Gender and the Law Blog

History of The Men's Rights Movement and American Politics, 1960-2005

 Theresa M. Iker, Before the Red Pill: The Men's Rights Movement and American Politics, 1960-2005, Stanford Dep't of History, PhD Dissertation (2023).

"Before the Red Pill" [reference to "The Matrix"] traces the American men's rights movement (MRM) from its roots in the early 1960s to its growing influence in mainstream national politics by the early 2000s. Examining both MRM leadership efforts and grassroots organizing across the United States, this dissertation utilizes organizational papers, activist correspondence, oral histories, movement newsletters, advice literature and memoirs, and mainstream press coverage.

The dissertation reveals the complex dynamics of gender, race, and politics in the growth of the MRM. The experience of divorce radicalized men's rights activists, who began organizing in the 1960s to reform family law. Rather than a mere backlash against feminism, men's rights thinkers adapted some of their most important insights and strategies from second-wave feminists throughout the 1970s, before becoming militantly misogynistic by the 1990s. Both conservative women intellectuals and second wives of divorced men's rights activists played critical roles during this era, softening the movement's public image and aiding in the development of a fathers' rights sub-movement devoted to child custody and support reforms. Overwhelmingly white themselves, men's rights thinkers made selective allusions to race to compare their politics to the Black freedom struggle, yet they distanced themselves from potential Black members amid the racialized politics of the 1980s and 1990s.

By the turn of the twenty-first century, men's rights activists devoted themselves to undermining feminist organizing against rape, domestic violence, and sexual harassment while claiming that men, rather than women, were the true victims of gendered violence. The simultaneous intensification of antifeminist and anti-state sentiments among activists pushed the movement further rightward into conservative partisan politics. Understanding the men's rights movement helps explain the emotive roles of masculinity, grievance, and entitlement in mobilizing the far Right base and maintaining persistent inequalities in the contemporary United States.

Conference: Abortion in American History

Conference, Abortion in American History: Intimate Decisions, Medical Knowledge, and Legal Decrees in the Two Centuries Before Roe v. Wade

This conference brings together leading scholars to explore the multifaceted history of abortion in 19th- and 20th-century America. Building on the Longo Collection in Reproductive Biology, this conference will explore the underlying history that can deepen public understanding of the controversial politics of abortion law.

New academic research on abortion history has surged in recent years, spurred by the lead-up to the Dobbs decision in 2022. Dobbs arrived at a time when a solid court majority professed reliance on originalism, a form of legal analysis that uses constitutional history and its presumed original meaning as the basis for court decisions. Historians have been busy presenting amicus briefs, both in Dobbs and in a continuing flurry of state court cases since the ruling returned abortion law to the states. Accurately understanding both legal and reproductive history has never been more important.

 

CFP International Society of Family Law: Family Law in an Age of Political Contestation

International Society of Family Law – North American Regional Conference
Family Law in an Age of Political Contestation

Philadelphia, June 16, 2025

CALL FOR PAPERS

The ISFL North American Regional Conference will take place at the Temple University Beasley School of Law in Philadelphia on June 16, 2025. The theme of the conference is "Family Law in an Age of Political Contestation."

We encourage papers that approach family law from the lens of critical theory, intersectional analysis, abolitionism, and/or law and economic inequality. We especially welcome proposals that focus on the impact of the current political moment on families who are vulnerable or otherwise marginalized due to their members' identities (LGBTQIA+, immigration status, race, disability, income status, for example).

Please submit abstracts of maximum 1000 words here. When doing so, please also include your current position and institutional affiliation. The deadline for submissions is February 1, 2025. We will notify those whose papers have been selected shortly thereafter.

You are also invited to attend without giving a paper. If you wish to do so, please check the box next to the "Attend, but not present scholarship" option at the submission website. If you are interested in serving as a moderator or commentator on a panel, please register for the conference and check the appropriate box on the submission form by February 1, 2025.  

There may be a modest registration fee (no more than $30). Unfortunately, we cannot offer any financial support for our speakers, but we nevertheless hope that we will be able to welcome you in Philadelphia in June 2025. Please email [email protected] with any questions.

