Gender and the Law Blog

UK Supreme Court Says Trans Women are Not Legally Women Under Equality Act

UK Supreme Court Says Trans Women are Not Legally Women Under Equality Act

The Supreme Court in Britain ruled on Wednesday that trans women do not fall within the legal definition of women under the country’s equality legislation.

The landmark judgment, which said that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex, is a blow to campaigners for transgender rights. It could have far-reaching consequences for how the law is applied in Britain to some single-sex services like domestic violence shelters, as well as to equal pay claims and maternity policies.

It follows a yearslong legal battle that began in Scotland over whether trans women can be regarded as female under Britain’s 2010 Equality Act, which aims to prevent discrimination. And it comes amid intense and at times bitter public debate over the intersection of transgender rights and women’s rights.

Announcing the decision on Wednesday, the deputy president of the court, Lord Hodge, said: “The unanimous decision of this court is that the terms ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 refer to biological women and biological sex.”

However, he added: “We counsel against reading this judgment as a triumph of one or more groups in our society at the expense of another, it is not.” He said the ruling “does not cause disadvantage to trans people” because they continue to have protections against discrimination under another part of the Equality Act.

Lord Hodge began his remarks by acknowledging the national conversation about transgender rights, and described trans people as a “vulnerable and often harassed minority,” while noting that women had long fought for equal rights with men.

He added: “It is not the task of this court to make policy on how the interests of these groups should be protected” but “to ascertain the meaning of the legislation which Parliament has enacted.”

Veronica Thronson on "The Derivative Dilemma: The Gendered Role of Dependency in Immigration Law"

Veronica Thronson has published "The Derivative Dilemma: The Gendered Role of Dependency in Immigration Law" in 28 U. Pa. J. L. & Soc. Change 147. The introduction is excerpted below: 

* * *  U.S. immigration law implements “derivative” status in a manner that creates hierarchies that enable the exploitation and the imposition of constraints upon migrant women. Derivative provisions in immigration law, those in which one person’s immigration status is linked and subordinated to another’s through a familial relationship, create situations of fragility and dependency that have major implications for those relegated to dependent status. This is especially true for migrant women, as the hierarchies of immigration law overwhelmingly reinforce other gender-based societal hierarchies and patterns of discrimination, perpetuating these not just in fact but with the imprimatur of law.

* * *

Although ostensibly gender neutral, in reality, the applications and consequences of derivative provisions in U.S. immigration law are quite gendered, as is true in other aspects of immigration law. As for derivative provisions, in the context of employment-based visas for nonimmigrants, noncitizen workers who are principal visa holders are overwhelmingly male, while women are more often derivative spouses and thus vulnerable. As this article explains, the status of a wife in this context is dependent on her husband on two fronts: on her husband’s visa status as well as the continuity of her legal relationship to her husband, who is the principal visa holder. First, if for any reason the principal visa holder loses his visa, a derivative spouse’s lawful status also ends. This creates the necessity and incentive for wives to subordinate their own ambitions to advance those of their husbands. Limits on the activities of derivatives further channel wives into traditional, gendered support roles. Second, the lawful status of derivative wives ends upon the termination of the underlying relationship. This means that after a divorce, the derivative former spouse will lose her status and often will not have other viable means to remain in the United States. This is true even as the principal spouse, and importantly any children of the couple, generally will have a continuing, unaltered ability to remain lawfully in the United States.

* * *

Despite progress in remedying the exploitation of women through the immigration system, much more needs to be done to ensure that the U.S. immigration system is an equal one and that gender concerns extend not just to those who suffer domestic violence. The systemic inequalities embedded in the immigration system, despite their deep roots and pervasiveness, can, in some instances, be resolved with simple administrative adjustments. Other fixes will require statutory reform, which has been elusive in immigration law for decades. With that said, efforts to address issues of domestic violence and gender have proven virtually the only front in which progressive immigration reform has been legislatively achieved. Whether by administrative action or legislation, fixes will require political will to recognize and address the barriers that women face as they continue to suffer the consequences of antiquated, gendered immigration laws.

