Gender and the Law Prof Blog

Extending Voluntary Acknowledgements of Parentage to Female Same-Sex Partners

Jessica Feinberg, A Logical Step Forward: Extending Voluntary Acknowledgments of Parentage to Female Same-Sex Couples, 30 Yale J. Law & Feminism 97 (2018)  

Under current law, stark differences exist between different- and same-sex couples who welcome children into the world with regard to the ease through which the member of the couple who did not give birth to the child is able to obtain legal parent status. While a number of simple, efficient procedures exist for establishing legal parentage for different-sex partners of women who give birth, same-sex partners of women who give birth often have to go through significantly more complex, time-consuming, and expensive procedures in order to establish legal parentage. The inequitable treatment of same-sex couples in establishing legal parentage has extremely harmful consequences for these couples and their children, and legal reform to address the unfair treatment of same-sex parents is long overdue. The hesitation to extend to same-sex couples the simple, efficient methods of establishing legal parent status available to different-sex couples likely stems from the longstanding tie between genetic connections and the establishment of legal parentage. While the law’s historical privileging of genetic connections in parentage determinations poses some challenges for same-sex couples in obtaining access to the simple, efficient methods of establishing legal parentage in existence today, these challenges are far from insurmountable. This Article sets forth a comprehensive proposal for the federal government to require states to extend voluntary acknowledgments of parentage, which currently allow a birth mother’s different-sex partner to establish paternity through the execution of a document at the time of the child’s birth, to female same-sex couples who conceive children using sperm provided in compliance with state donor non-paternity laws. The proposal represents a logical, modest step in the right direction for ameliorating the difficulties faced by same-sex parents in obtaining legal parentage without requiring significant upheaval to state laws governing the rights of genetic parents or federal laws governing voluntary acknowledgments of parentage.

A New Model of Feminist Relational Contract Theory

Sharon Thompson, Feminist Relational Contract Theory: A New Model for Family Property Agreements, 45 J. Law & Society 617 (2018)

In this article, a new model named Feminist Relational Contract Theory (FRCT) is explained, justified, and applied to the context of family property agreements and specifically nuptial agreements. Most nuptial agreements are created amidst a complex web of power relationships and the dynamic of these relationships often evolves over time. However, the courts in England and Wales have not yet found a way to recognize this without adopting a paternalistic approach. This article proposes an alternative that could, in practice, recognize issues of power between parties entering family property agreements, exploring a recent Australian case on nuptial agreements which adopts a more contextual understanding of contract law.

The Gendered Impact of the Incapacitation Rationale for Incarceration

Priscilla Ocen, Incapacitating Motherhood, 51 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 2191 (2018)

 Incapacitation, the removal of dangerous people from society, is one of the most significant penal rationales in the United States. Mass incarceration emerged as one of the most striking applications of this theory, as policymakers shifted from rehabilitative efforts toward incapacitation in jails and prisons across the country. Women have been uniquely devastated by this shift toward incapacitation. Indeed, the United States is home to the largest and fastest growing women’s prison population in the world. Of the women incarcerated in jails and prisons, nearly seventy percent were the primary caretakers of small children at the time of their arrest and approximately eighty percent are of reproductive age. Notwithstanding these alarming trends, the gendered dimensions of incapacitation have largely been underexplored in the scholarly literature. Rather, women’s incarceration has been theorized as an unintended consequence of the punitiveness directed toward Black men.

This Article aims to bridge this discursive gap by highlighting the specific ways in which incapacitation has been used as a means to regulate the bodies and reproductive capacities of marginalized women. The Article advances this claim in three ways. First, by mapping the historical function of women’s prisons as a mechanism to restore and regulate “fallen women” who deviated from traditional norms associated with femininity and motherhood. Second, by examining the ways in which contemporary women’s prisons similarly regulate women’s identities as mothers. Instead of attempting to rehabilitate women, however, contemporary women’s prisons incapacitate women who engage in behavior or possess characteristics that diverge from traditional maternal norms. Indeed, through what the Article terms the “incapacitation of motherhood,” women prisoners are alienated from their children, denied reproductive care, humiliated during pregnancy and postpartum recovery, and in some cases, sterilized. Lastly, contesting these practices and the incapacitation of motherhood, this Article calls for the use of a robust legal framework, informed by the principles of reproductive justice that are more protective of the reproductive capacities of incarcerated women.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton's Impact on and Reform of the Law

November 12 is the anniversary of the birthday of women's rights pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902).  I spent a decade studying her work on law, including the law of marriage, marital property, child custody, domestic violence, reproductive rights, juries, and constitutional reform.  That work was encapsulated in my book,  Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Feminist Foundations of Family Law (NYU Press 2016).