Conveners:

Prof. Sarah Katz (Temple University School of Law)
Prof. Dara Purvis (Temple University School of Law)
Dean Rachel Rebouche (Temple University School of Law)
Prof. Emily Stolzenberg (Villanova University School of Law)

"Reproductive Justice: Where Do We Go From Here?" Event on Dec. 10

The CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy is hosting an event on December 10th at 5:00 with a virtual livestream option. The event is titled Reproductive Justice: Where Do We Go From Here?. The event is described below: 

Join us for a special panel discussion that brings together reproductive justice advocates to explore the reproductive justice impacts of the recent election, the implications of policy changes to reproductive justice, and how to build momentum and strategic solutions to protect the right to health.

The moderator is Abigail E. Disney, Director, The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales. The speakers are Regina Davis Moss, President & CEO, In Our Own Voice, Terry McGovern, Senior Associate Dean for Academic and Student Affairs, CUNY SPH, Dázon Dixon Diallo, Founder & President, SisterLove, Inc, and Isabella Villa Real Seabra, MPH Student & Reproductive Justice Organizer, CUNY SPH.

Dellinger and Pell on "The Criminalization of Abortion and Surveillance of Women in a Post-Dobbs World"

Jolynn Dellinger and Stephanie Pell have published "Bodies of Evidence: The Criminalization of Abortion and Surveillance of Women in a Post-Dobbs World" in volume 19 Duke Journal of Constitutional Law & Public Policy 1-108 (2024). The abstract is excerpted below.

In the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, state laws criminalizing abortion raise concerns about the investigation and prosecution of women seeking reproductive health care and about the surveillance such investigations will entail. The criminalization of abortion is not new, and the investigation of abortion crimes has always involved the surveillance of women. However, state statutes criminalizing abortion coupled with surveillance methods and technologies that did not exist pre-Roe present new and complex challenges surrounding the protection of women's privacy and liberty interests—in addition to the interests of those who may provide or help pregnant people obtain reproductive care. Accordingly, surveillance, investigation, and the possibility of prosecution create new and more extensive privacy concerns than those traditionally associated with the right to decide whether to have an abortion.

What is also new and disruptive is the existence of medication abortion, which was not available pre-Roe. Medication abortion functionally allows people to self-manage abortions safely in the privacy of their own homes, and its availability undermines the efficacy of bans that target providers, aiders, and abettors. How states apply statutes that criminalize abortion and investigate "abortion crimes" in the context of new opportunities for safe, self-managed abortions will play out over time. This article, taking lessons about the surveillance of women from the pre-Roe era of abortion criminalization, is the first to evaluate new and existing laws criminalizing abortion post-Dobbs and consider how modern technologies directed toward the investigation of individuals self-managing abortions through medication will magnify the pervasiveness, scale, and harm of such surveillance.

Gender-Affirming Care and Children's Liberty

Dara Purvis, Gender-Affirming Care and Children's Liberty, 15 ConLawNOW 155 (2024).

This essay addresses the wave of statutes banning gender-affirming care for transgender and gender-diverse minors passed in states across the country over the last three years. It argues that an underdeveloped understanding of children’s rights makes it more difficult to explain how harmful gender-affirming care bans are and to challenge them in court. After explaining the nature of gender-affirming care, the essay discusses the grounds underlying existing challenges to gender-affirming care bans, highlighting the emphasis on equal protection and parental rights. It concludes by reframing the children’s liberty argument and exploring what the broader consequences of courts recognizing such a right would be

Previous Gender Law Blog Posts on Skrmetti Case on Transgender Rights, Being Argued Today at SCOTUS

Oral arguments are here:

Prior posts on the Gender Law Blog are here:

Marc Spindelman, Trans Sex Equality Rights After Dobbs

Deborah Brake, Why State Laws Banning Transgender Athletes are Unconstitutional

Sixth Circuit Decision Upholding Ban on Gender-affirming Care for Minors is a Monumental LGBTQ-rights Case Headed to SCOTUS

Katie Eyer, Anti-Transgender Constitutional Law

Leah Litman reviews Jessica Clarke, JOTWELL, Reviewing Sex Discrimination Formalism

 

First Known Transgender Attorney Argues Before Supreme Court in Transgender Rights Case

Chase Strangio: First Known Transgender Attorney Argues Before Supreme Court

Strangio, an attorney for the ACLU, is set to make history Wednesday as the first known transgender person to argue before the US Supreme Court. And he’ll do it as part of the most high-profile dispute on the docket this session.