Book Review, Writing Women's History in Portraits of Women in International Law

Aoife O'Donoghue, Radical Remembering, reviewing Immi Tallgren, Portraits of Women in International Law: New Names and Forgotten Faces (Oxford Press 2023), 38(2) Cambridge Review of International Affairs 228–233 (2025).

Why do we forget those who contribute to our collective knowledge, understanding, and critical thinking? This is a complicated question to answer, partially because maintaining that forgetfulness may be important for canon creation and partially because it is so considerable as to be inexplicable. Yet, it remains an important question to ask and attempt to respond to. For to answer that question opens the possibility of remedy, and critically to not repeat our forgetting. For forgetting creates a void, an empty space where others, and their knowledge, skills and, perhaps – scholarly, diplomatic, or societal ways to be – should properly be. This space where others should be is desolate because it has been constructed as such. We have intentionally forgotten, there is an aphasia that has produced these silences which is not accidental (Murphy Citation2006, 65; Thompson Citation2013, 133, 135). Even where we might still have the international legal, political or philosophical ideas that they brought with them, without knowing where those ideas came from and, critically, why they came from where they did, we are lesser. And because we have lost both the individual and collective memory of how transformations occurred, we are reduced in our self-understanding of transformation itself. We are lesser because we have forgotten.

Women, and particularly non-white women, are often those most likely to be forgotten, and this remains as true today as it ever was. Mary Astell (Citation2013), writing in the early 1700s, stated that as men in general write our histories, they rarely bother to chronical what women do, and this is especially true when women act against their sex and do men’s work. This wilful omission becomes worse when those same women act against their race, disability or gender identity. Feminism has long understood this, and from the outset feminist activism has been careful to create its own archives, maintain its own histories and tell its own stories, because it knew that otherwise it would not be done.Footnote¹ Immi Tallgren’s Portraits of Women in International Law is part of that tradition, part of maintaining women’s histories, stories and actions because there has been a distinct failure in international law to do so. Even the much lauded ‘turn to history’ within international law a moment if there ever was one to undertake such acts of retrieval, has up to this point decisively failed to undertake this work. This book is an act of feminist redress. The book places itself in this feminist tradition, carefully naming and citing these fellow examples of acts of radical remembering, itself an act of feminist academic activism. Naming those we act with, not compete against in these acts of feminist historical radical remembering.

Germany's New Parliament Has Less Women Lawmakers Than Before

NYT, Germany's New Parliament is Sworn In, But Where are the Women?

Two days after a coalition of conservatives won Germany’s federal election last month, the governor of Bavaria took to Instagram to say the parties were “ready for political change” and posted a group picture of the likely future chancellor, Friedrich Merz, with five other leaders.

But the photo seemed to suggest that a changed Germany will look remarkably like the country of old: It shows six white middle-aged white men sitting around a table of snacks. The only apparent concession to modern sensibilities was that half of the men are not wearing neckties.

Three-and-a-half years after Angela Merkel, the only woman to serve as chancellor, retired, German national politics seem to be backsliding when it comes to gender parity. The new German Parliament, which met for the first time on Tuesday, has always been more male and less diverse than the population it represents, but the new one will be even more male and — compared with the society as a whole — less diverse than the one before it.

Only 32 percent of the 630 new lawmakers are women, a drop from 35 percent when the last Parliament was formed in 2021.

In a country where society has appeared at times reluctant to turn away from traditional gender roles, the number of women in the highest elected body has been stagnating since 2013, when it hit a high of 36 percent. The president of Germany, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, pointed to this statistic during a speech at a recent Women’s Day celebration.

“When our democracy has a problem with women, then our country has a problem with democracy,” Mr. Steinmeier said. He noted that even if every elected woman from all of the country’s parties voted together as a bloc, they would not reach the one-third minority needed to block changes to the Constitution.

