Gender and the Law Blog

Jennifer Hendricks on "Next Time Around: Abortion and Sex Equality"

Jennifer Hendricks has published Next Time Around: Abortion and Sex Equality in volume 63 of the American Studies journal. The introduction is excerpted below: 

Can the American legal system embrace and promote reproductive justice? Only with deep changes in the values that drive constitutional analysis. Roe v. Wade was based on a privacy right that contained the seeds of its own destruction as a vehicle for reproductive justice. It protected the right to an abortion if you could get one on your own, but it provided little for poor women in particular and nothing to support a broader vision of reproductive justice. Feminist theory can provide an alternative set of values that resonate with the most important “road not taken” in constitutional law.

From Roe to Dobbs, the Supreme Court always treated abortion as a tragedy, a perhaps necessary evil—never a boon that freed a woman from an unwanted invasion of her body. The court’s refusal to incorporate women’s needs into constitutional law culminated in its insistence, in Dobbs, that the scope of protected liberty under the Fourteenth Amendment should be determined according to the beliefs of “eminent common-law authorities” like Matthew Hale, a seventeenth-century English judge who sentenced witches to be hanged and promoted the legal rule that raping your wife isn’t a crime.

Next time around, we need a positive right to abortion as part of a broader reproductive justice agenda. Legally, this means revisiting the Reconstruction Amendments to build a framework of positive rights for protecting dignity, equality, and relationships against invasion and domination.

Study Analyzes Gendered Service Work in Academia

Margaretha Järvinen and Nanna Mik-Meyer, Giving and Receiving: Gendered Service Work in Academia, Current Sociology (2024) [ResearchGate Link]

Deploying the perspective of ‘relational work’, this article investigates the mechanisms behind the gender-unequal distribution of academic service. The concept of relational work is used to analyse how men and women in academia balance collective against individual interests when agreeing or disagreeing on service tasks. Four types of relational work are identified: compliance, evasiveness, barter and investment, with compliance being more common among women, evasiveness and barter being more common among men and investment being tied to temporality in a gendered pattern. The article shows that men are more successful in pursuing individual interests against service demands and how this depends on their relational work as well as organisational role expectations, reducing women’s prospects of ‘saying no’. The study is based on qualitative interviews with 163 associate and full professors in the social sciences and CV data on their service contributions.

Carbone and Huntington on "Fatherhood, Family Law, and the Crisis of Boys and Men"

June Carbone and Clare Huntington have published "Fatherhood, Family Law, and the Crisis of Boys and Men" in volume 124 of the Columbia Law Review. The abstract is excerpted below: 

Boys and men in all racial and ethnic groups and across most socioeconomic groups are struggling on many fronts, including education, employment, physical and mental health, and social integration. In these areas and more, boys and men are much worse off than they were only a few decades ago. The crisis--which is concentrated among men without college degrees--is rooted in large-scale structural changes to the economy that have decimated jobs for this group and policy choices that emphasize incarceration while doing little to address economic inequality.

The decline in male well-being is not just a problem for boys and men. It is a problem for families. Men’s economic prospects have a profound impact on whether couples will commit to each other. Men without steady work--and with behaviors that often accompany unemployment, including a higher frequency of intimate partner violence--have trouble sustaining long-term relationships, and many do not marry. They often have children, but once romantic relationships end, unmarried men tend to drift away from the family. Many fathers want a larger role in their children’s lives, but this is possible only if they can strengthen their relationship with mothers. Many mothers also want fathers to be more involved, but they are concerned about issues fathers bring to the family. And children want a relationship with both parents.

