This just in from the feminist humor department: Rush Limbaugh is concerned that there’s a gender gap in his audience and is holding a “summit” to figure it out. The whole story is here. Hmmm…. what a difficult inquiry. Put aside the gender gap in ideology and party identification that exists in this country. I wonder if this has anything to do with Limbaugh being a misogynistic blowhard?
– David S. Cohen
Happy Springtime, Everyone!!!
Click on the link below. You will get a black page.
Click your mouse anywhere (& everywhere) on the
page & see what happens! Better yet, click & drag
your mouse over the black page… Enjoy!!
http://www.procreo.jp/labo/flower_garden.swf
The e-mail was sent last spring, by my cousin C., who is much missed.
–Ann Bartow
From here:
When the economy makes big news, many photographs of people at work come across the wires, usually to help illustrate a particular story or event. By collecting these disparate photos over the past few months, I found that a global portrait emerged of we humans producing things. People assembling, generating, and building items small and large, mundane and expensive, trivial and important. I hope you enjoy this look into some people’s work lives around the world.
I liked looking at the pictures, snapshots of real life for real people. Below are two samples:
April 10, 2009 9:30 am – 5 pm
Room 107
Jerome Greene Hall Columbia Law School
Women Crossing Borders, 9:30 am
Soraya Fata, Staff Attorney, Legal Momentum
Sharmila Lodhia, Post-doctoral Fellow, Santa Clara University
Jenni Milbank, Professor of Law, University of Technology Sydney (Australia)
Traditional Institutions through a Non-Traditional Lens, 10:40 am
Angela Irvine, Principal Researcher, Ceres Policy Research
Eva Ryrstedt, Professor of Law, Lund University (Sweden)
Sarah Valentine, Law Professor and Librarian, CUNY School of Law
Real Queer Advocacy: Intersection and Divergence, 11:45 am
Libby Adler, Professor of Law, Northeastern University
Tony Varona, Professor of Law, American University
Keynote Address, 12:45 pm
(luncheon in Jerome Greene Annex)
Dean Spade, Professor of Law, Seattle University
Legally-Constructed Gender and Sexual Identities, 2:30 pm
Jessie Hill, Professor of Law, Case Western Reserve University
Khiara Bridges, Post-doctoral Fellow, Center for Reproductive Rights/Columbia Law School
Barrak Alzaid, MA Candidate, New York University
Shankar Prasad, Political Scientist and Chief Marketing Officer, AKOS Health Systems, Inc.
Women Committing Crimes: Gendered Conduct Outside the Law, 4:00 pm
Rebecca Tushnet, Professor of Law, Georgetown University
Linda Fentiman, Professor of Law, Pace University
Benedetta Faedi, Graduate Fellow and JSD Candidate, Stanford University
Final panel will be followed by a reception in the Jerome Greene Annex.
Registration details to follow. For more information, contact the Journal of Gender and Law at jrngen@law.columbia.edu.
– Katherine Franke
On Friday, February 13th we held a symposium at Columbia Law School honoring the important work of Martha Nussbaum to the scholarship of Gender, Sexuality and the Law.
The Symposium was a tremendous success, and the proceedings will be published in a special issue of the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law.
Videos of each of the panels and Professor Nussbaum’s Keynote are now available streaming on the web: http://blogs.law.columbia.edu/genderandsexualitylawblog/
– Katherine Franke
So notes the ACS Blog, which reports:
Under the Clinton-era Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, military recruiters and authorities are banned from asking about a soldier’s sexual identify. However, soldiers are required to hide their sexual orientation from public view unless they are heterosexual.
According to figures from the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, women are disproportionately affected by the policy. In 2007, women only made up 14 percent of the Army. However, during the same year, women accounted for 46 percent of all Army discharges under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
While on the campaign trail, then Sen. Obama pledged to end gay discrimination in the military. However, more recent indications have been that Pres. Obama is in no rush to put this policy to rest.
This. Ya might not want to get into anything substantive in the bathroom either, if there is a chance those stalled shoes grace the interviewee’s feet.
The full report, compiled by the World Economic Forum, can be found here (PDF). It focuses on data related to economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, political power and health and survival. The overall rank of the U.S. is 27th out of 130 (see page 18). Via the Swash Zone.
More than 570 suspects were arrested during the action, which took place over three nights.
FBI agents and local police forces were involved in the operations which spanned some 29 cities.
Officials say a 16-year-old girl who recruits children as prostitutes is being sought as a priority.
Special Agent Melissa Morrow, of Washington’s FBI, said adult prostitutes who were among those arrested tipped authorities off about the girl.
“She is currently 16 and started when she was 13,” Agent Morrow said.
“Now she is out there recruiting other juveniles as well,” she said, adding that finding her was “at the top of our list”, the Associated Press news agency reported. …
The 13 to 17 year olds are recognized to be victims, but the “adult prostitutes,” anybody 18 years old or over, are arrested as criminals, rather than rescued, even though many probably got drawn into prostitution at very young ages too. That’s shameful and it could have been stopped. The LA Times notes:
… Over a three-night initiative called Operation Cross Country, federal agents working with local law enforcement also arrested more than 571 suspects on a variety of federal and state prostitution-related charges, the bureau said.
The teenage prostitutes found in the investigation ranged in age from 13 to 17.
“We may not be able to return their innocence but we can remove them from this cycle of abuse and violence,” said FBI Director Robert Mueller.
Meanwhile, in Memphis, Tenn., a man pleaded guilty Monday to federal civil rights charges for sex trafficking in minors. Leonard Fox faces at least 10 years in prison after admitting that he arranged for underaged girls to engage in sex for money.
“To sexually prey upon young girls in this manner for financial gain is particularly damaging to the victims and an affront to the society in which we live,” said Loretta King, acting head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.
Historically, federal authorities rarely play a role in anti-prostitution crackdowns, but the FBI is becoming more involved as it tries to rescue children caught up in the business.
