A follow-up to my earlier post here on the UPS spousal benefits issue. Governor Corzine has now entered the fray, sending a letter to UPS (here), urging it to extend benefits and pointing out that NJ law in fact construes “spouse” to include parties to a civil union.
-Anthony C. Infanti
In 2006, at least 12 journals published articles containing citations in which Justice Ginsburg’s name is misspelled.
The offenders include:
Fordham L. Rev.
U. St. Thomas L.J.
U. Rich. L. Rev.
B.U. Pub. Int. L.J.
Fla. J. Int’l L.
U. Mich. J.L. Reform
Law Libr. J.
U.C. Davis L. Rev.
Fordham Int’l L.J.
Rutgers L. Rev.
J.L. & Religion
U. Dayton L. Rev.
Davis and Rutgers deserve special mention because they also have trouble with Professor MacKinnon’s name. See here.
But, I throw stones from a glass house. I misspelled Ginsburg’s name in a footnote today. Spell-check is not enough.
-Bridget Crawford
Yesterday the Georgia Supreme Court heard an appeal in the case of Genarlow Wilson, previously blogged here, here and here.
From the NYTimes:
Originally, the Supreme Court declined to expedite the case and was set to hear the appeals in October.
But this month, the justices apparently had a change of heart and squeezed the case onto its docket ahead of a scheduled break.
[Wilson’s lawyer] Ms. Bernstein thanked the court, saying,”Every day that a defendant spends in jail is a precious day of their life.”
As Ms. Smith, the senior assistant attorney general, urged the justices to remember Mr. Wilson’s victim, Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears interrupted.”But today it’s a misdemeanor,”Justice Sears said.
The presiding justice, Carol W. Hunstein, asked Ms. Smith,”What does the state have to say about criminalizing our children?”
“Teenagers make mistakes,”Justice Hunstein added.”Where is the justice in a 10-year sentence and being on the sex offender registry for the rest of that person’s life?”
What the State of Georgia has to say about criminalizing black male children, in particular?
The full article is here.
-Bridget Crawford
FeministLawProf Myrna Raeder (Southwestern University School of Law) has posted to ssrn her article, “Comments on Child Abuse Litigation in a ‘Testimonial’ World: The Intersection of Competency, Hearsay and Confrontation.” Here is the abstract:
This article explores the impact the testimonial approach to Confrontation Clause jurisprudence has on child abuse cases. While neither Crawford nor Davis dealt with child witnesses, they contain several references that are significant in analyzing hearsay by children who do not testify. I discuss the possible interpretations of White v. Illinois, Idaho v. Wright, and King v. Brasier in a testimonial regime before turning to issues regarding the competency of child witnesses and their ability to provide an adequate opportunity for cross-examination. The article highlights the increased importance of Maryland v. Craig in presenting testimony by child witness, and argues that Craig’s balancing approach to confrontation survives Crawford. Forfeiture is analyzed in the child abuse context. Finally, the article evaluates the admissibility of statements that were originally made in forensic interviews, in medical settings, and to private individuals who have no mandatory reporting obligations or law enforcement ties, when the child does not testify at trial.
The full article is available here.
-Bridget Crawford
As everyone knows by now, Hairspray centers on Tracey Turnblad, a young overweight girl in the early 60’s who seeks her dream of dancing for a television dance show and in so doing pursues her instinctive belief in the equality of blacks. This story, by the inimitable John Waters (who has a cameo as a flasher who’s friendly to Tracey but flashes the bitchy girls who mock her), has several gender twists to it.
Tracey’s mother, Edna, was originally played by the unique drag queen Divine (photo 
at right), who gave the role a hearty warmth. Her camp twisted this fairly traditional story to bring all us countercultural types on board. Here, John Travolta (below left) plays the role with, as A.O. Scott of the New York Times notes, a heavy dose of realism. There’s not much camp here, though. Think Tootsie. With Divine in the film or Harvey Fierstein in the musical, Waters delinked gender from motherhood, making it patently clear that one’s mother could be a man. Different motherhoods only get their due in Almodovar’s All About My Mother, not the film version of Hairspray.
While there’s plenty of anti-racism discourse in the film, feminism is all sotto voce. The two principal”female”roles are heavy-set women (Tracey and her mom) who discover their own sexiness throughout the film. This storyline is straight out of”fat is a feminist issue,”and it makes a powerful statement that even heavier women can get the hot guy, fame, and happiness. The film luxuriates in the joys of eating (donuts served on a platter at the plus-size women’s clothing store) and dieting is something to escape, not observe. This is the lure for the gay audience – we gays love a woman who’s”different”but still blows everyone away.