I blogged about each of the chapters, linked here: 

Introduction, overview, biography, and conclusions 

Chapter 1, "What Do You Women Want?" on marital property reform

Chapter 2, "The Pivot of the Marriage Relation" on marriage equality and restructuring marriage

Chapter 3,  "Divorce is not the Foe of Marriage"  on advocacy of no-fault divorce and domestic violence protections

Chapter 4, "The Incidental Relation of Mother" on reproductive rights and birth control

Chapter 5,  "Our Girls" on child custody, feminist parenting, and equality in education

Conclusion: “Still Many Obstacles” on Stanton's legacy in 21st century family law.

 

The book is reviewed by Prof. Paula Monopoli here in the Journal of Legal Education.

My response is here, The Multiple Feminisms of a 19th Century Women's Rights Thinker

I talk about the book on the New Book Network Podcast.

The Maternal Dilemma and Continued Discrimination Against Women at Work

Noya Rimalt, The Maternal Dilemma, 103 Cornell Law Rev. (2018)  

This article questions the sufficiency of contemporary parental policies in undermining the gendered division of care-work at home. It reveals that despite the optimistic expectations that accompanied the enactment of gender-neutral leave legislation such as the FMLA, and the provision of equal care opportunities for men, a marked gap separates the law's target of equal parenting from the persistence of a maternal reality in most families. Moreover, because women remain responsible for family caregiving much more than men, the stereotype that women are less competent workers continues to thrive, and gender bias and discrimination still shape women's experiences in the workplace. This discriminatory reality is often masked by legal narratives presenting the rise of egalitarian and choice-based patterns of parenting as actual products of contemporary parental policies. Gendered patterns of care and work are thus legitimized as reflecting the individual lifestyle preferences of both women and men in a world in which equality and choice shape these preferences.

The article suggests naming this problem “the maternal dilemma” and calls for re-evaluation of current male-centered policy solutions designed to address it by encouraging men to assume more care-taking responsibilities at home. It adds a comparative analysis to illustrate that the maternal dilemma is not a unique American problem, with its very “thin” model of parental supports, restricted to narrow and primarily negative protections. The maternal dilemma prevails also under more progressive regimes of parental supports that provide additional incentives for men to assume greater care-taking responsibilities at home.

Building on comparative lessons as well as on the scope and significance of the maternal dilemma in the American context, the article argues that in their efforts to recruit men to the task of care-taking at home, feminists, legislators and policy makers have neglected an additional and equally important set of issues relating to the structures and forces that shape women's decision to remain the primary caretakers at home.In deliberating these issues the article suggests acknowledging that gendered patterns of care-work at home are not simply the product of women’s subordination. They also reflect the complex relationship between women’s disempowering experience in the labor market and the historical and contemporary significance of motherhood in their lives. Restoring the focus to women and addressing their specific needs and concerns are thus crucial for moving forward. Naming this problem the maternal dilemma serves as a reminder of where the core of the problem is; it also signals that the path to gender equality might require more than gender-neutrality and similar treatment.

The Impact of Liberal Feminism and Critical Race Theory on Reproductive Rights and Justice in the U.S.

Lisa Chiyemi Ikemoto, Reproductive Rights and Justice: A Multiple Feminist Theories Account in Research Handbook on Feminist Jurisprudence (Robin West and Cynthia Bowman eds., Elgar Press, Forthcoming)

This chapter examines the impact of liberal feminism and critical race theory on reproductive rights and justice in the United States. Liberal feminism has played a key role in this fight. Other feminist theories, including, prominently, critical race theory, have taken the mainstream reproductive rights movement to task for marginalizing the voices and experience of women of color and low-income women, thus reinforcing stratified reproduction. This work has put issues like surrogacy, coerced sterilization, welfare family caps and criminal prosecution of pregnant women on the reproductive rights and justice agenda. Interaction among feminist theories has produced a dialectic and evolution that enable them to meet new challenges. Similarly, a multi-theory account of reproductive rights and justice issues produces a more useful analysis and range of strategies than a single theory approach.