“The goal is to recover kids. We consider them the child victims of prostitution,” said FBI Deputy Assistant Director Daniel Roberts.
“Unfortunately, the vast majority of these kids are what they term ‘throwaway kids,’ with no family support, no friends. They’re kids that nobody wants, they’re loners. Many are runaways,” Roberts said.
Most of the children are put into the custody of local child protection agencies.
Agents in cities from Miami to Chicago to Anchorage, Alaska took part in the operation. …
… The federal effort is also designed to hit pimps with much tougher prison sentences than they would likely get in state criminal courts.
Government prosecutors look to bring racketeering charges or conspiracy charges that can result in decades of jail time.
“Some of these networks of pimps and their organizations are very sophisticated, they’re interstate,” said Roberts, requiring wiretaps and undercover sting operations to bring charges.
The weekend’s roundup marked the third such Operation Cross Country, and is part of a broader federal program launched in 2003 to crack down on the sexual exploitation of children.
–Ann Bartow
Senate President Pro Tem Glenn McConnell told the Post and Courier of Charleston that the gift market is changing for everyone.
McConnell says he and his brother Sam, plan to close the CSA Galleries in North Charleston, probably by the end of March.
…
Via Jezebel, a link to an article that apparently appeared in 1930 in a magazine called Physical Culture, called The High Cost of High Heels. It’s heavily infused with all manner of sexism, classism, and other forms of bigotry, all rhetorically linked to high heeled shoes and how stupid women are to wear them. Here is an excerpt:
I was mentally congratulating her, and incidentally congratulating myself on the opportunity to see so attractive and wholesome a sight, when she suddenly threw the last of her supply of crumbs to the pigeons, and departed.
Ah, Reader:what a shock of disillusionment! I wish I might spare you; but the truth is necessary to the moral of this tale. She didn’t walk; she stumped.
I might not have noticed this had she not happened to be in a hurry. Perhaps she had an appointment. Anyhow, she walked very fast:or tried to; and she had not gone twenty steps before she began to run, or tried to. There is no need to go into the painful details. She limped a bit as if her feet hurt her; and she moved along, somehow; but every natural grace of motion that one would have expected from a creature so strong and beautiful had departed.
Her heels came down with sharp, staccato clicks on the pavement. She ran stiff-legged and stiff-bodied, as a marionette might have run. And every resounding thump with every clicking step must have jarred her very brain. It was a shocking transition, as if one of the iridescent, pink-footed pigeons she had been feeding had tried to take flight with a wing clipped or crippled.
I wanted to put my hands over my eyes to shut out the horror of it; but I kept on looking. The spectacle had a dreadful fascination about it. And it had dramatic meanings also; for it seemed to shout at one a question. It seemed to say,”Women have discarded the notion that they cannot be beautiful without stays, and without other former features of apparel to which they once clung for ‘esthetic’ reasons. They have acquired enough faith in nature for that, and enough of sophistication to know that the human body no more needs crudely artificial distortions for the sake of beauty than a lily needs gilding. Will the day ever come when this last citadel of fashionable distortion of the body will be captured and razed, and when women will get over the notion that there is beauty to be achieved by wearing on the foot a leather harness designed expressly to throw it out of position, destroy its beautiful mechanical efficiency, cripple it in and out of action, and make it look from in front as much as possible like a hoof?”
JUST then came along another horror. It was another girl:an inferior type this time. She was brilliant with crudely applied rouge; and whatever she had plastered on her lips to change their expression and hide whatever sweetness and character they might have expressed, would have made her entirely kiss-proof in the eyes of any discriminating male. Her clothes were cheap, rather than economical; her stockings didn’t fit, and her thin, straight shanks, which were as lacking in character as her face, matched the stockings.
And the shoes! Reader, again I would spare you. She had spent her last cent, one guessed, on those shoes.
I don’t know what the heels of them would have measured in inches, but they stood her literally on her toes, and kept her there. Also, they tapered down almost to a point, so that her feet wobbled unsteadily every time she put them down. As was necessary with her feet in such a position, she toed out as she walked. One wondered that she could even stand.
All this, of course, made a violent change, necessarily, in her center of gravity. To accommodate to this displacement of her feet, she had to alter the position of her whole body in order not to topple over. She carried her pelvis thrust forward and her chest back as far as possible. In order to make her posture conform as completely as possible to her shoes, she also kept her knees slightly bent. She made a queer and grotesque sight. One wondered how she could walk. As for running, she wasn’t having any.
ALL that was needed to make her perfect and complete, an utter caricature, was plenty of fat. A fat woman, stumping along on a pair of those pointed heels, I reflected, would have made this morning’s experience with certain feminine notions of beauty complete. I would wait, I decided hopefully. Maybe the Queen of Love and Beauty:the Ultimate”It”Lady:would show up. Nothing short of 250 pounds, and heels three inches high, tapering to nothing, and calves six inches in diameter, tapering toward the heels, would satisfy my desire to see the Perfect Thing. So I waited. For anything can happen in New York.
Reader, believe it or not, she came. A diminutive but fat little Pomeranian was leading her along by the string, guiding her in such a manner as to keep her in the middle of the walk, while she devoted her entire attention to putting down her feet in alternation, and balancing herself as she moved from foot to foot, so to speak. It was an inspiring sight:such nerve:such verve:such adaptability to the pull of gravitation. One felt that with her talents she should have been on stilts, or:a tight-rope.
I hate high heels but if I’d met a character like this guy I’d have been tempted to slip on a pair just to irritate him.
–Ann Bartow
From the University of South Carolina School of Law’s recent TNT (Talent No Talent) show:
I competed in the “No Talent” category and lost. I’m not sure what that means. Mercifully my act did not make it to YouTube!
–Ann Bartow
In the American court system, when judges allow attorneys to attack the character of witnesses, they generally allow them to do so only through reputation and opinion testimony. Federal Rule of Evidence 405(a) provides that:
In all cases in which evidence of character or a trait of character of a person is admissible, proof may be made by testimony as to reputation or by testimony in the form of an opinion. On cross-examination, inquiry is allowable into relevant specific instances of conduct.
