Gender and the Law Blog

Integrating Women's Legal History and Women Judges Into Wikipedia

Sally Kenney, Women Judges and Wikipedia, 16 ConLawNOW 109 (2025)

Although many academics may openly discourage their students from consulting it, Wikipedia is the go-to first port-of-call for information for scholarly research, journalists, and even judges. Its info boxes are the source for Google and artificial intelligence in general. Wikipedia is the largest and most widely used encyclopedia in history. Just as feminist scholars have broken into mainstream journals and gained a toehold within university presses, these sources have become increasingly irrelevant and unavailable behind paywalls. Instead, Wikipedia has emerged as the standard research source, but it presents significant barriers to entry for feminist scholars and subjects of women, feminism, and gender. After explaining those barriers, this essay encourages scholars to embrace and learn to contribute to Wikipedia as an important way to amplify feminist voices and disseminate discoveries to prevent the erasure of women and feminism from history. It takes as its example, a project profiling women judges.

Are Oscar Awards Segregated by Gender Constitutional?

Julianne Hill, Are Gendered Oscars Constitutional? University of New Mexico Students are Asking the Question, ABJ J (Feb. 18, 2025)

That could be a reality as the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences considers a petition from undergraduate students in a University of New Mexico constitutional law course that questions the 96-year-old policy of separating actor awards by gender, stating it is legally flawed.

In October, 10 students sent a 99-page document citing constitutional precedents and suggesting the academy’s board of governors form a task force to examine why the Oscars continue to have gender-specific categories when other industries’ top awards—like the Grammy Awards—do not.***

While the proposal was developed and sent before Gascón became the first openly transgender performer to be nominated for best actress, a nod for her work in “Emilia Perez,” underscores the need for reconsideration, says Marijose Ramirez, one of the paper’s authors. “Society is moving towards a direction where the common binary isn’t standard,” she adds.

Their petition leans on U.S. Supreme Court precedent, including J.E.B. v. Alabama (1994), prohibiting gender-based jury selection; U.S. v. Virginia (1996), striking down gender-based admissions criteria for the Virginia Military Institute; and Hornstine v. Township of Moorestown (2003), a New Jersey federal district court decision rejecting separate valedictorian categories based on classifications not related to merit.***

he students looked at the model used by Grammys, which switched to nongendered categories in 2012. Despite concerns that male performers would sweep certain categories, “Females have unarguably dominated the Grammys ever since,” McCoy says.

To counter the reduced opportunities to win an acting Oscar, the report suggests the task force also consider adding new categories, like Best Ensemble, based on merit instead of gender, as well as receive public input.

Danielle Keats Citron and Ari Ezra Waldman on "Rethinking Youth Privacy"

Danielle Keats Citron and Ari Ezra Waldman have posted "Rethinking Youth Privacy." This article is forthcoming in volume 111 of the Virginia Law Review.  The abstract is excerpted here: 

Congress and state legislatures are showing renewed interest in youth privacy, proposing myriad new laws to address data extraction, addiction, manipulation, and more. Almost all of their proposals and all of youth privacy law in general follows what we call the parental control model. The model is erected in the name of children, but it mostly ignores their expressed privacy interests. Under the model, parents are asked to provide consent for corporate collection of children's data, to check on the handling of that data, and to protect children from online dangers. Because parental control dominates policymaking and scholarly discourse, it goes unquestioned. This Article challenges the status quo. Parental control risks harm to vulnerable children, overburdens caregivers (who are more often women), and denies youth the intimate privacy that they need to grow and develop close relationships, including, ironically, with their parents. The parental control model disserves nearly everyone involved except companies that press for its adoption because it earns them massive advertising profits without costly responsibilities for youth safety and privacy. The time is now to reimagine the youth privacy project. We need to shed the yoke of exclusive parental control and protect the intimate privacy that youth want, expect, and deserve. Our proposal foregrounds youth voices and intimate privacy interests. It calls for policymakers to place responsibility on corporate shoulders where it belongs, which accords with what young people say they want. Companies are best situated to secure youth privacy and to minimize risks to child safety. Beyond law, parents should be encouraged to act more as partners with their children in the effort to protect their intimate privacy. That personal imperative will redound to parents' and children's benefit and engender trust and love.