The case, US v. Skrmetti, challenges a Tennessee law that bans treatments, including hormone therapy and puberty blockers, for transgender minors and imposes civil penalties on doctors who violate the prohibitions. Some two dozen similar laws have been enacted in recent years in Republican-led states.***

For Strangio, the professional path that’s led to this moment – in which he’ll have 15 minutes to present his argument to the justices – cannot be unwoven from his life outside the courtroom.

“It is not lost on me that I will be standing there at the lectern at the Supreme Court in part because I was able to have access to the medical care that is the very subject of the case that we’re litigating,” he said recently.***

If the weight of so much collective anxiety and expectation is taking a toll on Strangio, it doesn’t show. Below his slightly mussed hair, the 42-year-old’s clear blue eyes were sharp and determined as he spoke with CNN last month.

Much of his stoicism, Strangio admits, comes from being remarkably good at compartmentalizing. But he doesn’t expect it to last.

“I’ll probably have a nervous breakdown on December 5,” the day after he argues before the court, he quips.

For now, he’s laser-focused on putting forward the best legal argument he can, driven by a visceral understanding of just how much is at stake.

Legislation Tracker, Anti-Trans Bills

Anti-Trans Bill Tracker

Trans Legislation Tracker is an independent research organization tracking bills that impact trans and gender-diverse people across the United States. We support academics and journalists with data and make tools that help the public follow and engage with legislation. Our growing set of resources help people understand the broader story of trans legal rights in the U.S.

Ohio Seeks to Enforce Abortion Law Despite Reproductive Freedom Amendment

Ohio Capital Journal, Ohio Attorney General Appeals Decision that Struck Down State’s Six-Week Abortion Ban

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost will appeal a Hamilton County court’s decision to strike down the state’s six-week abortion ban with no exceptions for rape or incest that was put into effect for several months after Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022.

Yost, along with Ohio Department of Health director Bruce Vanderhoff and the State Medical Board of Ohio’s Kim Rothermel and Bruce Saferin, were listed in the notice of appeal filed this week in the 1st District Court of Appeals. The 1st District is the appellate court that oversees Hamilton County.

The state attorney general is appealing Hamilton County Judge Christian Jenkins’ decision in October which struck down a 2019 law that banned abortions after six weeks gestation, a time at which supporters of the law said fetal cardiac activity could be detected.

Reuters, Ohio Seeks to Revive Parts of Abortion Law Despite Amendment

 Ohio's Republican attorney general is seeking to revive some restrictions on abortion that were struck down after voters adopted an abortion rights amendment to the state constitution.

 

A state court judge last month ruled that a Republican—backed law banning most abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected, or about six weeks, could not be enforced thanks to the 2023 amendment in response to a lawsuit by Planned Parenthood and other groups.

 

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost acknowledged in defending against the lawsuit that the abortion ban itself could not be enforced. However, he argued that other parts of the law — including requirements to have doctors check for fetal heartbeats before performing abortions, inform patients seeking abortions when their fetuses are viable and have patients wait 24 hours after seeing a doctor before undergoing an abortion — were still valid because they did not conflict with the amendment.

 

Ohio Statehouse News, AG Yost Appeals Ruling that Ohio Six-Week Abortion Ban is Unconstitutional

 

The fight over Ohio’s six-week abortion ban, one of the strictest in the country, continues in court.

Republican Attorney General Dave Yost has appealed a judge’s decision striking down that ban after last year’s approval of Issue 1, a constitutional amendment protecting access to abortion. The six-week ban, which does not include exceptions for rape or incest, went into effect after the US Supreme Court overturned the right to abortion in June 2022. Enforcement of the ban was blocked in October 2022 after abortion providers sued.

Yost said before last fall’s vote to guarantee abortion and reproductive rights in the constitution that the six-week ban would not exist if the amendment were approved. But he’s since suggested that provisions requiring an ultrasound and distribution of information also in the law, which passed in 2019 as Senate Bill 23, could still stand even after the amendment’s approval.