Intersectionality is not even protean here – plenty of black women, but the racism they suffer is indistinct from that faced by men. In a strange way, the deliberately naïve portrait of civil rights has a deliciousness of the moral certainty of the early 60’s, in contrast to the contested identities and issues around race in more recent decades. Who couldn’t cheer for the subversiveness of then-derided, now-accepted (hetero)interracial lust?
As I sat in the Ziegfield theater, surrounded by hundreds of gay men (many lawyers among them), we laughed, cheered, and applauded the screen. The show’s subversiveness is diminished. Let’s hope the real different mothers and the real heavy gals in the world benefit from this confection of a film in ways more lasting than the joys of a good donut.
-Darren Rosenblum
From the Washington Post:
Hillary Clinton’s Tentative Dip Into New Neckline Territory
By Robin Givhan
There was cleavage on display Wednesday afternoon on C-SPAN2. It belonged to Sen. Hillary Clinton.
The full article is here.
What do you all think about this article? It is very interesting in light of our discussion of what women should wear last winter.
I need to think about it more, but my initial reaction is this. They wouldn’t say this about a man. Looks, dress, appearance, sexiness is not an issue we focus on for male politicians. It is just like the discussion early on about Hilary’s hair and “fat legs.” It is a way to trivialize and refocus the discussion from her merits to her appearance. This always happens to women.
Second, the tone of the article has sort of a positive spin: that she is showing a sexier more “feminine” side, which is a backhanded insult to her traditional style. Moreover, it seems to suggest that she really isn’t or hasn’t been a real “woman,” which may be intended (or not) to fight the fear that she will get all the female votes as the first serious female presidential candidate.
AND the suggestion that to be ok women need to be “feminine” and “socially approvable” (which in our society tends to be sexually available and young/stupid/naive).
No wonder professional women all over the country are thinking they need to be sexier, show cleavage, wear short skirts, etc. The flaw is that this will backfire every time. So we are insuring female failure.
Am I wrong?
-Cheryl Preston
(Cross-posted with permission of Professor Preston from the AALS Women in Legal Education listserv – Eds.)
In the first six months of 2007, at least 18 journals published articles containing citations in which Catharine MacKinnon’s name is misspelled. The offenders are:
Alb. L. Rev.
California L. Rev.
Cardozo J.L. & Gender
Case W. Res. J. Int’l L.
Colum. J. Gender & L.
Iowa Law Review
Me. L. Rev.
N.Y.U. Rev. L. & Soc. Change
Pac. Rim L. & Pol’y J.
Rutgers L. Rev.
Tex. Int’l L.J.
U.C. Davis L. Rev.
U.C. Davis J. Juv. L. & Pol’y
U. Cin. L. Rev.
U. Miami L. Rev.
Whittier L. Rev.
Wm. & Mary J. Women & L.
Vand. J. Transnat’l L.
Nobody’s perfect and, yes, my home institution’s main journal is on the list of offenders for the previous year. But we can do better.
-Bridget Crawford
Here is an excerpt from the NYT article:
Women view Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton more favorably than men do, but she still faces skepticism among some women, especially those who are older and those who are married, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.
Women hold more positive views than men of all the leading Democratic candidates. But winning the support of women, who made up 54 percent of voters in the last presidential election, is especially important to Mrs. Clinton, who has sought to rally them behind her quest to become the nation’s first female president.
The poll found that over all, women tend to agree with her on the issues and see her as a strong leader and as a positive role model.
All of those polled : both women and men : said they thought Mrs. Clinton would be an effective commander in chief, suggesting she has made headway in diminishing concerns that her sex would impede her from leading the nation in wartime. A majority of those polled also said they thought she would win the White House if she captured the Democratic nomination.
But the poll also held some warning signs for Mrs. Clinton, 59, the junior senator from New York.
Forty percent of voters view her unfavorably, more than for any of the other major candidates for president (although they are not as well known). Neither men nor women fully trust that she is saying what she really believes, the poll found. …
… The vast majority of all voters : more than 80 percent : think it very likely or somewhat likely that Mrs. Clinton will win the Democratic nomination. More than 60 percent think she is likely to win the presidency.
The poll was conducted by telephone across the country from July 9 to July 17 among 1,554 adults. Of those, 1,068 were women, a deliberate oversampling designed to examine the views of different groups of women. The margin of sampling error for all adults and for women is plus or minus three percentage points.