Reforming the Assumed Consent Premise of Sexual Violation Law

Anna High, Mistakes And Ignorance Of Law: Lessons For Sexual Violation Reform From New Zealand 

In successive waves of sexual violation law reform, many common law jurisdictions have attempted to retreat from 'assumed consent', the premise that it can reasonably be assumed another person internally consents in the absence of any communication thereof. In Aotearoa New Zealand, the general trajectory of sexual violation law reform has been away from 'assumed consent' and towards the idea that consent must be communicated, and there are increasing calls for going further by way of adopting affirmative consent reform. However, throughout, a competing concern has been at play: that if the law is reformed to fully reject assumed consent, this might unfairly punish those who are ignorant of law's updated normative stance. This concern is apparent in both reform debates and in historical case law in which a 'mistake of law' has effectively been treated by appellate courts as exculpatory; it is also likely to continue to influence jury decision-making regardless of further doctrinal consent reforms. The 'ignorance of law' concern will need to be squarely confronted in jurisdictions contemplating possible updates to the law of consent. Relatedly, it is arguable that affirmative consent reform itself might play an important educative role, contributing to shifts in prevailing normative views over time.

Ester Anne Victoria Moraes on "Why the Global Gag Rule Failed in India"

Ester Anne Victoria Moraes has published Why the Global Gag Rule Failed in India: The Legacy of Postcolonial Population Control in Governance. The article was published in Studies in Comparative International Development. The abstract is excerpted below: 

This paper examines the effect of the Mexico City Policy, also called the Global Gag Rule, in India. The Gag Rule is a high-profile example of a coercive federal funding policy. It prevents Global South NGOs that receive US federal aid from working on abortion. The 2017 re-instatement of the Gag Rule and its expansion in 2019 was expected to devastate abortion services, advocacy, and discourse in the Global South. However, India is a peculiar example of a Global South country that was not directly or significantly impacted. On the contrary, abortion access was expanded under the law, and NGO advocacy and coalition-building for expanding access to safe abortion services in India was renewed while the Gag Rule was active. Using qualitative interviews and a historical analysis, I examine the Gag Rule in interaction with country-level “reproductive governance” apparatus in India. I argue that the protection of abortion services and advocacy from the Gag Rule is a by-product of India’s mode of reproductive governance, which is built on population control, itself an outcome of a historical US-India financial relationship and continued nationalist interest in targeted control over reproduction of minority populations. I demonstrate that the impact of transnational Global North funding policies is thus variable and mediated by the pre-existing policy landscape and form of reproductive governance.

Mugambi Jouet on "Abortion and American Exceptionalism"

 

Mugambi Jouet has published Abortion and American Exceptionalism on SSRN. The article is forthcoming in the Criminal Law Review. The abstract is excerpted below:  

This Article explores why abortion is being recriminalized in the United States in sharp contrast to the historical evolution of reproductive rights. Its thesis is that abortion exemplifies American exceptionalism in the original sense of the phrase that America is an “exception,” especially within the Western world. Yet exceptionalism should not be misunderstood as historical determinism or cultural essentialism. By the early 1970s, America was converging with peer Western democracies in liberalizing abortion. This process of convergence was ultimately halted by the mounting influence of the U.S. pro-life movement in an age when tolerance or support for reproductive rights increasingly became the norm abroad.

When Dobbs overruled Roe, it not only exacerbated polarization within America, but also the divide between America and other Western democracies. This divergence was epitomized by the criticism that Dobbs garnered from U.S. allies, which led to remarkable public statements by Justice Samuel Alito defending his decision from condemnation by foreign leaders.

While abortion is often analyzed in isolation, this multidisciplinary Article focuses on its interrelationship with wider features of American exceptionalism. A distinctive religious landscape sheds light on the intensity of opposition to abortion among the substantial minority of Americans who share a traditionalist worldview. The history of Catholicism and evangelicalism in America has notably diverged from fellow Western societies in ways that are largely overlooked. This unique social environment has contributed to the resilience of the U.S. anti-abortion movement, which has an outsized impact due to the exceptional weight of lobbying by special interests over American government. By holding that religious opposition to abortion can legitimately be channeled through secularized laws and policies, the U.S. Supreme Court has further enabled this movement to be highly effective. Organized opposition to abortion instead declined elsewhere in the West concurrently with the decline of organized religion, especially traditionalist conceptions of Christianity. Modern America is now an outlier, refighting and relitigating an endless battle over abortion.

 

Rosalind Dixon on "Abusive Feminism"

Rosalind Dixon has published Abusive Feminism in Volume 66 of the Boston College Law Review. The abstract is excerpted here. 

