, accessible to the regular person, and its rightness speaks for itself.   Justice Mark Cady, who wrote the opinion for the entire court, stays clear of soaring language about civil rights, about the dignity of gay men and lesbians, or about the sanctity of marriage as a fundamental building block of society.   The opinion reads like a brief that one of my best students might have written in a moot court competition.   Solid, clear, step by step.   As I said to Nan Hunter in an e-mail about the opinion: “Every i is dotted, every t is crossed.  In the end they conclude that ‘gay people are Iowans too – and heck, that’s good enough for us.’   Not the stuff of queer theory, but then it’s the Iowa Supreme Court, gosh dern it.”   After all, look at the plaintiffs:

These are regular folks who do the dishes, go to church, work to pay their mortgages, love their kids – just like straight Iowans.   Indeed, that is what the Iowa Supreme court found, over and over, “Like other Iowans, they (the gay and lesbian plaintiffs) prize their liberties and live within the borders of this state with the expectation that their rights will be maintained and protected – a belief embraced by our state motto.”   Later the court goes to great pains to point out that the gay plaintiffs are in committed and loving relationships, many raising families, wanting the state to recognize the importance of their relationships and desiring the stability that recognition entails just like regular heterosexual Iowans.

The court also makes every effort to situate the marriage case within the context of local Iowan values.   Whether it was a refusal to recognize the legitimacy of slavery in 1839, a recognition that racial segregation violated the Iowa Constitution in 1873 long before the U.S. Supreme Court did in 1954, or being the first state to grant women the right to practice law in 1869, Iowans have had their own strong sense of justice and fairness, and as the court noted, “in each of these instances, our state approached a fork in the road toward fulfillment of our constitution’s ideals and reaffirmed the ‘absolute equality of all’ persons before the law as ‘the very foundation principle of our government.'”

What they’re saying here is this: don’t think we’re doing this because of some carpet-bagging gay rights lawyers from Lambda Legal in New York – we’re just taking the next step in a road that is distinctly local and Iowan.   Iowans have never stood for unfairness – even when others did – and we won’t now.   This isn’t a culture war – it’s what good people should do.

This is Iowa – the state with the not-too-flashy Eastern Goldfinch as its state bird, and the dependable Oak as its state tree.   No camelia (Alabama – too smelly), poppy (California – of course), or eastern white pine tassel and cone (Maine – sounds gay to me) for Iowa’s state flower.   They’re happy with the wild prairie rose (pictured left).   And if god-loving gay people want to get married, then it seems only fair that we should let ’em.

In this may lie the decision’s greatest value – bringing the issue to the middle part of the country in terms that are distinctly mid-western.

– Katherine Franke, cross posted from Gender and Sexuality Law Blog

From the Chronicle of Higher Education (here):

Role models, particularly ones with children, can make the difference in whether a female graduate student takes the next big step along the tenure track. While undergraduates are influenced simply by seeing a female faculty member, graduate students need to see that she is able to have children as well as a career.

Clearly, they’ve never seen me trying to get my kids out the door in the morning…

-Leigh Goodmark

News Flash: the Iowa Supreme Court has announced that it will release its decision in the same sex marriage case, Varnum v. Brien, tomorrow at 8:30 am (CST).   The decision will be available here.
– Katherine Franke

Two posts at Historiann document some callback atrocities: here and here, and they are prodigiously supplemented in the appended comments. Here are just a few of the oddball things that happened to me when I interviewed for jobs:

1. A faculty member asked me if I had any quarters on me, and when I said yes, asked me to sort through them to see if I was in possession any of the “state” quarters that his grandchildren needed for their collections.

2. After learning that I had driven to the interview at a big city law school, a car-less faculty member asked me to drop her at a grocery store on my way back to the hotel after the first day of a two day callback. Then she asked me to stick around and drive her home after she finished shopping, since calling a cab would be inconvenient. This made me late for an interview dinner.

3. Though I was only going to spend one night in a hotel, because I was flying in one morning and leaving the following night, I was given a confirmed reservation for three nights, and told just to “ignore this, it’s a billing issue.” When I checked in, I found myself housed in party suite outfitted with an enormous hot tub. It reeked of cigarette smoke, and the bed spreads were crusty with, uh, DNA.

–Ann Bartow