Challenging Nuisance Ordinances That Penalize Domestic Violence Victims

ACLU, A Missouri Town Will Finally Stop Banishing Residents for Reporting Domestic Violence

In cities across America, calling 911 can get you evicted. This week, a city less than 10 miles outside of St. Louis agreed to stop enforcing this inhumane policy as part of an extensive settlement.

 

Last year, we filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of Rosetta Watson, a domestic violence survivor who was kicked out of her home and city because she called the police. Under a local ordinance in Maplewood, Missouri, anyone making more than two calls to the police for domestic violence was designated a “nuisance,” with no exception for victims. Ms. Watson called the police four times, when her ex-boyfriend kicked in her front door, punched her, and strangled her. Based on those calls, Maplewood revoked her occupancy permit, and she was banished from living in Maplewood for six months. For years afterwards, she struggled with fear of her abuser, distrust of law enforcement, and the inability to keep a stable home. * * *

 

The case against Maplewood is just the latest in our fight against nuisance ordinances. The Metropolitan St. Louis Equal Housing & Opportunity Council found 69 similar ordinances in the St. Louis region, and we estimate there are thousands across the country. For example, the ACLU published a report with the New York Civil Liberties Union last month, showing how different cities in New York often enforced these kinds of ordinances in communities of color and where poor people live, imposed harsh penalties for low-level offenses, and harmed domestic violence survivors and those in need of emergency aid.  

Are Breastfeeding Protection Laws Anti-Feminist?

Dara Purvis, Are Breastfeeding Protections Anti-Feminist? JOTWELL, reviewing Meghan Boone, Lactation Law, ___ Calif. L. Rev. ___ (forthcoming 2018), available at SSRN.

If one reason that women have been held back in the workforce is difficulty reconciling caregiving responsibilities and work-related duties, then one obvious method of reform should be to require employers to accommodate caregiving, particularly those forms of caregiving that are disproportionately or exclusively fulfilled by women. For example, because a typical full-time work schedule is not conducive to a new mother’s schedule of breastfeeding or pumping breast milk, many women are forced to prioritize work over breastfeeding. In response, both state and federal laws require employers of a certain size to accommodate new mothers returning from maternity leave by providing them with breaks and a suitably private area in the workplace to pump breast milk, allowing them to return to work and continue to feed their babies breast milk. Surely a win for feminism and facilitating women’s employment choices, right?

 

In her forthcoming article Lactation Law, Meghan Boone answers no, at least as such statutes are currently written. From the opening paragraphs, she poses a startlingly counterintuitive example of a Maine teacher whose child was stillborn. In the following days, she began lactating, an understandably traumatic process for someone mourning a stillbirth. As she grieved, she learned of nonprofit organizations that collected donated breast milk and distributed it to babies who would otherwise not be fed breast milk and decided to participate. The school where she worked, however, refused to accommodate her pumping breast milk because the Maine statute that required employers to accommodate lactation only applied to mothers nursing or pumping milk for their own children. Because the teacher’s breast milk would be donated to other babies, the school was not required to accommodate her desire to pump breast milk while she was at work.

 

From this difficult puzzle, Boone identifies a troubling feature of statutes protecting the right to pump breast milk at work or breastfeed in public: such laws do not protect women qua women. They protect infants, justified by the current medical opinion that infants fed breast milk enjoy health advantages that are not available to formula-fed infants. The significance of breastfeeding and pumping breast milk, in other words, has little to do with the lactating woman. Rather, lactation is a service that a mother provides to her child.***

 

This may seem like a distinction without a difference, but Boone persuasively outlines how legal protections for lactation reject decisions that characterize breastfeeding as an autonomy interest that shapes women’s decisions about how to mother, and instead underscore societal perceptions of what mothers should be.

 

On this reading, Boone argues, the current state of lactation law further entrenches gendered expectations, which, at least in some respects, is worse than having no lactation law at all. Existing statutes reinforce the idea of breastfeeding as something that women should do if they are the right kind of mother, but not for too long, and not in ways that fall outside of the norm. Boone proposes fundamental changes to lactation law: focusing on the physiological experience of lactation rather than a maternal relationship, removing the justification tied to an infant biologically related to the lactating woman, and recognizing that promoting women’s health is also a public goal supported by lactation law. Her reforms are a thoughtful and comprehensive solution to the deep-rooted issues with current flawed protections of lactating women. My only quandary is that Boone’s demonstration of the gender and maternal stereotypes embodied in lactation law is so thoroughly persuasive that it makes the prospect of reform seem very unlikely.