 

The language of gender equality is increasingly popular worldwide. Yet, it is used both to advance women’s rights and justify the rollback of commitments to equality and democracy. This kind of “abusive feminism” is also arguably on the rise: would-be authoritarian actors today often attempt simultaneously to appeal both to conservative anti-feminist and feminist voters. In one breath, authoritarian actors condemn feminist ideas, and in the other, they selectively and opportunistically advance the language, if not substance, of women’s rights and ideas about women’s descriptive representation. This Article explores this phenomenon, and its prevalence in democracies under strain today—including in the United States, Europe, and Africa—as well as its logic and preconditions. In addition, it explores potential responses on the part of feminists and those committed to electoral democracy. Ultimately, the Article suggests, the safest defense against abusive feminism lies in a general shift toward greater human rights realism over formalism, together with a more careful, anti-essentialist approach on the part of feminist scholars and practitioners. But achieving this shift is likely to involve a range of real-world challenges.

Recommended Principles and Standards for Engaging in International Commercial Surrogacy Arrangements

Surrogacy 360 has published "Recommended Principles and Standards for Engaging in International Commercial Surrogacy Arrangements." It includes a map of current laws. Here is an excerpt:  

In this document, Surrogacy360 outlines recommended principles and standards for cross-border surrogacy arrangements Many can also be applied in domestic settings (where all parties are in the same country). Our intention is to provide guidance for surrogacy clinics, providers, intermediaries, researchers, and policy makers working to improve conditions for international surrogacy. 

*  *  *

In order to ensure the health, well-being, and rights of each party involved in surrogacy arrangements – children born through surrogacy, surrogates, intended parents, and egg donors (if involved) – the following principles should guide the development of regulation and oversight of cross-border surrogacy and be reflected (where possible) in individual surrogacy arrangements.

Principles

1. International surrogacy arrangements must be approached from an equity perspective; this requires acknowledging and addressing differences in power and privilege between intended parents and surrogates. * * *  

2. Surrogates must maintain all rights to self-determination and decision-making over themselves and their pregnancies.

3. Surrogates must be guaranteed legal rights, medical protocols that prioritize their health, and conditions that do not compromise their physical or mental well-being during their medical treatments, pregnancies, and post-partum period.

4. Egg donors must be able to maintain all rights to self-determination and decision making during the egg donation process.

5. Egg donors must be guaranteed legal rights as well as medical protocols that prioritize their health and do not compromise their physical or mental well-being during the entire egg donation process.

6. The rights of individuals and couples whose status as parents may be vulnerable—due to inadequate protections regarding sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, ability, or religion in their home country or country of the surrogacy arrangement—must be respected and guaranteed.

7. Legal parentage must not be predicated on a genetic connection to the child born through surrogacy.

8. Intended parents should not enter into surrogacy agreements in countries where surrogacy is prohibited; doing so may lead to uncertainty regarding the citizenship and legal parentage of the child born through the process and the possibility that surrogates would be held criminally accountable.

9. Children born through surrogacy must be guaranteed citizenship in the country in which they will reside after birth.

10. People born through surrogacy must be guaranteed the right to knowledge of their gestational and genetic origins.

11. Intended parents must agree to parent and take financial responsibility for any children born through their surrogacy arrangements regardless of number, sex, genetic condition, or physical or mental ability.

12. Contact between intended parents and surrogates should be allowed and encouraged to recognize the humanity and integrity of the surrogate’s role and to provide intended parents with any necessary information about her health, well-being, and conditions.

Standards

The standards provide a roadmap to put the principles into practice. * * * 

1. The surrogate must be provided full and accurate medical information by agencies, clinics, and health providers about all aspects of embryo transfer, pregnancy, and delivery. * * * 

2. The surrogate’s full understanding of all aspects of the contract must be ensured, and her agreement and signature must be secured without coercion.

Contract provisions

3. The surrogate must have the right to make all health and welfare decisions regarding herself and her pregnancy * * *  

4. In keeping with accepted standards for best medical practice, clinics must conduct single embryo transfer unless there are exceptional circumstances * * *  

5. The surrogate must not be required to undergo a medically unnecessary cesarean section, which has well-recognized attendant risks.