ANSIRH Report on Abortion Onscreen in 2024

ANSIRH has published its report on abortion depictions in film and TV for 2024. 

The findings are excerpted here: 

• We documented at least 67 abortion plotlines on U.S. television this year. Half (50%) included plotlines about characters of color seeking abortions, while white characters make up slightly less than half (45%).

• About one-third of this year’s characters received emotional support before, during, or after their abortions.

• Less than half (42%) of this year’s plotlines included a character actually obtaining an abortion or disclosing a past abortion. The majority of depictions were either considerations of abortion or discussions of abortion generally.

• About one-third of this year’s television plotlines depicted political, logistical, or financial obstacles to abortion access, an increase since 2023.

• We saw a record low number of medication abortion depictions. Of the 67 plotlines, only two included depictions of medication abortion.

Its implications are summarized here: 

This year, television viewers tuned in for a wide range of abortion storyline depictions, with a record number of abortion storylines featuring characters of color. Many television shows referenced the ongoing political and cultural fallout from the Dobbs decision, even using humor to poke fun at abortion restrictions. Missing from this year’s plotlines were characters parenting at the time of their abortions, characters struggling to make ends meet, in-depth portrayals of medication abortion, and any mention of self-managed abortion. Several troubling themes emerged, including the high prevalence of coerced abortions and the return of “false pregnancy” and “averted abortion” storylines that mention but ultimately avoid portraying characters obtaining abortions. 

President Designates Frances Perkins National Monument for First Woman Cabinet Secretary

President Biden Designates Frances Perkins National Monument

Today President Biden will sign a proclamation establishing the Frances Perkins National Monument in Newcastle, Maine, to honor the historic contributions of America’s first woman Cabinet Secretary and the longest-serving Secretary of Labor.

Frances Perkins was the leading architect behind the New Deal and led many labor and economic reforms that continue to benefit Americans today. During her 12 years as Secretary of Labor under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, she envisioned and helped create Social Security; helped millions of Americans get back to work during the Great Depression; fought for the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively; and established the minimum wage, overtime pay, prohibitions on child labor, and unemployment insurance

National Park Service, Frances Perkins National Monument

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.”

How Television is Depicting Abortion Post-Dobbs

An article titled "Women's Lives Are on the Line, and Our Hands Are Tied”: How Television Is Reckoning With a Post-Dobbs America" was published by Stephanie Herold in Women's Health Issues. The article concludes: 

Since Dobbs, more television plotlines are portraying obstacles to abortion care, yet they continue to tell stories of white, non-parenting teenagers who make up a small percentage of real abortion patients. Plotlines overrepresent procedural abortion over the more common medication abortion. Depictions of health-related reasons for abortion seeking obscure more commonly provided reasons for abortions, such as mistimed pregnancies, caregiving responsibilities, and financial concerns. Considering the low levels of abortion knowledge nationwide, understanding what (mis)information audiences encounter onscreen is increasingly important.

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.

Charitable Giving to Women's and Girls' Organizations Represents only 1.9 Percent of Giving

Giving to Women’s and Girls’ Organizations Exceeds $10 Billion for First Time yet Still Represents 1.9 Percent of Charitable Giving in the U.S.

The Women’s Philanthropy Institute (WPI) at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy today released its sixth annual Women & Girls Index (WGI), the only systematically generated, comprehensive index that measures charitable giving to organizations dedicated to women and girls in the U.S., including the amount of philanthropic support they receive from individuals, foundations, and corporations. The 2024 WGI adds finalized IRS data from 2021(the last year for which financial data is available) across 54,588 organizations—providing an analysis on the decade 2012 to 2021 that highlights both gaps and growth in philanthropic support for women and girls.

For the first time, women’s and girls’ organizations surpassed $10 billion in giving as they received $10.2 billion in philanthropic support in 2021. This historic milestone is set against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic’s ongoing disproportionate impact on women, particularly women of color and those in low-wage jobs, and ongoing discussions about the systemic barriers to gender equity. While awareness of gender-focused issues such as pay equity and reproductive rights has grown, overall charitable giving that supports women and girls remains relatively small at 1.9% of total giving. This statistic highlights the continued need for greater philanthropic support across the full spectrum of causes that improve the lives of women and girls.