Using Feminist Legal Theory to Critique the Law's Devaluation of Tort Liability for Stillbirth

Jill Wieber Lens, Tort Law's Devaluation of Stillbirth, Nevada L. J. (forthcoming)

In the United States, more than sixty-five babies die daily due to stillbirth—death of an unborn baby after twenty weeks of pregnancy but before birth. New medical research suggests that at least one fourth of those deaths are preventable with proper medical care. Stated differently, one fourth of stillbirths are due to medical malpractice. In almost all states, tort law provides recourse for mothers after the death of their children due to stillbirth.

 

This Article uses feminist legal theory and empirical research of parents after stillbirth to demonstrate that tort law devalues stillbirth. That devaluation is due to the cognitive bias associating stillbirth with women. Historically, stillbirth only appeared in women’s claims for emotional distress. Instead of recognizing her child’s death, courts treated, and some courts continue to treat, stillbirth as just as a physical manifestation of the woman’s emotional distress. Even when modern courts recognize stillbirth as the death of a child, they still devalue that injury by characterizing the child as a nameless, genderless “fetus.” Also historically, courts were resistant to claims based on relational injuries, another injury stereotypically associated with women. Even though prenatal attachment theory demonstrates a parent-child relationship is lost in stillbirth, some courts are especially reluctant to recognize the relational injury in the context of death before birth. The cognitive bias associating stillbirth with women has also stunted the development of tort recourse for fathers, as it also will for non-biological parents. Fathers, the “forgotten bereaved,” are sometimes denied a claim or given a more limited claim.

 

The remedy for this devaluation is a wrongful death claim for the death of a child—not just a fetus—available to both parents, including recovery for the relational injury. Tort law must also guard against possible undervaluation of the parents’ injury based on the supposed replaceability of children or the presence of other living children, and against damage caps’ mandatory undervaluation of the parents’ injury. The Article also explains how these reforms are supported by tort law theories, and explains that the wrongful death claim should be available for all stillbirths, not depending on viability. Last, the Article necessarily explains that tort law’s proper recognition of stillbirth poses no threat to the legality of abortion.

Mother's Day - Friend or Foe to Feminism?

 Mother's Day.  The feminist's friend or foe?  

• Mother's Day's Dark History
• Why the Founder of Mother's Day Turned Against It
• Mother's Day is Steeped in Radical, Religious Feminism
• Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis
• The Mother's Day Myth: How we "Thank" Mothers for their Free Labor
• Mother's Day: The Creation, Promotion and Meaning of a New Holiday in the Progressive Era

 

The Deleterious Effects of the Marriage Penalty Tax on Women and Society

Dennis R. Lassila, Murphy Smith & Daqun (David) Zhang, Negative Social and Economic Effects of the Marriage Penalty Tax on Women and Society

For decades the marriage penalty tax (MPT) has been debated, reduced, increased, and muddled in the US tax system. The issue is important to individual taxpayers, as well as to policy-makers, academic researchers, and society overall. Research shows that the MPT has a negative impact on marital stability, resulting in particularly deleterious effects on women and children, as single females, especially single-parent females, are more likely to be in poverty. Consequently, the MPT is a gender issue in that women are more negatively affected by it than men are, but to varying degrees all members of society are negatively affected, women, men, and children. The purpose of this study is to review how the MPT was affected by the new tax law, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, and briefly review the history of the MPT and its impact on individuals and society. While the MPT was greatly reduced by the 2017 Act, notably regarding tax rates, the MPT, as connected to the earned income tax credit, continues to have a major detrimental impact on low to moderate income couples, discouraging marriage and having a particularly negative effect on their children.

Leveling Down Gender Equality

My latest article thinking about gender and remedies.