6. In compensated arrangements, the surrogate should be guaranteed a compensation schedule that provides for payment throughout the pregnancy (rather than a bulk payment after the child is born). * * *  

7. In compensated arrangements, an independent escrow account must be set up to guarantee timely payments to the surrogate * * *  

8. The intended parents must pay for independent legal representation for the surrogate throughout the process of developing the surrogacy contract and for the duration of the contract by an attorney of her choosing. * * *  

9. The intended parents must pay for the surrogate’s medical care by health professionals of her choosing * * * 

10. Where available, a surrogate should be provided with a disability insurance policy to be paid for by the intended parents * * *  

11. A surrogate should be provided with a life insurance policy to be paid for by the intended parents * * *  

12. Contact must be allowed between the intended parents and the surrogate before, during, and after her pregnancy.

Rights of Egg Donors

13. The egg donor must be given full and accurate medical information by agencies, clinics, and health providers about all aspects of the egg retrieval process * * *

14. Clinics must not overstimulate the egg donor to produce more eggs. * * *  

15. Clinics should not engage in “shared cycles” where eggs are split between two or more sets of intended parents * * * 

16. Agencies and clinics should not conduct egg retrieval with an egg donor who has experienced ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS), has a history of polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) or endometriosis, has undergone egg retrieval cycles within the last three months, or who has completed six cycles or more in her lifetime.

17. The egg donor must be provided with access to medical care paid for by intended parents or the clinic or agency * * * 

18. The egg donor must be provided with legal representation * * *  

19. If an egg donor will receive compensation for the arrangement, a schedule of compensation must be contractually agreed upon. * * *  

20. Egg donors must be able to withdraw consent and discontinue participation without incurring financial consequences.

Rights of Intended Parents

21. Policies, standards, practices, and protections related to international surrogacy arrangements must apply equally without regard to sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, marital status, ability, or religion of the intended parents.

22. Non-genetic intended parents must not be denied legal recognition of parentage. * * *

23. Prior to entering into a surrogacy contract, the intended parents must have access to up-to-date, accurate information * * *  

Rights of People Born Through Surrogacy

24. Decisions regarding medical practices must prioritize the health of the child * * *

25. The citizenship of the child must be guaranteed in the intended parents’ home country or intended country of residence. * * *  

26. The egg donor, sperm donor, and surrogate should agree to identity release when the person born through surrogacy reaches maturity.

 

Susan Serrano on "Intersectional Imperial Legacies in the U.S. Territories"

Susan K. Serrano has published Intersectional Imperial Legacies in the U.S. Territories in the Yale Law Journal Forum. The abstract is excerpted here. 

Women and people who can become pregnant in the U.S. territories experience particularized harms often rooted in U.S. colonization and the territories’ political relationship with the United States. From reproductive harms to economic challenges characterized by dangerously limited access to critical public benefits, women’s intersectional lived experiences are often marginalized or ignored. This Essay describes how traditional legal frameworks can sharply constrict available remedies and tend to further--or at least maintain--the U.S. colonial project. It then employs theories of intersectionality and coloniality to sketch the contours of a rational-basis-with-bite framework that would oblige the parties to ventilate issues fully and closely examine likely consequences. In doing so, it begins to chart a theoretical and pragmatic path for assessing territorial residents’ challenges to exclusionary laws while leaving room for beneficial laws that promote communities’ self-determination.

New Book, Wages for Housework: The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor

Emily Callaci, Wages for Housework: The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor (Seal Press 2025)

Women do more than three-quarters of all the world’s unpaid care work, contributing over $9 trillion to the global economy each year. Dishes don’t clean themselves; dinner is not magically made; children must be cared for. But why is this work not compensated?
 
Wages for Housework is the fascinating international story of Selma James, Silvia Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Wilmette Brown, and Margaret Prescod, whose movement demanded wages as a starting point for remaking the world as we know it. Drawing on their campaign’s roots in 1970s America, Italy, and the UK, with original archival research and interviews, historian Emily Callaci explores the revolutionary potential of paying women for their work in the home, and how Wages for Housework reimagined potential futures under capitalism—and beyond—in ways that continue to be relevant today. 