Family law is part of the problem, contributing to the familial isolation of men without college degrees. In recent decades, family law has undergone a significant transformation, but this transformation primarily benefits married couples. The legal system now seeks to create “postdivorce families”--that is, families in which both parents are cooperative, active caregivers, notwithstanding the end of the parents’ romantic relationship. To this end, custody laws encourage shared parenting, and family courts offer alternative dispute resolution processes, counseling, and other assistance that strengthen fathers’ active membership in the family. But men facing economic precarity are unlikely to be married and thus need not go to court when a romantic relationship ends. Accordingly, these men do not benefit from this transformation in custody rules and processes, and they are unlikely to access the supportive services. The child support system makes things worse by imposing unrealistic orders on low-income fathers that alienate men from their families. And the family regulation system, also known as the child welfare system, treats these fathers as incompetent caregivers or, even worse, as threats.

Family law may relegate men in crisis to the periphery of family life, but it can also help bring them back. The goal is not to restore men’s patriarchal authority but rather to extend the model of cooperative parenting to more families. To this end, this Essay proposes far-reaching reforms to custody rules and processes, child support, and family regulation. In each of these problematic areas of family law, the proposed reforms give families greater autonomy in shaping agreements about family relationships, support to make these bargains workable, and opportunities for men to be active fathers.

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.

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

 

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.

Seventh Circuit Upholds IN Ban on Gender Affirming Care

Split 7th Circuit OKs Indiana Law Banning Youth Transgender Treatment

A split three-judge panel in the Seventh Circuit Wednesday greenlit Indiana's ban on gender-affirming care for minors.

The measure prohibits youth hormone therapy, puberty blockers and gender reassignment surgery. Indiana's Republican Governor Eric Holcomb signed it into law in April 2023, but before it could take effect that July, U.S. District Judge James Patrick Hanlon, a Donald Trump appointee, issued a preliminary injunction against most of its components.

Hanlon, ruling in a suit brought by a class of transgender youth represented by attorneys from the Indiana ACLU, suspended the moratorium on most gender-affirming medical procedures, though he allowed the ban on gender reassignment surgery to stand. He also blocked a provision of the law which would allow the state to prosecute medical practitioners who help trans youth access those procedures elsewhere.

The decision prompted an appeal to the Seventh Circuit, which heard arguments in February. Eleven days later, in a precursor to Wednesday's ruling, the appeals court lifted Hanlon’s injunction.

In its final ruling, the Seventh Circuit panel said that the lower court erred in finding that plaintiffs affected by the ban faced irreparable harm.

The decision is here: KC v. Individual Members of the Medical Licensing Board of Indiana

Everett and Taylor on "Abortion and Women’s Future Socioeconomic Attainment"

Bethany Everett and Catherine Taylor have published Abortion and Women’s Future Socioeconomic Attainment in the American Sociological Review. Its key conclusions are excerpted below. 

 

Using two different approaches, one that focuses on restrictive abortion environments and a second that focuses on having an abortion, we found that both living in a relatively less abortion-restricted environment and having an abortion during adolescence are associated with better socioeconomic outcomes for women up to 24 years later. We found that women who lived, as teenagers, in locations where abortion was less restricted were more likely, when they were 34 to 43 years old, to have graduated from college and to score lower on multiple indicators of poverty and economic insecurity than those living in states and counties with higher abortion restriction. This means that women with difficulty accessing abortion are more likely to experience trouble paying their bills, be in debt, and face eviction from their homes.

 

We also found that—among women who self-reported pregnancies under age 20—those who reported the pregnancy ended in abortion were more likely to have graduated from college and have higher incomes, and were less likely to experience economic challenges, including having their utilities (e.g., phone, electricity, and gas) turned off, eviction, and food insecurity, than were those who reported the pregnancy resulted in a live birth. Finally, we found that the relationships between our measures of abortion—in Studies 1 and 2—were less consistently associated with employment outcomes compared to other measures of economic security, implying that women who do not have access to abortion may not be less likely to be employed, but are perhaps more likely to be employed in low-wage jobs. Our results, combined with previous research, make several important contributions to sociological literature by documenting how abortion is a mechanism of socioeconomic stratification in the United States.