Tracy A. Thomas, Leveling Down Gender Equality

Introduction

The Supreme Court resurrected its “leveling down” jurisprudence in 2017 when it remedied an equal protection violation of gender discrimination by denying, rather than extending, the requested benefit. This approach of nullifying the benefit for all had previously been confined to a handful of cases, over thirty years old; but with the decision in Sessions v. Morales-Santana the Court brought new life and currency to this limitation of equality law. In Morales-Santana, a six-Justice majority of the Supreme Court led by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Kennedy, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan, struck down a gender-based distinction in the federal immigration statute.  The statute had two different standards for mothers and fathers for determining derivative citizenship for children born abroad to unwed citizen parents. It seemed to be an easy case of facially unequal rules based on gender: one year prior U.S. residence for mothers, five years prior residence for fathers. However, the Court then refused to grant the plaintiff father the same benefit of the shorter time frame allotted mothers.  It instead equalized the gendered rules by denying the previous benefit of the shorter one year to mothers. While Justice Ginsburg’s decision in Morales-Santana purported to be a strong, historic decision on the merits of equality, the denial of meaningful relief actually weakened the meaning of equality with a reach far beyond the contours of this one case. 

This “leveling down” of the remedy – responding to inequality by reducing benefits to all rather than leveling up and extending benefits to the disadvantaged group -- is unusual, but not unheard of.  It has been judicially endorsed in a few cases, where the courts have ratified the voluntary actions of defendants.  In one example, the city of Jackson, Mississippi remedied its racially segregated swimming pools by closing down all pools.  In another, Congress redressed the disparity of Social Security benefits that gave extra benefit to women by reducing the women’s benefit to the lower level previously applicable to men.  And in yet another example, a high school found to have discriminated against a pregnant teen by denying her membership in the school’s National Honor Society, eliminated the honor society for all students.

Defendants seem to choose this remedy almost in defiance, refusing to grant a benefit to the petitioner with the audacity to challenge inequality.  This retrenching is deemed an acceptable organizational response, as seen for example, in the example of the BBC and its overseas editors.  When the BBC (British Broadcasting Company) was exposed in the media for paying its women overseas editors substantially less than its men editors, it responded by reducing the men’s pay. The women were thus not only denied equal pay for the past discrimination, but were exposed to potential peer retaliation for “rocking the boat” and making the men worse off.  But for the BBC, as with other wrongdoing defendants, leveling down seemed to be a quick and easy way to erase the inequality problem.    

The Court in Morales-Santana similarly believed it needed to defer to the defendant’s choice of remedy for the gender discrimination.  This was ironic given that the Court in that same case expressly rejected such deference to Congress in the merits part of the decision.  It departed from previous decisions upholding gender distinctions in the derivative citizenship statute based on deference to Congress’s plenary power over immigration; this time, the Court forcefully applied constitutional norms of equality to a different end.  Yet, in the same breath, the Court turned around and espoused the importance of deference to the defendant’s choice for the remedy.  It struggled to find such legislative intent, trying to second guess what Congress would have done had it known its derivative citizenship statute was unconstitutional.  The Court decided Congress would have stricken the second of two statutory clauses, rather than the first provision or instead of utilizing the gender neutral term “parent” instead of “mother.” It thus achieved equality by a simple formal textual exercise which resulted in the elimination of the shorter-time benefit to all unwed parents.   

This textualist analysis, however, depended upon the assumption that leveling down is an equally-valid remedial option for inequality.  But this is where the Court went wrong.  The Court failed to question the constitutionally legitimacy of this nullification in light of the constitutional mandates of due process and equal protection.  Had the Court engaged in an analysis of the remedy as much as it did of the right, it might have discovered that more was demanded than mere neutral formality and equivalency of benefit across the board.  Equality itself, as a constitutional right, dictates more than just empty formalism.  And due process, I have argued, requires that rights be granted meaningful remedies. Together, this means that where the operative substantive right is based on equal protection, as in Morales-Santana, a meaningful remedy is one that grants the “protection” promised.  For equal protection does not merely mandate a logical parallelism of genders, but normatively values equal opportunity and benefit. Examining the leveling down remedy in light of equality, beyond the strict mandates of a particular statutory benefit, reaches a different conclusion than the Court.  Asking the additional question of whether the plaintiff has received a meaningful remedy for the past inequality casts doubt on the validity of leveling down relief for gender discrimination.  