Women Kicked Off Plane for Wearing Crop Tops

Sexist Flight Attendant Boots Female Passengers Over Crop Tops

Two female passengers have accused a Spirit Airlines flight attendant of sexism after he allegedly kicked them off a plane for their choice of dress, as seen in a viral Instagram video.

“It’s just humiliating having to be escorted and treated like a criminal just because we were wearing crop tops,” one of the flyers, named Tara, told the Daily Mail while detailing the alleged blouse arrest.

She and her friend Teresa were flying from Los Angeles to New Orleans to celebrate the former’s birthday when the crewmember singled them out.***

According to the airline’s contract of carriage, a passenger may be asked to vacate the aircraft if “inadequately clothed” or if their attire “is lewd, obscene, or offensive in nature.”

Spirit Airlines Passengers Claimed They Were Kicked Off Plane by Male Flight Attendant for Wearing Crop Tops

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. 

The History of the Gendered Term "Congressman" and its Neutral Alternative "Representative"

You Should Call House Members "Representatives"

For most of the nation’s history, members of the U.S. House of Representatives have been addressed as “Congressman” or “Congresswoman.” By contrast, a senator is referred to as, well, “Senator.”

These gendered terms for House members dominate in journalism, everyday conversation and among members of Congress.

The name Congress refers to the entire national legislature, composed of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Gender identity aside, Congressman and Congresswoman are fundamentally inaccurate terms.

In the Constitution, Congress refers to the legislative branch as a whole. When discussing the membership of Congress, the Constitution uses “Representatives” and “Senators,” but also “Members” in reference to both. “Congressman” is nowhere in that founding document.

One of the foremost scholars of Congress, the late Richard Fenno, wrote, “a House member’s designation, as prescribed in the U.S. Constitution, is not Congressman, it is Representative.”

As a scholar of Congress and particularly the Senate, I am interested in the differences between the two chambers and how that affects American politics. In my investigation of the origins and evolution of congressman and congresswoman, I combed the records of colonial and state legislatures, as well as records related to the country’s founding and newspapers from the end of the 1700s to the mid-1900s.

Even if the current era were not one of justified sensitivity to gender neutrality and diversity, these two terms for House members are not just dated, they are wrong. Representative is the correct but rarely used term.

Harris Made Gender Visible in the 2024 Election, But It Was There All Along

Ms., Harris Just Made Gender Visible in the 2024 Election--But it was There All Along

Now that Joe Biden has announced his withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, the salience of gender as a critical factor in the contest for the presidency will rise quickly to the surface. The surest way to make gender visible in presidential campaigns is to get a woman in the race.

But gender is always present in those campaigns—whether or not it’s visible. Even when two men run against each other, it’s not a “battle of the sexes” between a man and a woman: It’s a contest between two (usually white) men over competing versions of masculinity. That was the case up to the moment of Biden’s withdrawal. The 2024 campaign was gearing up to be a contest between two older white men who represent starkly divergent ideas about the very meaning of manhood.

Many commentators in mainstream and progressive media seem not to understand—or want to discuss—the deeply gendered nature of presidential campaigns or the presidency itself. This glaring deficit in political analysis was on full display in coverage last week of the Republican National Convention (RNC). The GOP put on a four-day, fist-pumping celebration of the manly virtues, culminating yet again in the anointing of a bombastic former real estate mogul, reality TV star and notorious misogynist as the supposed embodiment of those virtues.

The unapologetic celebration of a crude and embarrassingly cartoonish hypermasculinity was so extreme—especially on the penultimate day four—that some TV commentators had trouble mustering anything more thoughtful to say than what CNN’s Chris Wallace said on-air in response to a question from Jake Tapper: When Tapper asked Wallace, “What theme are we seeing at the convention tonight?” Wallace replied, “Testosterone.”

New Sojourner Truth Plaza Honors Abolition and Suffrage Leader in Akron, Ohio

Right here in my hometown, the tribute to Sojourner Truth who famously gave her "Ain't I a Woman" speech here at the Akron Suffrage Meeting. 