Together Women Rise's Recorded Webinar on "The State of Foreign Aid & Its Impact on Women and Girls"

Check out this informative webinar hosted by Together Women Rise. It discusses "The State of Foreign Aid & Its Impact on Women and Girls." Here's the summary of the event: 

Together Women Rise Advocacy Group with RESULTS hosted a special webinar, “The State of U.S. Foreign Aid and Its Impact on Women & Girls,” focusing on the Administration’s freeze on foreign aid. Dorothy Monza from RESULTS shared insights on the freeze’s impact on USAID. Chris Jocknick from Landesa and Polly Dolan from Nurturing Minds detailed how these cuts have affected their projects in land rights, climate action, and education. Watch the full recording to learn how you can take action to support these critical programs and help women and girls globally.

 

USAID's Reproductive Health Funding is Gone

Jessica Kutz, The 19th, has published USAID's reproductive health funding has saved millions of lives. Now it's gone. 

The article explains USAID's relationship to reproductive health and its problematic origins: 

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was established in 1961 to provide foreign assistance to impoverished countries around the world through food aid and humanitarian and economic development work. It is also one of the world’s largest providers of contraception through its family planning program. According to the Congressional Research Service, the agency’s funding in 2023 was about $40 billion, which represented less than 1 percent of the federal budget.

* * *

USAID started its family planning program in 1965 as an anti-population growth initiative, Schlachter said. “[It was] really a racist program to ensure that Black and brown people had less babies. But it morphed over time into being the backbone of the reproductive health sector within global health.” Experts say the family planning work, which ranges from sexual education, access to contraceptives, and maternal and infant health, have all been implemented as a way to bolster the human rights of women and girls around the world. By giving people the ability to delay pregnancy into adulthood, and the choice to go to school or have fewer children, they and their families are healthier.

The Trump Administration's executive order stopped all funding, including reproductive health aide: 

For over a decade, USAID has spent about $600 million annually for its family planning work. “The good that money has done is unquantifiable,” Owolabi said. She received training through a USAID-funded program for HIV prevention and treatment and family planning while she was a medical student in Nigeria. She’s seen how that money has led to better maternal health outcomes and helped combat HIV in places like Rwanda and Uganda through training doctors and providing supplies and antiretrovirals to clinics. Now she’s hearing accounts of how that work has been affected.

“Imagine a rural area in Uganda, a small health outpost where women will come with their babies for care, or their pregnancy, or [where a] child can receive immunization, or for family planning counseling,” she said. “The staff can’t work because of the stop work order, the drugs, the medications, the commodities … are no longer available because USAID is one of the largest procurers and suppliers of commodities in this country. So you handicap health workers, you handicap the health system. You hold the logistics and supply chain ransom.”

As of 2023, 67% of contraceptives supplied through USAID went to Africa, where some of the leading causes of death for girls and women are related to pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections like HIV. According to an analysis by the Guttmacher Institute, if no contraceptive care is provided by USAID in 2025, that will lead to about 4.2 million unintended pregnancies and over 8,000 deaths related to pregnancy and childbirth complications.

“Women will die as a result of this decision,” said Rachel Clement, senior director of government relations at PAI, a global advocacy group. “Those people will die from preventable maternal mortality causes.”

Kim, Lapp, and Lee on "Critical Immigration Theory"

Kathleen Kim, Kevin Lapp, and Jennifer J. Lee have published "Critical Immigration Theory" in volume 104 of the Boston University Law Review. The article is inspired by the authors' work on the "Immigration Law Opinions Rewritten" volume of the Feminist Judgments Project. The abstract is excerpted here: 

U.S. immigration law has always been a place for Americans to enact their many prejudices. Often, it edifies norms that exclude and subordinate noncitizens due to their race, gender, or socioeconomic status. As a result, immigration law and policy create great human suffering through actions such as separating families, excluding refugees, and detaining noncitizens.