This Article first examines the Court’s decision in Morales-Santana and its justification for choosing the “mean remedy” of leveling down and denying a citizenship benefit to the child of both mothers and fathers.  Part II then explores the Court’s general, but unexplained, impression that ordinarily leveling up is the proper remedial course.  It provides a normative foundation for this remedial presumption grounded in the meaning of equal protection and in the due process right to a meaningful remedy.  Given these constitutional norms, the Article then argues that the remedial calculus should be changed.  Rather than accepting the Court’s assumption, renewed in Morales-Santana, that leveling down and leveling up are equally valid remedial choices, it argues for a strong presumption of leveling up in cases of gender discrimination, with only narrow exceptions permitted to rebut.  Part III of the article explains that these exceptions permitting leveling down would be rare, and would be grounded in equity, but only in concerns that would inflict undue burden on the defendant or third parties from the leveling up itself.  Such a deferential rule to the plaintiff’s rights better effectuates the meaning of equal protection and protects against judicial and voluntary action that by remedial formalism of leveling down could eviscerate the very meaning of equality.

 

British House of Commons Speaker Reprimands Foreign Secretary for Sexist Language

Boris Johnson Told Off by Speaker for "Sexism"

Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has been reprimanded by Commons Speaker John Bercow for using sexist language.

 

Speaker Bercow intervened - to applause from some Labour MPs - after Mr Johnson referred to shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry as Lady Nugee.

 

Ms Thornberry is married to High Court judge Sir Christopher Nugee - but chooses to go by her maiden name.

 

Mr Bercow said it was "inappropriate" and sexist to refer to her as Lady Nugee.

 

He said MPs should be called by their names and not by the titles of their spouses.

 

Mr Johnson had to be reminded of Ms Thornberry's title by MPs, as he answered a question from a Conservative MP on the Commonwealth, calling her "the Baroness, whatever it is, I cannot remember what it is... Nugee".

 

Mr Bercow rebuked the foreign secretary, telling him: "We do not address people by the titles of their spouses.

 

"The shadow Foreign Secretary has a name, and it is not 'Lady something'. We know what her name is. It is inappropriate and frankly sexist to speak in those terms, and I am not having it in this Chamber.

 

"That is the end of the matter. No matter how senior a Member, that parlance is not legitimate. It will not be allowed, and it will be called out."

 

Mr Johnson subsequently apologised for his "inadvertent sexism."

 

Ms Thornberry has occasionally been teased about her formal title by Conservative critics and in February last year complained to Mr Bercow when Theresa May referred to her as Lady Nugee in the Commons.

 

"Is it in order for the prime minister to refer to a member of this House not by her own name, but by the name of her husband?" the Islington South MP said in a point of order.

 

"I have never been a Lady and it will be a great deal more than being married to a Knight of the Realm in order to make me one."

 

Mrs May said: "If the Honourable Lady is concerned about the reference that I made to her, of course I will apologise for that.

 

"I have to say to her, though, that for the last 36 years I have been referred to by my husband's name."

Foundations of Modern Penal Theory that Ignore the Gender Inequality of the Social and Family Context

Catalina Correa, The Foundations of Modern Criminal Law and Gender Inequality, 16 Seattle J. Soc. Justice 1 (2017)

Modern penal theory, like prevalent western theories of law, adopts a determined model of autonomy, one in which people are separable from social and family contexts. Taken to the criminal law context, this model proposes people can be defined without taking into account the social context. The use of prisons thus presupposes that individuals can be removed from their communities and families to be reeducated, readapted, treated or—in the retributive approach—simply punished. This notion of autonomy, however, hides from sight the group of people who not only maintain family ties with the men and women in prison, but who also, in contexts such as the Latin American one, take on the responsibility of supporting the prisoners economically. As this paper shows, this group is not heterogeneous or plural but defined by gender and primarily constituted of the mothers, daughters, wives and sisters of the people who are imprisoned. The data presented in this paper shows that this group of women is marginalized, impoverished and abused by a criminal justice system that not only omits to recognize the serious costs that the system imposes on them, but also omits to acknowledge their existence. This paper argues that this lack of recognition is possible because it is premised on a penal model that assumes a certain idea of autonomy, one which enables societies to erroneously affirm that prison sentences are individual sentences.