And Federal Rule of Evidence 608(a) provides in relevant part that:
The credibility of a witness may be attacked or supported by evidence in the form of opinion or reputation.
Like Rule 405(a), Rule608(b) allows for inquiry into relevant specific acts of (mis)conduct on cross-examination, but neither Rule allows for the admission of extrinsic evidence of those acts in the event of an unsatisfactory answer.
In other words, in a murder trial, after the defendant testified and had her character for honesty attacked by the prosecution, defense counsel could call a witness to testify that the defendant has a reputation for being honest. The prosecutor could thereafter ask that witness on cross-examination whether she had heard that the defendant cheated on her taxes last year. According to the Federal Rules and case law, the above reputation testimony is evidence of the defendant’s character while the prosecutor’s “specific act” question is not evidence of the defendant’s character but merely probes the testimonial qualifications of the witness.
As the Advisory Committee Note to Rule 405 makes clear: “The theory is that, since the reputation witness relates what he has heard, the inquiry tends to shed light on the accuracy of his hearing and reporting;” it is not independent evidence of character. This is why the prosecutor could not follow up with extrinsic evidence of the defendant’s tax cheating (absent a conviction) should the witness testify that she was unaware of any such act by the defendant.
When I teach Evidence, students often wonder why American courts generally allow attorneys to prove character through opinion and reputation testimony (what we might otherwise call gossip and rumors) but not through “specific act” evidence. “And you may ask yourself-well…how did we get here?”
Well, there are several theories out there. Some say that courts wanted to avoid the “trial within a trial” that the admission of “specific act” evidence would create. Meanwhile, John Henry Wigmore believed that American character/impeachment evidence jurisprudence is a “perversion of the earlier English rule that focused on the personal belief of the impeaching witness grounded in his or her ‘personal knowledge’ of the person whose credibility was at issue.”
Well, in her recent Note, Unchaste and Incredible: The Use of Gendered Conceptions of Honor in Impeachment, Julia Ann Simon-Kerr “offers another explanation.” Simon-Kerr notes that historically, reputation evidence was inadmissible to impeach or impugn the character of a man. As an example, she cites to the 1837 opinion, Bakeman v. Rose, 18 Wend. 146, 150 (N.Y. 1837), in which the Court of Appeals of New York declared that:
“[I]t is perfectly well settled, both in [New York] and in England” that evidence that a person had a reputation for committing crimes, such as being a “murderer, forger, adulterer, gambler, [or] swindler,” could not be admitted to impeach a witness.
Conversely, when the witness at issue was a woman, and especially when she was testifying at a rape or sexual assault trial, courts frequently admitted reputation testimony. Simon-Kerr cites to the 1817 opinion, Commonwealth v. Murphy, 14 Mass. 387, 388 (1817), where the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts allowed the character of a female witness in a rape trial to be attacked through reputation testimony concerning her alleged prostitution and out-of-wedlock children, declaring that:
“[t]he credibility of a witness may . . . be properly impeached, by proving her to be of such a character.”
Simon-Kerr notes that Murphy “continued to have currency in other jurisdictions for nearly a century” and explains how this influence makes sense given the prevailing view of a woman’s honor at the time. While a man’s honor was seen as linked with his honesty, a women’s honor (and her truthfulness) was seen as inextricably intertwined with her sexual virtue. It was not, however, a woman’s actual sexual virtue that was most important but her perceived sexual virtue, which Simon-Kerr makes clear by citing to several influential authors of the time, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wrote in his influential Émile that:
Worth alone will not suffice, a woman must be thought worthy; nor beauty, she must be admired; nor virtue, she must be respected. A woman’s honour does not depend on her conduct alone, but on her reputation, and no woman who permits herself to be considered vile is really virtuous.
This prevailing view in turn explains why “the use of reputation evidence was singularly damaging to female witnesses.” And, according to Simon-Kerr, it might also explain why American courts accepted reputation and opinion testimony, rather than “specific act” evidence, as the preferred method for proving character. She muses that:
courts may have made what scholars have labeled a “misguided choice” in favor of reputation evidence to prove character precisely because the question arose so often in the context of female witnesses and their chastity. Since reputation seemed probative in the context of female witnesses, courts dealing with character impeachments of women would have been more inclined to adopt that mode of proof. In other words, reputation’s centrality to female honor may explain both why it was especially problematic for women to be impeached using what Wigmore referred to as “the secondhand, irresponsible product of multiplied guesses and gossip that we call ‘reputation'” and why courts adopted reputation as the proper method for impeaching character.
This seems to me to be an interesting and plausible conclusion as well as one that has an ironic postscript. Based upon the way that rape victims were treated by the American court system, the federal Rape Shield Rule, Federal Rule of Evidence 412, now precludes most evidence relating to victims’ prior sexual behavior/predisposition (as do most state counterparts). While there are exceptions to this Rule, Rule412(b)(2) makes clear that in a civil trial, “[e]vidence of an alleged victim’s reputation is admissible only if it has been placed in controversy by the alleged victim.” In other words, at least in the civil realm, the very types of cases that may have led to the preference for reputation testimony over “specific act” evidence for proving character now nearly never serve as the hosts for the admission of reputation testimony.
-Colin Miller
Here is a list I’ve compiled of the 24 journals identified by ExpressO as having “women” as a subject matter speciality. I set out to determine whether each journal has announced that it has begun reviewing articles yet, and any stated preferences the journal has for methods of submissions, page limitations, etc. Only one journal (Yale J.L. & Feminism) had specific information on its website about when it was reviewing articles (now).
My big take-aways are that most of these journals accept articles on a rolling basis and, all things being equal, they’d prefer to get e-mail submissions directly to the listed address.
No doubt there are some holes in this list. I welcome corrections, additions and updates.