New Book, "Give Her Credit" and the Untold Story of a Women's Bank

Grace L. Williams, Give Her Credit: The Untold Account of a Women's Bank That Empowered a Generation

The galvanizing true story of a group of remarkable women in the 1970s male-run world of business, banking, and finance. They didn’t play by the rules. They changed them and made history.

In the 1970s, a new wave of feminism was sweeping America. But in the boys’ club of banking and finance, women were still infantilized—no credit without a male cosigner, and their income was dismissed as unreliable. If bankers weren’t going to accommodate women, then women had to take control of their own futures. In 1978 in Denver, Colorado, the opening of the Women’s Bank changed everything.

It was helmed by bank officer B. LaRae Orullian and the brainchild of whip-smart entrepreneur Carol Green, who forged a groundbreaking path with their headstrong colleagues, among them: Judi Foster, investment research whiz; Edna Mosley, unyielding civil rights advocate with the NAACP; Mary Roebling, renowned financial executive; Betty Freedman, a socialite and fundraiser; and Gail Schoettler, a formidable Denver mover and shaker for social justice. Coming together and facing their own unique road to revolution, they built the most successful female-run bank in the nation. It wasn’t easy.

Give Her Credit follows the challenges, uphill battles, and achievements of some of the enterprising women of Denver who broke boundaries, inspired millions, and afforded opportunities for every marginalized citizen in the country. It’s about time their untold story was told.

Sara Colangelo on "Bridging Silos: Environmental and Reproductive Justice in the Climate Crisis"

Sara Colangelo has published "Bridging Silos: Environmental and Reproductive Justice in the Climate Crisis" in Volume 112 of the California Law Review 1255 (2024). The abstract is excerpted here: 

The climate crisis is a perilous yet underexamined example of the intersection of environmental injustice and reproductive injustice. The physical manifestations of the climate crisis affect key elements of reproductive justice: women’s rights to have children, to not have children, and to parent children in healthy, sustainable communities. Reams of studies document climate disaster-driven gender violence, loss of access to healthcare and reproductive services, as well as direct and deadly health effects of climate change on maternal health, fetal development, infants, and children. Despite these profound impacts, the environmental and reproductive justice movements remain largely siloed, particularly in the legal community.

This Article makes two interventions into existing legal scholarship. First, the Article identifies an intersectional nexus of hazard between environmental and reproductive justice, which is especially acute for women of color living in under-resourced communities. It argues that environmental injustices in the context of the climate crisis undermine reproductive justice. Second, the Article explores how the movements can align strands of their advocacy and suggests how advocates can leverage various legal and policy strategies to mitigate these intersectional injustices. It argues for a ground-up approach based on community power-building and interdisciplinary cooperation, which can inform legal and policy solutions at scale. Collective action to foster health and dignity has never been more urgent, as climate change harms escalate, maternal health deteriorates, and the Supreme Court issues decisions shredding reproductive autonomy and circumscribing environmental regulatory authority.

New Book on "Childbirth in Capitalism"

Anna Fielder has published a new book titled "Going Into Labour: Childbirth in Capitalism." It is available for purchase here. The summary is below. 

Childbirth is often described as a natural process, and yet the choices we make around birth, the risks we face and the care available to us, are tightly bound up in the dynamics of the capitalist system in which we live. Capitalist relations shape childbirth in unacknowledged ways but with intensely inequitable, often traumatic, effects.

Going into Labour is a Marxist analysis of the labour of childbirth and birth care. Former midwife Anna Fielder interrogates key features of contemporary childbearing, situating birth as a crucial site of struggle against capitalism.

Fielder emphasizes the pay and working conditions of birth workers such as midwives and nurses. She also signals the importance of political struggles in birthing arenas against forces including racism, colonialism, misogyny and cisheteronormativity. As capitalism draws on these forces, shaping contemporary inequities and oppressions, activists work to gestate futures that aspire beyond the constraints of the present.