A Published Interview with Loretta Ross

The online periodical, Feminist Approaches in Culture and Politics, has published On Global Reproductive Justice: An Interview with Loretta J. Ross. The interview was conducted by Seda Saluk. Two powerful passages of Ross's remarks are excerpted below: 

When we talk about a global scale, I invite people to take a meta-view. The people who oppose human rights only have two things to their advantage: lies and violence. On our side are truth, evidence, history, and, most of all, time. I don’t believe that as powerful as these authoritarians see themselves, they don’t have the power to roll back time, deny the truth, bury all the evidence, or make people forget their history. They are trying their best to negate those existential forces that they cannot control.

* * *

 

One thing we say in the civil rights movement is that don’t imagine that you are the entire chain of freedom. The chain of freedom stretches backward toward all of your ancestors and forward toward all of your descendants. Your only job at this moment is to make sure the chain of freedom doesn’t break at your link. Don’t give up. Don’t lose hope. Don’t fail to step up to the challenge of keeping the chain of freedom intact, even though you may not be alive to see the outcome. 

Eliot Tracz on "Bisexuality and Binaries as Legal Shibboleths"

Eliot T. Tracz has posted a forthcoming article on SSRN titled Bisexuality and Binaries as Legal Shibboleths. The article is forthcoming in the Journal of Gender, Race & Justice. The abstract is excerpted here: 

This article argues that there is much that the law can learn, both from bisexuality and from over individuals who live outside of the binaries. Section II discusses bisexuality on a conceptual level. It begins be exploring how to define bisexuality and the related challenges. After settling on a definition, it then provides demographics to provide a clearer picture of the bisexual population. Finally, it describes how bisexual identity is often shared with other identities and the role of intersectionality in bisexual jurisprudence. Section III explores the relationship between binaries and bisexual erasure. It begins by defining bisexual erasure (bi-erasure) and offering some examples of how bi-erasure happens. In then takes a look at how our society classifies queer individuals through a number of bipolar categories including sexual orientation, relationship status, and gender identity. This is followed by discussion of how bisexuality fits within a world of binaries. Finally, it discusses internal queer politics, and the erasure of bisexual individuals within the queer community. Section IV builds on the previous section by shifting the discussion from bi-erasure generally into the narrower realm of the law. It begins by discussing bi-erasure in the opinions of the courts either through omission or an uninformed judiciary. [It] then discusses bi-erasure by lawyers advocating on behalf of queer rights. It closes by discussing bisexual erasure in legislation. Section V argues that bisexuality has the ability to be a subversive force in the law. First it argues that bisexuality’s inherent rejection of binaries demonstrates the hollowness of immutability as a legal concept. It does so in two ways: first it challenges the question of whether someone can be immutably queer, and second, it raises the question of whether or not immutability as a concept is still relevant. Finally, it argues that bisexuality is yet another instance in which the law is improved by rejecting reliance on simple binary ideas.

Gender, Constitutional Design, and Women's Leadership in Executive Positions

Bringing to your attention prior work that is particularly relevant now.

Paula Monopoli, Gender and Constitutional Design, 115 Yale Law J. 2643 (2006).

Does the allocation of power between the legislative and executive branches, and the way we define the scope of the executive affect whether women ascend to executive office? In this article, Professor Monopoli argues that the constitutional process of boundary-drawing between the legislative and executive branches of government has implications for how successful women will be in ascending to executive positions. She posits that the Hamiltonian vision of an expansive executive with plenary power is the model least likely to result in women’s ascending to executive office. The essay traces the philosophical heritage of Hamilton’s vision and outlines the empirical research that links voter perceptions about competence to the gender of candidates. It explores the stagnating progress of women in American politics in a post-September 11th environment and concludes that the choice of a more communal executive model, rather than an exclusively agentic one, may help reverse that trend and may actually result in a more effective executive.

Professor Monopoli is the founding director of the Women, Leadership & Equality Program at the University of Maryland School of Law.

Why America Still Doesn't Have a Female President

The Atlantic, Why America Still Doesn't Have a Female President. Every Woman is the Wrong Woman.