-Bridget Crawford
The bad pun heading was not a good sign, but maybe Randy Cohen’s answer was correct:
I recognized a friend in a short video clip on an amateur pornography Web site. She is now a medical professional, wife and mother, and I doubt that she posted it. (Perhaps a former boyfriend did.) I think she would want to know it’s there, but I fear the effect on our friendship if I tell her. Maybe she’s better off not knowing: it is probably tough to get such a thing removed. Should I tell? NAME WITHHELD, NEW YORK
Your coming forward could embarrass you, upset your friend and threaten your friendship. Do it anyway. You yourself believe she would want to know about the video clip. The longer it is online, the greater the chances of its being seen by someone else who knows her. She can’t protect herself unless she knows the clip is out there. Sometimes you must imperil a friendship to help a friend.
It may well be tough to compel the site to remove this video clip, but your friend is entitled to try. Or she might want to take legal action against a treacherous ex or at least try to learn who posted the clip. Even if she has few alternatives, she has the right to act on them, something she can do only if she knows her situation. By speaking up, you give her a measure of autonomy, a chance to do what she thinks best. And there is the off chance that she already knows about this video because she posted it (and no reason she should not). The intimate lives of even our closest friends can be a mystery.
A caution: Resist the temptation to alert her anonymously, an approach that may shield you but can leave her anxious and uncertain, fretting over who knows about this and the motives of her informant.
ETA: Randy Cohen e-mailed as follows:
I wanted to mention that I did not write the bad pun heading. Writing bad heds is a privilege reserved for editors. I did write the column, of course, and was pleased to see that you posted it on Feminist Law Professors.
E-mail quoted with permission.
This announcement from Feminist Law Prof Suzanne Kim:
On March 6, 2009, the Women’s Rights Law Reporter, the nation’s first legal journal devoted to gender rights, will hold a symposium exploring the intersections of gender and terrorism entitled “The Gender Dimensions of
Terrorism: How Terrorism Impacts the Lives of Women.” The Symposium will feature a morning keynote from Susan Herman, President of the ACLU, and Karima Bennoune, Rutgers Law School professor and visiting professor at the
University of Michigan Law School. The Symposium is free and open to the public and will take place at the Rutgers Center for Law and Criminal Justice, 123 Washington St., Newark, NJ 07102.
The Symposium will also include three panel discussions: one discussing the many definitions of terrorism and seeking to create a broader definition to guide discussion throughout the day, followed by two panels discussing the impact of terrorism on Women. One of these panels will discuss terrorism’s impact on women’s human rights, the other the ways in which women participate in terrorism.
Panelists discussing a new definition of terrorism will include Tom Parker, Director, Terrorism, Counterterrorism and Human Rights, Amnesty International USA, Beverly Gage, Assistant Professor, U.S. History, Yale University, Vince Warren, Executive Director, Center for Constitutional Rights, and Ahmed Bulbulia, Professor of Law, Seton Hall University, discussing a new definition of terrorism. Panelists discussing how terrorism impacts women’s human rights will include Rhonda Copelon, Professor of Law, CUNY School of Law, Jasmin Zine, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Wilfrid Laurier University, Amina Jama, Professor of Sociology, Ryerson University, and Dr. Maliha Chishti, Professor, Wilfrid Laurier University. The final panel, on women participating in Terror, will feature Dr. Mia Bloom, author of *Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror*, Dr. Margaret Gonzalez-Perez, Professor, Political Science, Southeastern Louisiana University, Paige Eager, Professor, Hood College, and Farhana Ali, International Policy Analyst, RAND Corporation The *Reporter* strongly encourages those interested in the terrorism and how it affects women to attend.
Please RSVP by emailing WRLR.symposium@gmail.com. Those interested can also visit here for more information.
Lots of good programming happening at Rutgers, Newark. Thanks, Suzanne!
-Bridget Crawford
Thanks to Brian Leiter for compiling this list so quickly in response to my post below.
(with the caveat that there might be some scholars whose schools were not included in this sample who might have made the list: e.g., Carol Rose at the University of Arizona):
1. Kathleen Sullivan (Stanford University), 900 citations
2. Martha Minow (Harvard University), 820 citations
3. Deborah Rhode (Stanford University), 800 citations
4. Martha Nussbaum (University of Chicago), 740 citations
5. Reva Siegel (Yale University), 730 citations
6. Margaret Jane Radin (University of Michigan), 690 citations
7. Mary Ann Glendon (Harvard University), 640 citations
8. Judith Resnik (Yale University), 630 citations
9. Catharine MacKinnon (University of Michigan), 620 citations
9. Roberta Romano (Yale University), 620 citations
I’m happy to have the list, and pleased that I am familiar with all of these fantastic law profs, by their work if not in person. I think most, maybe all, identify as feminists. When I have more time (I’m really freaking slammed by deadlines that people I care about are depending on me to meet) I will float a few theories about why women are cited less than men, but if anybody else has any ideas in the mean time I’d be happy to entertain them here. Since my friend J. recently reminded me that it is a pain in the neck to comment here (by design, which is unfortunately by necessity), e-mail is fine too.
It also needs to be said that both lists, women and men, are overwhelmingly white.
–Ann Bartow
List is here, as compiled by Brian Leiter. For a number of reasons I think it would be useful to have a list of the “ten most cited” women law faculty members, more on this later.
–Ann Bartow
As women, we’ve all been there at some point in our lives….a job…a sport…some activity where we were told we can’t participate simply because we were female. Answer the question … and tell us what inspired you to keep going and how you handled the challenges.
I received a copy of this mass e-mail from the good folks at ExpressO, the on-line law review submission service affiliated with the Berkeley Electronic Press:
Are your law students asking you for the opportunity to use ExpressO to get published? * * * The challenge is that students with unfettered ExpressO access have an unfortunate habit of submitting indiscriminately to law reviews. Article editors of admiralty law, family law and antitrust law journals are, for example, asked to consider the same piece of student research. The superfluous submissions waste the law review editor’s time and create uncontrollable costs for law schools.