Or did she?.... For the full story, see Nell Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol and Lolita Buckner Inniss, "While the Water is Stirring": Sojourner Truth Proto-agonist in the Fight for Black Women's Rights, 100 B. U. L. Rev. 1637 (2020).

Sojourner Truth Legacy Plaza to Open in Akron

***Truth, a former slave, traveled the country advocating for an end to slavery and the betterment of women’s rights. On May 29, 1851, Truth delivered her “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech at the Old Stone Church that was once on High Street at the Ohio Women’s Convention.

The 10,000-square-foot plaza is the “first historic site in Akron that directly reflects and honors the Black woman’s experience,” according to a release from United Way of Summit & Medina. ***

A life-size statue of Truth, created by Akron artist Woodrow Nash, sits in the center of a large impala lily, the national flower of Ghana. Truth has ancestors from Ghana, Harris said, and the flower’s strong structure speaks to her character. 

“I wanted to make every aspect mean something,” Harris said. “I wanted to mix human elements and some of the natural elements with historical elements and try to tie everything together.”

Learning the Law Through Taylor Swift Cases

ABA J., Swift Justice: Students Learn About the Law Through Taylor Swift Cases

As anyone who pays attention to current events knows all too well, Taylor Swift has become ubiquitous.

She’s touring the world, playing to sold out stadiums on her record-breaking “The Eras Tour.” She’s in movie theaters, showing a version of said tour to enchanted Swifties who either couldn’t see her in person or did and want to relive their best day.

She’s at NFL games, trying to bring good karma for her boyfriend, Travis Kelce, and his team, the Kansas City Chiefs. She’s talked about on cable news and social media, as the political world waits to see if she’ll speak now about who she’s endorsing in the 2024 presidential election.

And in at least two law schools, she’s the subject of a class available to students wanting to gain practical knowledge about the law by studying her various legal entanglements and how she emerged stronger.

At the University of Miami School of Law, there was “Intellectual Property Law Through the Lens of Taylor Swift,” a seven-week course taught by Vivek Jayaram, founder of Jayaram Law and co-director of the Arts Law Track in Miami Law’s Entertainment, Arts and Sports Law LL.M program.

Jayaram, who has practiced intellectual property and corporate law for over 20 years, came up with the idea for the class at lunch one day with Gregory Levy, associate dean of Miami Law. Jayaram had just read an article about Swift’s lawsuit with Evermore Park, a theme park in Utah that sued her for trademark infringement after she released an album titled “Evermore” in December 2020.

There were some other lawsuits and legal disputes he had read about involving Swift, including a well-publicized fight starting in 2019 over ownership of her old master recordings that led to her re-recording her back catalogue. There also was a 2014 battle with Spotify over streaming royalties and 2015 deals with JD.com and Alibaba to combat Chinese counterfeiting of her merchandise.

“I said to Greg: ‘I bet Swifties know more about IP law than a lot of lawyers,’” recalls Jayaram, whose favorite Swift album is 1989. “That initiated a bit of a conversation about centering an IP class around her.”

The inaugural class, which met in the spring of 2023, had about 25-30 students. Jayaram says his end game was to use Swift as a means of exploring interesting issues in IP law. He adds that while she was hardly the first artist to experience copyright and trademark issues, she has dealt with them in interesting, innovative ways that have allowed her to experience greater success.

“She’s not the first one who has re-recorded her old songs, but she’s really the only one who has been really successful at it,” says Jayaram, pointing out artists as diverse as The Everly Brothers, Journey and Def Leppard have tried it, with significantly less commercially successful results. “It’s very unusual to do this and have it shoot up to the top of the charts.”

Another law professor had a similar epiphany—this time, after speaking with some of his students who were excited about going to various shows on her recent “The Eras Tour.” “I thought that she could work as a class,” says Sean Kammer, an environmental and torts law professor at University of South Dakota Knudson School of Law. “I got to work and started from the point of view of what are the ways we can use Taylor Swift and her music to learn about the law?”

Kammer’s class, called “The Taylor Swift Effect,” does not just focus on IP law—instead, it looks at various issues, including how Swift’s songwriting and storytelling can help lawyers become better advocates.