The Flaws and Gendered Assumptions in the New Rape Survivor Child Custody Act

Jennifer Hendricks, The Wages of Genetic Entitlement: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly in the Rape Survivor Child Custody Act, 112 Northwestern L. Rev. Online 75 (2017)

This Essay analyzes flaws and assumptions in the recently enacted Rape Survivor Child Custody Act. The RSCCA offers a window into the problems with defining parenthood in terms of genes instead of caretaking relationships, which is what led to the problem of rapists being able to claim parental rights in the first place. Rather than address that underlying defect in family law, the statute attempts a solution that might work if all rapists were strangers, all rapists were men, and all rape victims were women, but glosses over complicated problems of violence and coercion in relationships. Despite this failure to grapple with hard cases, the RSCCA helps us see how the biological processes of reproduction are necessarily intertwined with the definition of legal parenthood.

OR Governor Signs Boyfriend Loophole Gun Bill

Oregon Governor Signs "Boyfriend Loophole" Gun Bill

Amidst a crowd of students and advocates rallying for stronger gun regulations, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown signed Monday the first piece of legislation addressing the issue since the deadly shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last month.

 

The law expands the prohibition of gun ownership to people convicted of domestic violence against non-married intimate partners — closing the so-called "boyfriend loophole."

 

It also blocks people convicted of misdemeanor stalking from owning a gun. 

 

"Closing the 'intimate partner' is an important step to keep Oregonians safer from gun violence," Brown said. "I'm hopeful that the tide is turning on our nation's gun debate."

 

The legislation was one of Brown's top priorities coming into the short legislative session, which ended Saturday.

Constitutional Conflict Over Inherent Differences Between the Sexes

Cary Franklin, Biological Warfare: Constitutional Conflict Over 'Inherent Differences' Between the Sexes, Supreme Court Review (forthcoming)

Equal protection law no longer recognizes so-called “inherent differences” among the races as a justification for discrimination. The law takes a different view of sex. It continues to recognize “inherent differences” as a legitimate ground for treating men and women differently — as long as the differential treatment does not perpetuate women’s subordination or reinforce traditional sex stereotypes. This doctrine raises a host of difficult questions, most notably, what counts as an “inherent difference”?

The Court confronted that question twice in its 2016 Term. In Pavan v. Smith, the Court had to decide whether Arkansas could treat same-sex couples differently from different-sex couples with respect to their children’s birth certificates. In Sessions v. Morales-Santana, the question was whether the federal government, for purposes of assigning citizenship, could treat non-marital children born abroad to mixed-nationality couples differently depending on the sex of their U.S. citizen parent. In both cases, the Court rejected the government’s ostensibly biological justification for the differential treatment. But the new and important ways in which it reasoned about biology in these cases has not received much notice. Commentators treated Pavan as an obvious and relatively unimportant extension of the Court’s famous 2015 same-sex marriage decision. Meanwhile, so much was happening in the context of immigration when Morales-Santana came down that it did not attract much attention — and what attention it did attract tended to focus on the unusual remedy the Court adopted, not its reasoning about biology. 

This Article argues that Pavan and Morales-Santana, especially when read together, are surprisingly transformative and consequential decisions. In the past, the Court has declined to apply heightened scrutiny to biologically-justified sex classifications in contexts involving gay people and unmarried fathers. As a result, these contexts have become repositories of specious biological justifications for discrimination; pregnancy, in particular, has been understood to justify all manner of differential treatment in these areas. In Pavan and Morales-Santana, the Court broke with this tradition by genuinely scrutinizing the state’s pregnancy-based justifications for discriminating and finding them constitutionally inadequate. In so doing, it struck a serious blow against the most formidable barrier to equal protection where gay people, unmarried parents — and pregnant women — are concerned.

Theorizing Women's Economic Abuse in the Family

Arianne Renan Barzilay, Power in the Age of In/Equality: Economic Abuse, Masculinities, and the Long Road to Marriage Equality, 51 Akron Law Rev. 323 (2018)

In an era when women have achieved formal legal equality, patriarchal power endures. In this article I take on a largely neglected subject: economic abuse. While this phenomenon has recently begun to generate awareness as a form of intimate partner violence, it currently lacks a theory and history with which to deeply understand it. A failure to recognize the profound roots enabling economic abuse contributes to its perpetuation, trivialization, and marginalization in legal thought. Such a failure has broad implications for gender equality. This Article offers both a history and a theory with which to understand the phenomenon’s deep roots. It sheds light on the historical modification of coverture through familial and market-based breadwinning roles, and points to new insights from masculinities theory to explain how economic abuse is enabled. It illustrates how economic abuse is socio-legally made possible, demonstrating how it is embedded in a historical, socio-legal structure of the market and the family. It thus brings domestic violence gender-based analysis into a broader conversation about the law, the market, and the family. It contends that economic abuse is not merely an individual matter requiring individual-oriented solutions, but rather a social one, based on a particular, historically-based construction of relationships between gender, law, the market, and the family. More generally, it offers a way to think about power in the family in this new, seemingly more egalitarian era. It concludes by suggesting guiding principles for mitigating economic abuse and for destabilizing gendered power dynamics in the family more broadly.