According to interviews I conducted with six researchers who study gender and politics, sexism was a small but significant factor that worked against Harris. And it’s going to be a problem for any woman who runs for president. “American voters tend to believe in the abstract that they support the idea of a woman candidate, but when they get the real women in front of them, they find some other reason not to like the candidate,” Karrin Vasby Anderson, a communications professor at Colorado State University, told me. In 2017, she wrote an article about the long odds faced by women running for president. The title? “Every Woman Is the Wrong Woman.”

New Book, Family Matters: Queer Households and the Half-Century Struggle for Legal Recognition

Marie-Amélie George, Family Matters: Queer Households and the Half-Century Struggle for Legal Recognition (Cambridge 2024)

    From the Publisher:

In 1960, consensual sodomy was a crime in every state in America. Fifty-five years later, the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples had the fundamental right to marry. In the span of two generations, American law underwent a dramatic transformation. Though the fight for marriage equality has received a considerable amount of attention from scholars and the media, it was only a small part of the more than half-century struggle for queer family rights. Family Matters uncovers these decades of advocacy, which reshaped the place of same-sex sexuality in American law and society – and ultimately made marriage equality possible. This book, however, is more than a history of queer rights. Marie-Amélie George reveals that national legal change resulted from shifts at the state and local levels, where the central figures were everyday people without legal training. Consequently, she offers a new way of understanding how minority groups were able to secure meaningful legal change

The Gender Gap in Election 2024, Including Among Young People

Guardian, Gender is Going to Be a Huge Factor in this Election. Here's What the Data Shows.

**Polling shows that the gender gap, which we have seen in every presidential election since 1980, is at a record high. The gender gap, defined as the difference between the vote margin among women and the vote margin among men between Democrats and Republicans, is the key to success for Kamala Harris and other Democrats – they need to win women by more than they lose men.

Recent polling varies, but these polls all demonstrate a significant gender gap. A Quinnipiac University poll from September shows a 26-point gender gap: women favor Harris 53% to 41% for Donald Trump, a 12-point advantage, while men favor Trump 54% to 40% for a 14-point advantage. A Suffolk University poll from August of likely voters shows a 34-point gender gap, with women supporting Harris 57% to 36% for Trump for a 21-point margin and men supporting Trump 51% to 38% for Harris for a 13-point margin. And an Echelon Insights poll in September also found a 10-point gender gap, with women favoring Harris 54% to 43% for Trump for an 11-point advantage and men 49% for Harris and 48% for Trump.

Women and men are making different calculations as they plan to vote, and what drives these intentions are their most important issues and their perceptions of the candidates. Since the US supreme court ruled that states can ban abortion, abortion has been a top voting issue for female voters, especially younger women. In swing state polling conducted by the New York Times/Siena College in August, the economy and inflation are men’s most important issue in deciding their vote. For women, abortion and the economy and inflation are tied as the most important issues, and for women under age 45, abortion is the single most important voting issue

NY Times, The Gender Election

A dramatic new gender divide has formed among the country’s youngest voters. Young men have drifted toward Donald Trump, while young women are surging toward Kamala Harris. As a result, men and women under the age of 30, once similar in their politics, are now farther apart than any other generation of voters. ***

So, in general, women are more likely to vote Democratic than men. But in most age groups, the difference is pretty small. Among the youngest voters, which means 18 - to 29-year-olds, it’s really big this time around, bigger than for any older age group.

Young men are, a small majority of them, planning to vote for Donald Trump. That has not necessarily generally been true of young people. The majority of young people voted for Biden, no matter their gender.***

You do, in general, and they are. But this time, polls are showing something different for young men. Just over half of them appear to be voting for Donald Trump. Meanwhile, 2/3 or more of young women are planning to vote for Kamala Harris, which is a bigger share than any other group by age or gender.

CFP West Coast Sexuality, Gender and Law Conference

Call for Papers here.