The goals of the new offering would be to serve the interest of the student authors and the law reviews while keeping costs manageable. ExpressO would offer a new institutional account type called”student account”. It would enable students from participating institutions to submit to law journals in any single discipline/subject area. For example, a student writing about international law would be able to submit all international law journals. The law reviews would also benefit. Limiting student submissions to a single discipline means law reviews would see fewer submissions outside of their scope. Additionally, only those law reviews eager to consider student submissions would get them as all will have the option to opt-out of the program.
I can understand an institution’s desire to limit the number of journals to which users can submit. After all, our home institution pays a fee for each submission we make.
Separate from the question of whether law schools should pay for students’ submissions, the e-mail inspires a concern about the channeling function of ExpressO. A system that asks an author to declare her or his “single discipline/subject area” and then chooses for the author those journals that “fall within” that subject area might not be a boon for inter-subject matter scholarship.
I already have the (unmeasured, unproven, unverified) sense that the growth of speciality journals has both helped and hurt gender scholarship, for example. Speciality journals “help” insfoar as they provide a much needed venue for the work, but they “hurt” insofar as they provide a reasonable intellectual basis for a main journal to decline speciality articles. Why should X main journal publish a ________[fill in the blank speciality] article, when the school already has the Journal of ________ [fill in the blank speciality] & the Law?
If a piece of scholarship would be appropriate for both a family law journal and an admiralty journal, to use ExpressO examples, then why shouldn’t a user be able to send to self-proclaimed “family” law journals and “admiralty” journals at the same time? Not a big deal, of course, because presumably one could simply make two submissions: one declaring the article a “family” law piece and the other declaring the article an “admiralty” law piece. More importantly, though, will “main” journals be even less likely to accept any specialty articles, if the submission system itself institutionalizes specialty “tracks”?
Law review editors and authors, what do you think?
-Bridget Crawford
lavender
This year’s National LGBT Bar Association (formerly NLGLA) Conference (“Lavender Law”) takes place on September 10-12, 2009, in Brooklyn, New York. Lavender Law offers academics the unique opportunity to come together with other law and sexuality scholars, as well as the attorneys who litigate and the judges who hear the cases that appear in scholarly work.
This year, Lavender Law is expanding its Junior Scholar’s Forum. If you are a law professor who is just beginning to write scholarship focusing on law and sexuality issues, conference organizers encourage you to submit a proposal to the Junior Scholar’s Forum. If your proposal is accepted, you will receive extensive feedback and guidance from academics who have been working in the field.
For more information about this year’s conference click here. To submit a proposal click here. To participate in the Junior Scholars program, send an email to Liz Glazer (Hofstra) here.
-Bridget Crawford
An illustrated poem by Laini Mataka:
Via Womanist Musings, where the full text of the poem is also available.
Things have been so busy that I haven’t had much time to post recently. Nonetheless, during the presidential campaign I posted about the tax consequences of Sarah Palin’s per diems, and that post was picked up by the New York Times. It turns out that, after much hulabaloo and what Paul Caron over at TaxProf describes as a “pathetic” opinion from the McCain campaign, the State of Alaska has finally conceded that it should have withheld taxes on Governor Palin’s per diem payments.
Recently, much has been made by Republicans of the failure of President Obama’s nominees for cabinet positions to pay their taxes. This story illustrates the hypocrisy of that position. Sadly, to paraphrase President Obama, the failure to pay taxes is not a Democratic issue or a Republican issue, but an issue for Americans of all political stripes.
-Tony Infanti
Do you know a faculty member who propositions students? If you’ve spent any time in academia, my guess is that the answer is “Yes.” Does that faculty member think he (or she) is propositioning students? My guess is the answer is, “Probably not.”
Have you ever reported a colleague who propositions students? Invites students on “dates”? My guess is the answer is, “No.” Notwithstanding the academy’s reputation for leftist intervention of all sorts, profs tend to respect wide zones of privacy in personal matters.
If you have reported a colleague who propositions students or invites them on “dates,” does the administration investigate? My guess is the answer is, “No.” At least in law schools, I’ve heard the refrain, “Everyone is an adult here. Faculty members don’t really have any power over students in an anonymous grading system.” To me, that’s just willful ignorance of power differentials.
Yesterday’s Chronicle of Higher Education News Blog included this article detailing a lawsuit brought by students at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania against University administrators for, among other things, failing to investigate properly claims against a University VP.
Deans and directors, listen up. Looking the other way now means looking at a subpoena later.
-Bridget Crawford
Read this Op-Ed by Anber Raz of Equality Now in The Independent. Below is an excerpt:
More than 100 schools for girls have been torched or blasted by militants in the Swat valley and other tribal areas, where it is feared that as many as 100,000 girls may now be denied their basic right to an education.
The militants have warned all parents to remove their daughters from school or face direct attacks on the girls. Women have been told to wear the veil and not leave their homes unless accompanied by a male relative. The Pakistani government is said to have agreed the introduction of sharia law with the militants as an inducement to stop the fighting.
Government sanction of a parallel legal system used to deny the basic rights of women and girls, is both unconstitutional and unacceptable. Reports suggest that more than 70 Taliban courts are already operating in the region, handing down punishments that include flogging. With no indication of when girls’ schools in the region will reopen and with appeasement of the militants an apparent priority, the government claims to be doing all it can to restore law and order, but it seems to have excluded consideration of more than half its population.
Law and order is certainly something that would be very much welcomed by Mukhtar Mai. She was gang-raped in 2002 on the orders of an illegal tribal court in punishment for an alleged crime of her 12-year-old brother. She has still not won justice. …
Please contact the officials below urging them to ensure the rights of women and girls are protected and not sacrificed in order to appease militants in Swat and FATA.