CFP, Queer Constitutional History, Journal of American Constitutional History

Call for Papers

Journal of American Constitutional History

"Queer Constitutional History" 

Professors Felicia Kornbluh and Marie-Amélie George, guest editors

 We invite scholars in history, law, and related fields to submit articles for a symposium issue of the Journal of American Constitutional History on "U.S. Queer Constitutional History," to be edited by Professors Felicia Kornbluh and Marie-Amélie George, in consultation with journal editor David Schwartz.  We plan to publish the symposium issue in 2025 to coincide with 10^th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Obergefell v. Hodges. At the time the Court issued the Obergefell decision, the opinion appeared to settle specific questions about the legal and constitutional status of marriages between people of the same sex and broader questions about the constitutionality of formal discrimination against gays and lesbians. Since then, the Supreme Court has issued decisions challenging established sexual-liberty jurisprudence, including Justice Thomas' concurrence in Dobbs v. Jackson (2022), which promised a reconsideration of the whole "substantive due process" tradition.

We invite essays on the queer constitutional history that gave rise to the Obergefell decision-including events outside of the realms of marriage, family law, or U.S. constitutional law-as well as the place of marriage equality within the Court's broader sexual liberty jurisprudence.  We welcome contributions on the evolution of marriage equality, queer parenting, and sexual privacy rights under the U.S. Constitution, as well as related topics. For example, submissions might examine how and why these rights became recognized, their doctrinal underpinnings, the gaps that exist in Constitutional jurisprudence, and the relationship between queer Constitutional rights and the Court's decisions in related fields.

We hope to publish a broad array of perspectives on these topics, to help inform scholarship on queer legal history and U.S. Constitutional history, as well as studies of legal institutions more generally. For that reason, this symposium issue takes an expansive approach to all of its terms: "U.S." extends beyond the mainland to include American territories and the country's diplomatic and international relations; we take "Queer" to mean research on gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, nonbinary, or asexual people, or otherwise relating to nonnormative and stigmatized gendered and sexualized phenomena; "Constitutional" refers to questions that have been considered in U.S. constitutional courts, as well as related questions that have preceded or transcended them, and matters of state-level and not national constitutional adjudication; and "History" means the study of the past, but not necessarily the deep or distant past, and in this case cannot help but look over its shoulder to connections with contemporary issues.

Abstracts are due February 1, 2025. Please submit them by email to Felicia Kornbluh ([email protected]) and Marie-Amélie George ([email protected]). Authors of selected articles will be notified by March 1, 2025. Drafts, which should range from 5,000 to 10,000 words, will be due July 1, 2025 for submission to peer reviewers. Final versions of the articles will be due September 1, 2025. The guest editors may propose a half-day conference to immediately proceed the American Society for Legal History's annual meeting in 2025. Contributors to this symposium issue would be invited, but not required, to participate

Millennial Women Lawyers Demand Work-Life Balance

Anna Stolley Persky, Millennials Demand Work-Life Balance More Than Their Predecessors, But Challenges Remain, ABA J. (Dec. 1, 2024)

 

Giugi Carminati, 41, had the first of her four children when she was 24 and attending the University of Houston Law Center. As Carminati began practicing law in Houston, she and her husband thought they could have it all. Carminati figured she would put her children in day care and continue working her way up to partner.

 

But child care costs for four children were “crippling,” Carminati says. She estimates that the cost of an au pair, who had a limited work schedule, along with things like after-school care, summer-care costs and overnight-sitter fees when Carminati traveled, worked out to $45,000 annually. Her husband, a physician, had little flexibility in his schedule.

 

“It was unlivable to be expected to operate as an attorney with long and unpredictable hours and travel,” says Carminati, who is part of the millennial generation born between *38 1981 and 1996. She eventually left private practice and started working in-house in 2022. Her schedule allows her to work remotely--including on a sailboat in the summer.

 

Millennials tend to emphasize a healthy work-life balance when choosing employers, according to the Deloitte Global 2024 Gen Z and Millennial Survey. That includes members of the generation like Carminati, who are lawyers with young children. Also, various reports say the profession, known for long work hours and high-pressure environments, is still difficult for many women with parenting responsibilities: Like generations before them, they often cobble together child care with a mix of nannies, babysitters, day care settings and assistance from relatives.

 

According to the 2023 ABA study Legal Careers of Parents and Child Caregivers: Results and Best Practices from a National Study of the Profession, 61% of the mothers surveyed said they experienced demeaning comments about being a working parent, compared with 26% of fathers. The study, sponsored by the ABA Commission on Women in the Profession, also found that 65% of the mothers interviewed were responsible for arranging child care, versus 7% of the fathers.