Second Annual West Coast Sexuality, Gender & Law Conference

 Call for Papers and Commentators

Abstract Submission Deadline: 

December 15, 2024, 11:59 PM Pacific

 

Submission Portal

 

*Please note that this link is also for those volunteering to serve as commentators/discussants.

We are pleased to announce the second annual West Coast Sexuality, Gender & Law Conference, to be held on February 21-22, 2025 in Irvine, California. The University of California, Irvine School of Law will serve as the conference host.

Alongside increasing political and legal attacks against LGBTQ people, legal and political efforts are seeking to shape and reassert normative views of gender and the family. In that environment, scholarship exploring issues of sexuality, gender, and the law is more necessary than ever. The goal of the Conference is to provide attendees with detailed, constructive feedback on their work in a supportive, collegial environment, and to build community among scholars working on these issues (especially those on the West Coast). Scholars at all levels of seniority are encouraged. We also encourage submissions at different stages of progress, from early drafts (incubators) to more developed forms (a work-in-progress session).

The Conference will consist of several concurrent paper sessions over the course of one and a half days. Participants will be expected to attend one paper session during each of the scheduled time blocks and to read and be prepared to discuss those papers in a constructive manner.

There is no conference or registration fee. Participants will be responsible for the costs of their own flight, other transportation, and hotel arrangements (we are working on reserving a block of hotel rooms for the conference). We will provide a conference dinner on Friday evening, as well as breakfast, lunch, and snacks on Saturday morning.

To preserve an intimate and supportive character, we can accommodate only 45 participants. Although we will try to fulfill all requests, if space is limited, some preference will be given to West Coast-based scholars.

To apply, please submit a CV and an abstract of no more than 500 words here by December 15, 2024. Submissions will be vetted by the organizing committee (listed below). Selection will be based on the originality of the abstract as well as its capacity to engage with the other papers in a collaborative dialogue. Participants will be notified of their selection as soon as feasible after the due date. Drafts of papers will be due approximately two weeks prior to the Conference. As noted above, commentator volunteers should also indicate their interest via the submission portal.

We look forward to your submissions and participation. Questions can be directed to the organizing committee members at [email protected].

Thank you!

Courtney Cahill, UC Irvine

Andrew Gilden, Willamette

Courtney Joslin, UC Davis

Yvette Lindgren, UMKC

Kaipo Matsumura, Loyola LA

Brian Soucek, UC Davis

Ari Ezra Waldman, UC Irvine

SCOTUS Decision Freezing Title IX Rules Made a Huge Mess

The case is Department of Education v. Louisiana, 603 U.S. ___ (Aug. 16, 2024)

Newsweek, Supreme Court Made a "Hugh Mess" With Title IX Ruling

The Supreme Court's recent ruling on transgender rights in education is a giant mess that has left everyone confused, a legal analyst has said.

Steve Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C, wrote that the court's ruling on a pair of emergency applicants raises more questions than it answers.

The controversy involves the federal civil rights legislation, Title IX, which was introduced in 1972 to end discrimination against women in education.

The Biden administration introduced a "final rule for Title IX," which would use those protections to end "sex stereotypes, sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex characteristics."

It has been met with fierce opposition in many conservative states, where parents argue it will lead to transgender students in women's toilets and women's sports teams.

In two lawsuits—Department of Education v. Louisiana and Cardona v. Tennessee—lower federal courts temporarily blocked the entirety of the new rules while the cases play out in appeals court.

The Supreme Court agreed to hear an emergency case from the Department of Education, which is seeking to lift those lower court emergency injunctions.

In a 5-4 majority decision on Friday, the Supreme Court declined a Department of Education emergency request to reinstate portions of the new rules that are not related to gender identity and sexual orientation, with the majority writing that they were not given "a sufficient basis to disturb the lower courts' interim conclusions."

Conservative Neil Gorsuch joined liberal Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson in dissent, arguing that the gender identity and sexual orientation rules should be paused during the appeals because they are related to alleged "injuries" suffered by the states, but the rest of the new rules should resume.