President Asif Ali Zardari
President of Pakistan
President’s Secretariat
Islamabad, Pakistan
Mr Farooq Naik
Minister of Law, Justice and Human Rights
S Block Pakistan Secretariat
Islamabad
Pakistan
Mr Ameer Hussain Hoti
Chief Minister of North West Frontier Province
info@nwfp.gov.pk
Tel: +92- 92- 9211705
Please also send copies of your messages to the Speaker of the House of Parliament:
Dr Fehmida Mirza
Speaker, National Assembly of Pakistan
Parliament House
Islamabad, Pakistan
E-mail: speaker@na.gov.pk
Please keep Equality Now updated on your work and send copies of any replies you receive to:
info@equalitynow.org
A conference devoted to an interdisciplinary discussion of the legal and ethical issues posed by the new ways in which privacy can be invaded was convened at the University of Chicago Law School last November. You can watch streaming video of Larry Lessig’s keynote here.
The abstract:
In recent years, male law students at top-fifteen-ranked law schools have published nearly twice as many notes in their schools’ general-interest law reviews as have their female counterparts. Although this disparity is common to virtually every top-fifteen-ranked school, it has received little attention in the scholarly literature. This article therefore strives to start a conversation. The article shares data demonstrating a sex-based publishing discrepancy. It also shares the results of a survey the author conducted with law review editors at the top-fifteen-ranked law schools. The article then proposes a variety of explanations for the discrepancy, recognizing the complexity of the causal story. Finally, the article points out some implications of the discrepancy, for women, for law reviews, for law schools, and for scholarly legal discourse.
Abstract:
Women’s health is widely assumed to be a central consideration in reproductive rights cases. I examine court decisions relating to contraception, abortion and childbirth and demonstrate that while this assumption has historical validity, consideration of women’s reproductive health as a protectable interest is declining in reproductive health cases. This is being accomplished in significant part through application of one or both of two recurring devices.
First, judges regularly — and often inaccurately — cite the theoretical availability of alternative reproductive health services as proof that women’s health won’t suffer even if a law curtailing reproductive rights is upheld. I label this the “availability tool.” Second, when alternatives are not available, decisions blame women for the lack of availability. I call this the “culpability tool.” Application of the availability and culpability tools in reproductive health cases regularly results in a truncated analysis of how laws impact women’s reproductive health.
I show that while the availability and culpability tools can be applied in a manner that appropriately considers women’s health interests, in practice, the tools are often used incorrectly, and thus may contribute to the undervaluing of women’s health in reproductive health jurisprudence.
Available here for download.
Via Jezebel, where this post features many clips of falling models. Purportedly written by a model, some of the commentary is unsettlingly blase about the dangers of the featured shoes, and outright victim blamey in others, e.g. “People say she had been drinking backstage. My kind of girl.” But the author is spot on when she says about the clip below:
These guys, on the other hand, from the NBC local affiliate? They can eat shit and die. Kamila was trying her best to negotiate fashion’s highest heels : and a watering can filled with water (you can see it sloshing out onto the runway as she trips). Go to hell, snickering anchormen.
–Ann Bartow
“The first thing I’d do as president [to preserve abortion rights] is sign the Freedom of Choice Act. That’s the first thing that I’d do.” — Senator Barack Obama, speaking to the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, July 17, 2007
So why isn’t it on his desk? To read the 2007 version (110th Congress) go here.
–Ann Bartow
Law Prof Darren Hutchinson posted an essay with the above title here. In it he expresses concern that too much reflexive worship of Obama, and a paucity of critical scrutiny of the Obama administration by progressives will inhibit real political change.
I can’t pretend there is anything feminist or gender related about this, but, wow, a Bruce Springsteen Symposium!!!! More info here.
This song got me through some rough days in the early 1980s:
Maybe I should submit an abstract!
–Ann Bartow
The University of Denver Law Review is pleased to announce the release of a special symposium edition, “Obama Phenomena: Facets of a Historic Campaign.”Co-sponsored by the University of Denver Sturm College of Law and Suffolk University School of Law, the symposium brought together a diverse, inter-generational group of scholars to offer their views on President Barack Obama’s history-making campaign.
View the special symposium edition here. You will find links to the following articles:
Half-Full, Half-Empty? Asian American Electoral”Presence”in 2008 by Keith Aoki and Bob Chang
Race, Class, and The Obama Tax Plan, by Dorothy A. Brown
Hate Messages in Election 2008 Commercial Paraphernalia, by Jane Caputi
Retracing the Steps in a Historic Election, by Jeffrey M. Chemerinsky and Kimberly C. Kisabeth
Our First Unisex President?: Black Masculinity and Obama’s Feminine Side, by Frank Rudy Cooper
God-Talk in the Age of Obama: Theology and Religious Political Engagement, by Charlton Copeland
From Domain Names to Video Games: The Rise of the Internet in Presidential Politics, by Jacqueline Lipton
Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, and Michelle Obama: Performing Gender, Race, and Class on the Campaign Trail, by Ann C. McGinley
The Courts Under President Obama, by Scott Moss
Racial Paradox and Eclipse: Obama as Balm for What Ails Us, by Camille Nelson
Post-Racialism or Targeted Universalism?, by john a. powell
Barack Obama, Abraham Lincoln, and John Dewey, by Susan Schulten
A Cautionary Tale: The Obama Coalition, Anti-subordination Principles and Prop 8, by Catherine Smith and Jennifer Holladay
The First (Black) Lady, by Verna Williams
–Catherine Smith
On Friday, March 13, 2009, the UALR William H. Bowen School of Law will present the 2009 Ben J. Altheimer Symposium. This year’s topics is “Lawyering for Social Justice: Exploring the Roles of Immigration and GLBT Cause Lawyers.”
CLE credit is available. Registration (here) is free for students, nonlawyers, lawyers others not seeking CLE credits. The UALR Law Review membership invites all interested members of the public and profession to participate in our critical analysis of these civil rights issues.