Older Women are the Future Economy

Alessandra Malito, Older Women will Soon Rule the World, MIT Professor Says

In his new book, “The Longevity Economy: Unlocking the World’s Fastest-Growing, Most Misunderstood Market,” (published by PublicAffairs) Joseph Coughlin, founder and director of the MIT Age Lab, a research program that studies the population 50 and older as well as the technology that impacts their lives, says the narrative on retirement needs a major update. Society puts so much emphasis on the years between birth and 65 years old, but life spans have lengthened over the last century to well into the 80s (and some say citizens of well developed countries can expect to live into the 100s) which means that Americans now may spend a third or more of their lives in retirement.

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The catalyst won’t be the engineer or marketing person or someone doing advertisements on Madison Avenue, the future is distinctly female. She lives longer, she is the primary caregiver and the chief consumption officer of the home, so if she doesn’t buy it or envision it, she frankly won’t be living in it and the country and family is missing a big opportunity on what she knows and what she likes and what she will buy. We find the venture capital community ignoring women — we have a vision of innovation as a 27-year-old male wearing sneakers.

MarketWatch: Can you expand on “the future is female” comment? Women haven’t always been considered for such a role — why now?

Coughlin: They weren’t just marginalized — they were invisible. Female consumers today have more education in all fields except engineering, and that’s world wide. That makes her a dedicated researcher. Entrepreneurialism is a new women movement — women have startups employing Americans equal to large corporations. And while she is doing all that, she remains the caregiver, not just to her own children but to her parents. She’s influencing the majority of auto decisions, she understands what the needs and wants are in the population. Women are starting companies about downsizing services to clean up houses and services to provide care in homes — they see the problems and the opportunities.

 

MarketWatch: You had some tips for businesses looking to invest in the longevity economy — what are some?

Coughlin: With some irony, companies these days are very much liking to advertise that they are consumer-focused. But most companies ignore 51% of the population: the female population. To understand the aging marketplace, they need to look particularly at women 50 and older. The second thing is usable design does not have to be big, beige and boring — transcendent design is not just usable and functional, but genuinely delights the buyer. The third is to create new stories, new rituals, new myths — why don’t we have downsizing parties? Grandparent registries? If you think about it, business and society have all holidays and punctuation marks for 0-65 years old. After that you have a retirement party and everyone else’s parties. For one-third of your life, it’s not about you at all. And the last part is, if we are going to be living longer, we need to rewrite the way we think of retirement. Not just extending work span, but remaining engaged, productive. And frankly, most have a social network where we work, not where we live.

Reforming WTO Labor Standards of Parenting Leave to Reflect Women's Worldwide Equality

Taylor Stoneman, International Economic Law, Gender Equality, and Paternity Leave: Can the WTO Be Utilized to Balance the Division of Care Labor Worldwide?, 32 Emory Int'l Law Rev. 51 (2017)

Which public policies most effectively promote gender equality and how can they be realized internationally to support women on a global scale? I first argue that longer periods of paid paternity leave must be embraced to challenge the historical conception of women as the primary caregiver in a male-female partnership and to bring men into the private sphere at the important confluence of a couple’s childfree and parental lives. In order to broadly achieve these policies, I turn to international law. Building off Charlesworth, Chinkin, and Wright’s observation of the international legal order’s gendered nature, I demonstrate that the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) core labor standards, as they are today, reflect a gendered understanding of the labor market and are insufficient to support the basic needs of a working population that includes both men and women. I further argue that a reimagined set of these standards should be incorporated into a World Trade Organization (WTO) Trade-Related Agreement on Labor Standards that would impose substantive obligations on Member States. Such an agreement would be consistent with the WTO’s historical embrace of “embedded liberalism” and could ultimately drive domestic policy transformations benefiting women worldwide.