Writing in his Supreme Court blog, One First, Vladeck explained that he wanted to focus on Friday's Department of Education v. Louisiana case because "it was literally the only ruling that the Court handed down last week and because it's both a big deal and a huge mess."

Vladeck's problem with the ruling is that it freezes all of Biden's new rules on Title IX, the vast majority of which has nothing to do with transgender rights.

"The rule does lots of other things … many of which have nothing whatsoever to do with gender identity," he wrote.

Intersectionality and Women's Participation in Peace Negotiations

Jenna Sapiano, Gina Heathcote & Xianan Jin, Intersectionality and Women's Participation in Peace Negotiations, forthcoming International Affairs (2024) 

The Women, Peace and Security resolutions have consistently called for women’s increased participation at all levels in institutions and mechanisms for preventing, managing and resolving conflict. Despite a long history of feminist interventions to disrupt categories of gender as a stagnant, ahistorical or geographically consistent structure, rationales for women’s inclusion continue to rest on problematic narratives and assumptions. We draw on twenty-nine interviews with practitioners whom we asked to speak about their experiences in peace negotiations and the expectations placed on women involved in these processes. The problematic narratives and assumptions we identify on the basis of these interviews and academic literature have the effect of diminishing women’s agency and, thus, their ability to participate in peace negotiations on their terms. Women contribute positively to the durability of peace and the inclusion of gender provisions in agreements. Still, when women’s identities are constructed as one-dimensional, the benefits of women’s inclusion remain paradoxically a cause for celebration and a partial gain. In this article, we apply theories of intersectionality, informed by Black and African feminisms, to expose women’s subject positions that may be made invisible because of assumptions that continue to be associated with calls for women’s participation in peace negotiations.

New Book by Pamela Laufer-Ukeles on "Families, Relational Attachments, and the Law of Collaborative Family-Making"

Pamela Laufer-Ukeles has published a new book with Routledge titled "Families, Relational Attachments, and the Law of Collaborative Family-Making." Available here. 

This book points to a crisis at the heart of modern family law’s treatment of “collaborative family-making”: gamete contributions, surrogate motherhood, adoption, functional parenthood, foster care, and kin caregiving. Born of inequality and anchored by exclusivity and secrecy, the dominant legal framework governing collaborative family-making focuses on the acquisition of collaborative services by legal and intended parents without expecting or fostering any lasting bonds between them. This acquisitional framework is starkly disconnected from empirical accounts of the lived experience of collaborations, which demonstrate complex and ongoing relational attachments that extend beyond a transactional moment. At the intersection of law and sociology, the book challenges the law to account for relational realities that fail to conform to neat legal categories of parent and stranger, asking: How should the law reflect the complex interconnections between families and family-making collaborators? Should collaborators be treated as legal strangers? Who is impacted by the lack of legal status possessed by family-making collaborators? Who benefits and who loses? Ultimately, this is a work of optimism that seeks to facilitate family-making collaborations in more ethical ways by insisting that family law recognize and support family-making collaborators. It introduces a bold new legal framework of interconnection and guides the reader in implementing practical legal and contractual changes that promote human dignity, uphold children’s right to identity, and support ongoing relational attachments with adults who are fundamental to children’s lives. The volume provides deep and accessible insight into families and family law for legal practitioners, academics, students, and laypersons interested in family-making collaboration.

CFP Symposium, Women's Leadership in Law and Politics

Call for Proposals

Women’s Leadership in Law and Politics

Scholars Virtual Symposium

Sponsored by The Center for Constitutional Law & The Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron

Friday, February 21, 2025

The Center for Constitutional Law at Akron Law and The Bliss Institute of Applied Politics seek proposals for a Scholars Virtual Symposium to be held on Friday, February 21, 2025. Akron’s Center for Constitutional Law is one of four national centers established by Congress in 1986 for the bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution to support legal research and public education on issues of constitutional import. Past presenters at the Center have included Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Justice Arthur Goldberg, Professor Reva Siegel, Professor Lawrence Solum, Professor Maggie Blackhawk, Professor Katie Eyer, Professor Harold Koh, Professor Kate Masur, Professor Julie Suk, and Professor Paula Monopoli, among many others. The Bliss Institute of Applied Politics is a bipartisan research, teaching and experiential learning institute dedicated to increasing understanding of the political process with special emphasis on political parties, grassroots activity, and civility and ethics.