Here’s the program:
8:00 a.m. Check-In with Coffee, Fruit, and Pastries
8:40 a.m. Welcome
John M.A. DiPippa, Interim Dean, UALR-Bowen School of Law
8:45 a.m. Introduction to Cause Lawyering
Bettina Brownstein, Partner, Wright, Lindsey & Jennings LLP
8:55 a.m. The Current Legal Issues in Immigration
Karla McKanders, Associate Professor of Law, University of Tennessee College of Law
Elise Shore, Regional Counsel, Mexican American Legal Defense Fund
Dr. Andre Guerrero, Director of Programs for Language Minority Students, Arkansas Department of Education
10:10 a.m. Break
10:20 a.m. Practical Guidance for Immigration Cause Lawyers
Misty Borkowski, Counsel, James, Carter & Coulter P.L.C
Guillermo Hernandez, Counsel,The Hernandez Law Firm, PLLC
Leonardo Monterrey, Counsel, The Monterrey Law Firm
Milton DeJesus, Law Offices of Milton DeJesus, PA
11:35 a.m. Lunch
12:15 p.m. Ethics Presentation:Ethical Dilemmas Arising in the Practice of Cause Lawyering
Bettina Brownstein, Partner, Wright, Lindsey & Jennings LLP
1:15 p.m. Break
1:25 p.m. The Current Legal Issues in the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Communities
Zachary Kramer, Assistant Professor of Law, Penn State Dickinson School of Law
Ilona Turner, Staff Attorney, National Center for Lesbian Rights
Abby Rubenfeld, Counsel, The Rubenfeld Law Office
David Ivers, Counsel, Mitchell, Blackstock, Barnes, Wagoner, Ivers, Sneddon PLLC
2:40 p.m. Break
2:50 p.m. Practical Guidance for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Cause Lawyers
Zachary Kramer, Assistant Professor of Law, Penn State Dickinson School of Law
Ilona Turner, Staff Attorney, National Center for Lesbian Rights
Abby Rubenfeld, Counsel, The Rubenfeld Law Office
David Ivers, Counsel, Mitchell, Blackstock, Barnes, Wagoner, Ivers, Sneddon PLLC
4:05 p.m. Closing
Looks like a great program! Kudos to the students at UALR for putting it together.
-Bridget Crawford
Brittan and Heide are two women, heavily victimized by AutoAdmit, who have been willing to stand and fight. An article about the AutoAdmit litigation called “Slimed Online” can be found here at Portfolio.com. Here is an excerpt:
Autoadmit, like innumerable other sites catering to a particular profession or community, is comparatively obscure. What makes it matter to the world at large is Google, which collects whatever AutoAdmit and millions of other websites make available and then spews the results out around the planet. A Google search is the new universal background check and is unfettered, unfiltered, and nearly impossible to appeal. But not to manipulate. To ensure that their calumnies topped the Google cache, AutoAdmit posters filed multiple slurs about both women:a practice known as Google bombing:to crowd out or shove down anything else.
Were Google and AutoAdmit newspapers or television stations, Heller and Iravani would have had a ready remedy: They could sue. Someone printing or airing falsehoods or statements likely to defame or cause extreme emotional distress couldn’t then simply walk away. But different rules apply to internet intermediaries: Websites like Google and AutoAdmit merely deliver content rather than producing it themselves. Just over a decade ago, seeking to encourage the free flow of information on the internet and itself under pressure from telecommunications companies, Congress passed legislation stating that such websites could not be sued for carrying defamatory material. The measure in question is Section 230(c) of what has surely become one of the most striking misnomers on the books: the Communications Decency Act of 1996.
As a result, two entirely different brands of discourse have developed. In the traditional media, things remain reasonably decorous. But online the promise of anonymity, though far flimsier than most suspect, unlocks something ugly and menacing in ostensibly normal people.
Here’s some of what the article reports happened to Heller:
The attacks against Brittan Heller began in the summer of 2005, after her graduation from Stanford.”Stupid Bitch to Attend Yale Law,”declared STANFORDtroll.”She will be part of the class of ’08, and her name is Brittan Heller.”The usual cyber-mauling ensued.”I’ll force myself on her, most definitely,”promised neoprag, who added,”I think I will sodomize her. Repeatedly.”To which stanfordtroll replied,”If you go after that, you’ll be in for a suprise [sic].”Then someone calling himself :D chimed in,”Just don’t fuck her, she has herpes.”
Seeking to have the inflammatory thread taken down, Heller turned to Google:in vain. Its policy is clearly stated on its website:”Google does not remove allegedly defamatory material from our search results. You will need to work directly with the webmaster of the page in question.”So, using a mix of humor, flattery, and steel, Heller contacted AutoAdmit.”While sometimes I can be stupid and sometimes I can be a bitch, I can only aspire to be both at once…since I’m just terrible at multitasking,”she joked in an email message to Cohen and Ciolli, adding,”I would like to get this settled quickly and not have to involve any outside legal authorities.”The implied threat irked Cohen, who by law didn’t have to do anything.”Sounds like a nut,”he wrote to Ciolli. Two days later, after hearing nothing, Heller wrote again.”Please remove the post, and if you’re willing, allow me to confront my slanderer,”she pleaded.
Again, she got no reply.
Here is some of what the article reports happened to Iravani:
Like Heller, Iravani had never heard of AutoAdmit. But she soon learned that she had been targeted and that it had popped up on Google. Iravani complained to the Yale administration but found little sympathy; one top administrator told her to tough it out and learn how to take criticism. (A spokeswoman for the school says,”We did everything in our power to assist them.”) But another Yale official, who knew that Heller … suggested Iravani contact her. Though they hadn’t known each other before (and still aren’t close), the two soon joined forces.