 

But a growing number of young lawyers are pushing back, according to attorneys and legal recruiters interviewed by the ABA Journal.

 

Money matters

 

“The millennial generation is less tolerant of the kind of sexism that many women for many generations just put up with as they tried to assimilate into the workforce,” says Tracy A. Thomas, the Seiberling Chair of Constitutional Law at the University of Akron School of Law.

 

And law firms have responded accordingly. Law firms of all sizes increasingly are offering hybrid work schedules, for example. In addition, there is less need for extensive travel due to online depositions and hearings, says Thomas, 59.

 

Millennials, she adds, are also more willing than prior generations to switch jobs to achieve a work environment that fits their needs. However, they can “run up against a wall” with billable hours.

 

Many law firms ask associates to bill 2,000 hours or more annually, but lowering that requirement to 1,800 could help attorneys have more work-life balance, Law.com reported in 2023. But the lower number could also reduce law firm profits up to 20%, according to the article.

 

“There's still a generational disconnect and friction between younger lawyers and leaders in law firms and the industry,” says Thomas, who studies gender and the law. “So long as the ideal worker is the person who works the most billable hours and firms still reward those lawyers with promotions, the choices set up for the younger generation, and particularly working mothers, are limited.”

 

In some ways, millennials also have options that weren't available to older generations, thanks to a changing work environment and the shift to remote work during the coronavirus pandemic. Sabrina Sacks Mann, 55, a Philadelphia legal recruiter, has noticed that the millennial generation will push for legal careers that fit their needs, with an emphasis on time with family.

 

“They are more likely to question the status quo,” says Mann, who has helped arrange the lateral placement of attorneys in law firms and corporations since 2002.

 

But Joanna Grossman, 56, a professor at Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law in Dallas, says the legal profession is still resistant to real structural change.

 

“Millennials have a healthier view of work-life balance, and it would be better for the legal industry if people in law firms worked fewer hours, but in the end, profit is king,” says Grossman, the inaugural Ellen K. Solender Endowed Chair in Women and the Law. “The typical law firm model is not compatible for people who have substantial child care or nonwork responsibilities.”

New Book on the History of Abortion Pills

Carrie N. Baker has a new book forthcoming in December 2024 on the history of abortion pills in the United States. The book summary is here. It is available open-source here:  

This is the first book to offer a comprehensive history of abortion pills in the United States. Public intellectual and lawyer Carrie N. Baker shows how courageous activists waged a decades-long campaign to establish, expand, and maintain access to abortion pills. Weaving their voices throughout her book, Baker recounts both dramatic and everyday acts of their resistance. These activists battled anti-abortion forces, overly cautious policymakers, medical gatekeepers, and fearful allies in their four-decade-long fight to free abortion pills. In post-Roe America, abortion pills are currently playing a critically important role in providing safe abortion access to tens of thousands of people living in states that now ban and restrict abortion. Understanding this struggle will help to ensure continued access into the future.

Peleg on "Conversion Therapy and Children's Rights"

Noam Peleg has published Conversion Therapy and Children's Rights on SSRN. The abstract is excerpted below:

Conversion therapy is an umbrella term used to describe a range of practices that have one goal: making LGBTQ + children straight and/or cis-gendered. When it comes to children, conversion therapy is offered by adults to other adults, primarily parents, with the promise to transform children' s sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expressions. As the recipients of these practices, children are usually, but not always, coerced to attend these so-called therapeutic sessions by their parents. Conversion therapy has been subject to extensive debates in law and policy over the last couple of years, with some countries banning all, or some forms, of these practices, while others have stopped short of regulating it. Most, if not all, of the discussions about the legality of these practices centre on adults, their rights and interests, whether it is human or civil rights frameworks, such as discussing parents or providers right to religious freedom or to free speech, or their legal positionalities under other bodies of the law such as tort law, to name one example. But while children are victimized by  conversion therapy, their rights and interests are oft en overlooked and forgotten, let alone being front and centre of the discussion about the legality of these practices. This chapter seeks to centre children in the discussions about the legality of  conversion therapy  by taking a child-centred approach to analyze conversion therapy from a children's rights.