The 2025 Scholars Symposium highlights questions of women’s leadership in law and politics. Recent events have brought heightened visibility to women’s political and leadership. Vice-President Kamala Harris became the presidential candidate. Women Justices reached a critical mass on the U.S. Supreme Court, constituting now four of nine Justices. Women’s grassroots initiatives and activism brought reproductive rights to the national agenda through state voting referenda in the wake of Dobbs. This symposium brings together scholars from disciplines including law, politics, history, and gender studies to explore the contours of what women’s political and legal leadership looks like. It will discuss trends, barriers, limitations, and impacts of women’s leadership.

Suggested topics for this symposium may include, but are in no way limited to:

• Why women’s representation in political and lawmaking institutions matters
• Barriers to women’s political and legal leadership
• Women judges – trends, history, and impact
• Women as political candidates
• Bias in women’s leadership – gender, racial, ethnicity bias, and DEI
• Personal attacks on women in leadership from AI, social media, and harassment
• The Hillary Factor – the antagonism to women candidates and the assumption women can’t win
• The Kamala Factor – undervaluing women’s power
• Grassroots women’s groups, g. Moms for Liberty, Red Wine & USA, MeToo
• Proportional Representation Reform, g. Alaska, Congress’s Fair Representation Act, international
• Comparative international women’s leadership in law, courts, and politics
• Women’s leadership in legal practice – firms, partners, MDL, arbitration, experts, judges
• Women’s political equality as seen in constitutional jurisprudence, including Dobbs
• Pipelines to women’s legal and political leadership
• Women as constitution makers (19th Amendment, ERA, global constitutions)

The symposium aims to ignite dialogue and discussion among scholars ruminating on these important issues. The price of admission, so to speak, is a short discussion paper to be published in the written symposium in the Spring 2025 edition of the Center for Constitutional Law’s open-access journal, ConLawNOW (also indexed in Westlaw, Lexis, and Hein). Papers should be about 3,000 to 5,000 words (5-10 published pages). These may be derivative works of longer works or books published elsewhere.

Those interested in participating in the 2025 Constitutional Law Scholars Symposium should send an abstract, title, and CV to Professor Tracy Thomas, Director of the Center for Constitutional Law at Akron, at [email protected]. Abstracts are welcomed beginning now, and should be submitted by December 1, 2024. 

Gendering the New International Norms on Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies

Rangita de Silva de Alwis, Gendering the New International Norms on Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies  

A flurry of landmark international digital rules is soon to make its debut in the international law arena. At the Summit of the Future, in September 2024, the Secretary General plans to announce the Digital Global Compact 2023, an ambitious vision to close the various digital divides and to fast track progress toward the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals.  In March of 2024, the UN General Assembly adopted the first ever UN General Assembly Resolution on Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Sustainable Development.  Five months later, in August of 2024, the United Nations approved the draft of a global cybercrimes treaty; this historic draft agreement, coined the United Nations Convention Against Cybercrime, will go before the UN General Assembly in this upcoming fall.  

Last year, ahead of the 2023 Summit of the Future, the Secretary General introduced his Agenda for Peace, committing to “Transforming the gendered power dynamics in peace and security.”  In line with his vision, together, these new and evolving frameworks provide the first history-making normative landscape for new technologies at the global level. This Article critically examines the role of gender in these burgeoning frameworks as pivotal to elements in a rapidly changing digital ecosystem. While the current normative foci overlook important aspects of gender equality, they also elide the rise of ChatGPT and other Generative AI and their impact on gender. The primacy of gender equal participation in digital and cybersecurity governance should be a pillar of the new global digital order.