Iravani turned next to AutoAdmit. She complained that she couldn’t concentrate on her work, was now embarrassed to be seen in public, and had begun therapy.”I can’t tell you how much I would appreciate it if you would simply deactivate this thread and make my life go back to normal,”she pleaded in an email.”I am a nice person and don’t deserve this humiliation.”This time, Ciolli, who’d grown impatient with such complaints, snapped back in an AutoAdmit post, writing,”Do not contact me…to delete a thread, especially if I have no idea who you are and have never spoken to you in my entire life.”If he kept receiving similar requests, he warned, he would just post them all on the message board for everyone to see. The discussion about Iravani then metastasized, appearing on a website (which Cohen and Ciolli were not directly involved with) that linked to AutoAdmit called T14Talent. Without her knowledge, Iravani had been entered in a contest to name the”most appealing women”in the top 14 law schools in the country.
Read the whole thing here.
–Ann Bartow
Rather than simply publicizing the accomplishments of a group of women involved in technology, the website Fastcompany.com decided to compile a list of “The Most Influential Women in Web 2.0”
The list compilers now say they “inadvertently” set off a firestorm. Because for some reason folks writing about the tech industry never expected a ranking system that chose some successful women over others based on completely subjective criteria would be controversial. In addition, the site reports that “While some comments focused on the accomplishments of the women chosen, or suggested others we might have named, many were graphic, sexist, and nasty.” Another development that you would think would have been entirely predictable to anyone who knew her way around the Internets.
It’s great to recognize women who have succeeded in technology related fields. But this can be done without framing the enterprise as some kind of contest, where who is younger, hotter, richer, and most intriguingly paired romantically inevitably become part of the contested terrain. Women in technology deal with all that quite enough already.
–Ann Bartow
Kate Harding at Broadsheet wrote the first post about Nadya Suleman I’ve wanted to link to. The title of this post is her concluding sentence, and she speaks for me on this too.
–Ann Bartow
World Pulse, a global media organization covering world issues through the eyes of women, has announced a call for applications for Voices of Our Future, a new international women’s correspondent network.
World Pulse publishes a print and electronic magazine and hosts a social networking site called PulseWire, connecting women on the ground from around the world. Currently, women from over 90 countries are sharing their stories on the site.
For the Voices of Our Future network, World Pulse will choose up to 30 applicants among grassroots women who are beginning to use new media to speak for themselves to the world, transform their communities and change their own lives.
After a month-long open application process, where applicants engage actively in dynamic dialogue on PulseWire, the selected correspondents will embark on a four-month programme that includes training in ‘Web 2.0′ and citizen journalism by specialists including APC Women’s Networking Support Programme, mentoring sessions by certified coaches from the Empowerment Institute, and publication in World Pulse magazines.
At the end of the programme, three of the top correspondents will receive the Voices of Our Future Award and an all-expenses-paid trip to attend awards ceremonies in the United States. Additionally, one correspondent will receive a full scholarship to the Empowerment Institute Certification Program starting in January 2010.
To apply, join the Voices of Our Future Group on PulseWire by 14 March 2009.
So says the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, in a new report that is available here. A press release providing an overview of the report can be found here.
So Yankees star Alex Rodriguez has admitted to taking performance-enhancing drugs (ESPN story here). The news “tarnishes an entire era” in Major League Baseball, as President Obama commented, but is anyone really surprised? I wasn’t. Ho-hum.
One aspect of Rodriguez’s admission that did interest me was his explanation of why he took the drugs:
“When I arrived in Texas [to play with the Rangers] in 2001, I felt an enormous amount of pressure. I felt like I had all the weight of the world on top of me and I needed to perform, and perform at a high level every day,” Rodriguez told ESPN’s Peter Gammons in an exclusive interview in Miami Beach, Fla.
This pressure, this needing to “perfom” strikes me as not entirely different from the reason that some women get breasts implants. They feel pressure to look a certain way, to conform to the pornified expectation for how women should look. In reviewing the book Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds for the online supplement to n+1, Molly Young describes how pictures in the magazine have changed over time: “Things go downhill in the 1980s as breast implants became popular: the new boobs are globe-like and tactile only in the way that bowling balls are tactile. Some of them cast a glare, like cartoon balloons.”
Ok, so A-Rod got paid for his (enhanced) performance and yet claimed for years that he was clean. That is dishonest, deceptive, unfair to others who did not take steroids. Women who get unnaturally-sized breast implants are “paid,” too — with male attention, with male approval, with (however tenuous) attachment to men who value the woman’s conformation to the “cartoon balloon” vision for women’s bodies.
This being said, I don’t disparage women who have or want breast implants. If a woman makes a knowing choice about the health risks of implants, I’ll embrace the fetishized “choice” rhetoric and support her choice. I’ll refrain from any theoretical two-step alleging false consciousness. I don’t believe any of us ever make “pure” decisions, BTW, and I don’t want to participate in any feminist litmus-testing (which I reject as devisive).
What makes women with purely elective, cosmetic-only breast implants different from Alex Rodriguez is that they (usually) don’t pretend to be “clean,” or unenhanced.
-Bridget Crawford
From the Feminist Daily News:
At a meeting late last week, members of the United Nations Human Rights Council urged Saudi Arabia to actively work to end pervasive human rights violations in the country, particularly those against women and children. According to Reuters, Britain, Switzerland, Canada, and Israel spoke against Saudi Arabia’s current practices. Israel’s delegation reportedly accused Saudi Arabia of “severe discrimination against women and minorities, corporal punishment, torture, forced labor, and the sexual exploitation of children.”
Women’s rights in Saudi Arabia are currently limited on a number of fronts including marriage rights, freedom to travel, property ownership, education, and work. According to Human Rights Watch, although some human rights laws have been introduced in Saudi Arabia, little implementation or enforcement of these laws has occurred.
Short ABA Law Journal story here. At South Carolina we have, unfortunately, been ahead of the curve on this. Salaries have been frozen, hiring has stopped, adjuncts have been laid off, and travel money has been eliminated for tenured professors, while untenured folks receive only a small travel stipend. Our library has had to reduce its acquisitions substantially, which is problematic not only for our law school community but for people all over the state, as it is the only public law library in South Carolina. So far no furloughs, but that remains an exigent possibility. All this is hard on the students as well as the faculty and staff.
–Ann Bartow