“We look at questions that are more theoretical, like how we experience music and how we derive very deep meanings from these pieces,” says Kammer, whose favorite Swift song is “All Too Well” (10 Minute Version). “At the end of the class, we look at what we can learn as creators of legal arguments, to tell the stories we need to tell, by taking lessons from how a songwriter writes a song in terms of organization, style and narrative.”

Other undergraduate and graduate schools have opened their course catalogs to the multi-Grammy winner and recently certified billionaire. Stanford University, Arizona State, Rice University, the University of California at Berkeley and others have introduced classes examining a range of issues, including her lyrical and musical style, the psychology of her music and relationships, and business-oriented courses examining her as an entrepreneur.

A Linguistic Approach to Understanding Implicit Gender Bias in the Legal Profession

Emily Kline, Stolen Voices: A Linguistic Approach to Understanding Implicit Gender Bias in the Legal Profession, 30 UCLA Women's L.J. (2023)  

Relying heavily on socio-linguistical (language and society) studies, this article makes the case that the legal profession’s obedience to stereotypical masculine language “practices” significantly contributes to implicit gender bias. A large body of socio-linguistic scholarship dating back to the 1970’s has found that men and women exhibit subtle but significant lexical differences in the way that they speak and write. Though these differences are arguably linked equally, if not more, to issues of power, socialization, and cultural expectations than to biology, the differences still operate to erect barriers to success for professional women – particularly in a male dominated profession such as the law. Further, socio-linguistic and management theory scholarship demonstrates that professional women regularly encounter bias based upon stereotypes of what their communication style should be – creating untenable situations where women must make strategic and often no-win decisions about how to “perform” language.

Teaching Patriarchy After Barbie

Teaching Patriarchy Post-Barbie, Ms.

Like many, I’m grateful that this summer’s Barbie film has moviegoers around the world talking about the patriarchy. I am delighted that the highest-grossing movie of 2023 has brought the word “patriarchy” into our daily parlance. Now that we have the language to describe our predicament, it’s critically important to keep talking about the patriarchy, and to keep going down the path that Barbie takes us on to investigate the way our daily lives are impacted by patriarchal constructs. I’ve been using similar tactics to the Barbie movie to introduce these ideas to my first-year students at UC Santa Cruz, with revealing results.

Most students sign up for my composition course to fulfill a general writing requirement, without knowing what the subject of the class will be. When they discover the topic on the first day of class, some students express that they have no desire to “Come Closer to Feminism,” as I have titled the course (borrowing this phrase from bell hooks’ marvelous handbook Feminism is for Everybody).

Faced with this reality, I have had to create a way for students to learn about feminism even if they initially describe themselves as anti-feminist. My goal is to make the course accessible and applicable for everyone who is placed into it. This includes helping students of all backgrounds unpack how the intersections of their individual gender, racial and sexual identities make them particularly privileged—or oppressed—within our patriarchal society.

Sologamy, The Increasingly Important Social Identity of Singlehood

 

Naomi Cahn, Singlehood, Wash. U. J. Law & Policy (forthcoming 2024)

Singlehood is becoming an increasingly important social identity category. Thousands of people are members of Facebook groups such as I am my Own Soulmate or Community of Single People. Sologamy, marrying oneself is on the rise. The growing social movement to bring attention to voluntarily single people is creating pressure on the law.

Single people are also highly visible when it comes to categories for the allocation of government benefits: eligibility requirements may well differ based on whether an applicant is single or married. This occurs, for example, in the qualifications for long-term care under Medicaid or various public welfare benefits, the availability of portability in utilizing the estate and gift tax, or even in the choices for filing income tax returns. This categorization reflects core assumptions about the privatization of dependency during marriage rather than taking singlehood seriously.

Nonetheless, this legal treatment and the growing number of voluntarily single people lead to questions about whether singlehood should be a distinct legal category, a basis for analyzing legal distinctions. Indeed, single people are still not yet adequately explored in legal scholarship. This may be a reflection of cultural (and legal) images of single people that are often negative: single people are lonely, have not yet met the right person, are reluctantly un-partnered, singlehood status is seen as something that is temporary and subject to control—or a reflection that singlehood is such an indeterminate legal category, difficult to define, that it would be too difficult to establish it as a distinct category.