Hernández-Truyol on "Who's Afraid of Being WOKE?"

Berta Esparanza Hernández-Truyol has published Who's Afraid of Being WOKE? – Critical Theory as Awakening to Erascism and Other Injustices in 1 J. Critical Race and Ethnic Studies 19. The abstract of this essay is excerpted below:  

This Essay critically analyzes the “anti-woke” message deployed by the Conservative Political Action Conference’s (CPAC) 2023 annual meeting’s poster—the suggestion that awake is good and its synonym woke is bad—with the goal of establishing the importance of CRT in general and in education more specifically. This work shows how critical theories are key to deconstructing disingenuous messaging about the meaning of words, theoretical constructs, and historical realities.

The Work first elucidates that the meaning of awake, as utilized in myriad fields, addresses the concept of consciousness—awareness of injustices in society. Second, the Essay historicizes the origins and uses of the word woke to emphasize that it, indeed, is synonymous with awake. Following, it traces the development of critical thinking in law to establish the value and importance of critical approaches in analyzing language as well as in scrutinizing social (the family, educational and religious) institutions. The Work also shows how invaluable critical thinking is to unearthing legal structures’ often-skewed foundational values and thereby promoting a deeper understanding of constitutional values such as equality. Next, the work exposes critical analysis as a necessary precondition to the attainment of justice by utilizing the tools of CRT to unveil the intentional distortion of the meaning of woke as part of the strategy to entrench, maintain, and reify the status quo and marginalize, if not erase, difference—particularly racial, ethnic, and sexual hierarchies.

The Essay concludes that the attack on woke effectively is an erascist assault on African American language, values, and history. As such it is a symbol of the quest to perpetuate the status quo; an attempt to expunge the difficult truth of the country’s history on race unearthed by theoretical movements such as CRT’s unveiling of the racialized foundations of social institutions including law and the legal system. Erascism erasing uncomfortable racial and other social truths—appears to be the goal of the anti-wokeness fervor.

Indigent Defense and Gender

Andrew Davies & Evangeline Bulick, Indigent Defense and Gender, The Sage Encyclopedia of Crime and Gender (Janet P. Stamatel ed., Forthcoming)

In the United States, any defendant facing the possibility of incarceration has the right to be represented by an appointed lawyer if they can’t afford to hire one privately (Argersinger v. Hamlin, 1972; Gideon v. Wainwright, 1963). “Indigent defense” is the name given to this mandate and the systems that provide such lawyers. “Public defenders” and “appointed counsel” are terms for lawyers engaged in that work.

Scholars have examined indigent defense practice through the lens of gender in both historical and contemporary contexts. In this article, we first review work describing the role of women reformers in the visioning and creation of the earliest indigent defense systems in the late nineteenth century. Second, we describe statistical evidence on lawyers’ gender in the contemporary indigent defense profession. Third, we review scholarship on gender in the practice of indigent defense. We give special emphasis to feminist scholarship on women indigent defense lawyers appointed to represent people accused of sex offenses. Though sparse, we highlight evidence on intersectional and non-binary gender identities where it is available.

Feminist Philosophies of Copyright and Gender and the Politics of Proof

Carys J. Craig, Copyright and Gender: Feminist Philosophies and the Politics of Proof, forthcoming in Jessica Lai & Kathy Bowrey, A Research Agenda for Intellectual Property and Gender (Edward Elgar, 2025)

This chapter considers copyright and gender through a critical feminist frame. Part 1 surveys some feminist philosophical insights into copyright law's subject matter (original, fixed expression) and its protagonist (the independent rights-bearing author). It explains that core elements of the copyright system thereby encode a masculinist understanding of both creativity and selfhood. Part 2 turns to the matter of proof, pointing to a growing body of evidence that seeks to demonstrate the gendered nature and implications of copyright law. While acknowledging its political and persuasive potential, this chapter problematises the empirical turn in copyright and gender research and policymaking. It cautions that a focus on measuring inequality and quantifying gender disparities could undermine the more fundamental and transformational project of unsettling the copyright status quo. Ultimately, it concludes that the feminist copyright agenda should remain centred around the radical critique of a system that produces inequality and exclusion by design.