In response, scholars are engaging in a distinctive method of interrogating immigration law. We call this analytic method Critical Immigration Legal Theory (“CILT”). Derived from critical race theory and other similar theories, CILT critiques facially colorblind immigration laws to expose their subordination of immigrants based on race and other historically oppressed identities, while challenging the fixed legal categories of alienage and citizenship by defining new ways of belonging. It also uses anti-essentialism to contest the negative stereotypes of immigrants as undesirable outsiders as well as the positive stereotypes of deserving immigrants and “model minorities” that encourage respectability politics. Further, CILT has a central praxis dimension that aspires to transform immigration law and its treatment of noncitizens by aligning with immigrant rights movements that are mobilizing for social change and legal transformation.

Our goal is to recognize the trend of CILT methodology within immigration law scholarship as a means of contestation, resistance, and praxis. CILT has emerged out of the growing cadre and diversity of immigration law scholars and the increasingly blurred lines between law scholar, lawyer, and activist. Their lived experiences--personal and professional--inform their perspectives on the systems of power that subjugate the noncitizens with whom they collaborate. By describing current CILT approaches, we hope to begin a conversation for others to connect, weigh in, and build on our description. We conclude by considering the implications of CILT, from the potential for backlash to how it changes the way that immigration law scholars teach and work with students, clients, and communities.

A New Criminal Offense of "Intimate Intrusions" for Online Abuse

Clare McGlynn, Towards a New Criminal Offence of Intimate Intrusions, Feminist Legal Studies, 2024

This article suggests a new approach to tackling women’s experiences of harm and abuse, particularly online, namely a criminal law of ‘intimate intrusions’. It seeks to reinvigorate Betsy Stanko’s (1985) concept of intimate intrusions, developing it particularly in the context of the ever-increasing prevalence of online abuse against women and girls, as well as establishing how this conceptualisation might manifest in law reform. Intimate intrusions, it is argued, provides a valuable umbrella concept that may better encompass both the range and nature of existing harms, as well as, crucially, the yet-to-be-imagined modes of abuse. Further, in suggesting a new criminal offence of intimate intrusions, this article challenges the common process of piecemeal criminal law reform, with each new manifestation of abuse resulting in a specific offence tackling that specific behaviour. While such an approach provides new redress options, it remains limited. Following an examination of recent reforms in Northern Ireland, where three distinct new criminal offences were adopted covering downblousing, upskirting and cyberflashing, this article suggests that the concept of ‘intimate intrusions’ provides a better foundation for a new criminal offence and outlines its potential nature and scope.

Call for Papers: International Society of Family Law, Hosted in Philadelphia on June 16

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)

Women's Legal History Podcast, Key Legal Events During the Interwar Years

Legal History Podcast: Not For Want of Trying

A legal history podcast that uncovers key events in women's legal history in the UK during the interwar years.

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. 

New Book about "Birth in Times of Despair"

The N.Y.U. Press has published Carina Heckert's book "Birth in Times of Despair: Reproductive Violence on the US-Mexico Border." The book description is excerpted below:

In El Paso, Texas, the racist undertones of anti-immigrant sentiment have contributed to various forms of violence in the region, including the 2019 mass shooting that was the deadliest attack on Latinos in US history. As the community continued to mourn this tragedy, the COVID-19 pandemic unleashed yet another set of economic, social, and public health catastrophes that were disproportionately felt within the border region.

In Birth in Times of Despair, Carina Heckert traces women’s emotional experiences of pregnancy, birth, and the postpartum period in the midst of a series of longstanding and ongoing crises in the US-Mexico border region. Drawing from interviews, surveys, and medical records of women who gave birth during an intense period of sociopolitical crisis, she examines how limited access to health care, inhumane immigration policies, and exposure to an array of harmful social environmental circumstances serve as sources of intense harm for pregnant and recently pregnant women. In so doing, Heckert reveals how these experiences serve as a profound critique of policies that continue to fail to protect women and their families. She concludes with suggestions for practical, humane, and urgent policy changes to alleviate the needless suffering of this vulnerable group.

With its comprehensive portrait of the abysmal physical and mental health outcomes pregnant women face within the border region, Birth in Times of Despair expands our understanding of how obstetric violence is enhanced by the structural violence of the state, and unveils the urgency to ameliorate the harm caused by current immigration policies. 

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.