Among all registered voters, 46 percent of women have a favorable view of Mrs. Clinton, while 33 percent have an unfavorable view. The rest are undecided.
Does that sound “supportive but skeptical” to you? Sheesh.
–Ann Bartow
From The Chron. Previous related posts here (noting comments flurry), here, here and here. Supposedly, the text of the letter Derrida sent to the UCI Chancellor is here, though its authenticity cannot be confirmed. It reads in pertinent part:
… First, as concerns probability, I can testify on the basis of what I have been told by many colleagues (including Dragan, obviously). It would seem that the allegations of the plaintiff are unfair and in bad faith (I will not yet say perverse). When there has been neither any coercion or violence brought to bear on her, nor any attack (moreover very improbable!) on the presumed”innocence”of a 27- or 28-year-old woman, where does she find the grounds, how can she claim to have the right to initiate such a serious procedure and to put in motion such a weighty juridico-academic bureaucracy against a respectable and universally respected professor? I have also heard said that all the legal procedures were not observed in the conduct of the inquiry, notably in the way in which the administration informed (in fact failed to inform) our colleagues of new aspects of the law. I have especially heard said that, without even envisaging all sorts of intermediary stages, the provision of a whole range sanctions or warnings, a recommendation has already been made to apply the worst possible sanction of last resort: the exclusion of our colleague from UCI. Why has such a precipitous action been considered? Why go so quickly and so far? …
Again, it is not clear this letter was actually written by Derrida, though the text seems to comport with the description of the letter in the Chron article.
I spent a great couple of days in London hanging out with Feminist Law Prof Sharon Sandeen and her partner S., and even got to have a really fun dinner with Laurelin in the Rain (with Laurelin in a Restaurant!). Attended a wonderful conference here, and have one more stop to make before attending this. Hope everyone is having a great summer. My travels remind me how much I like (most) law professors, and how happy and lucky I am to be one. Apologies that comments are slow to post and that I’m not checking the blog e-mail account more often.
Cheers! – Ann Bartow
Durham Castle
Media Matters for America observed:
During a panel discussion of the 2008 presidential election on the July 15 edition of NBC’s Meet the Press, syndicated columnist Robert Novak asserted: “Republicans are very pessimistic about 2008. When you talk to them off the record, they don’t see how they can win this thing. And then they think for a minute, and only the Democratic Party, with everything in their favor, would say that, ‘OK, this is the year either to have a woman or an African-American to break precedent, to do things the country has never done before.’ And it gives the Republicans hope.” Neither host Tim Russert nor any of Novak’s fellow panelists, Bloomberg News Washington managing editor Al Hunt, Republican strategist Mike Murphy, and Democratic strategist Bob Shrum — all of whom are, like Novak, white men — commented on or challenged Novak’s assertion. As Media Matters for America documented, the four Sunday-morning talk programs on the broadcast networks, Meet the Press, ABC’s This Week, CBS’ Face the Nation, and Fox Broadcasting Co.’s Fox News Sunday, feature guest lists that are overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly male.
A breakdown of the guests on Meet the Press from 2005 to 2006 shows that 76 percent of the guests on the program were white men. ….
Link via Laura Heymann. And as noted here, here and here, the Media Matters for America roster is overwhelming comprised of white males. If mocking Republicans is supposed to deflect attention away from the racism and sexism of the liberal doods, it’s not working. Plenty of women, and women and men of color graduate from journalism schools, so lack of qualified potential hires is not causing the problem, that much is clear. See also this, and this and this and this too.
–Ann Bartow
From the New York Times:
Experts have often wondered what proportion of men who download explicit sexual images of children also molest them. A new government study of convicted Internet offenders suggests that the number may be startlingly high: 85 percent of the offenders said they had committed acts of sexual abuse against minors, from inappropriate touching to rape.
Apparently, though, the Federal Bureau of Prisons does not want the data about on-line porn and child sex abuse to be made available. According to the Times article (full text here), “[T]he prison bureau in April ordered the paper withdrawn from a peer-reviewed academic journal where it had been accepted for publication, apparently concerned that the results might be misinterpreted.”
On the relationship between the consumption of pornography, Catharine MacKinnon said in her Francis Biddle Memorial Lecture at Harvard Law School in 1984 (reprinted in Feminism Unmodified):
In pornography, there it is, in one place, all of the absues that women had to struggle so long even to begin to articulate, all of the unspeakable abuse: the rape, the battery, the sexual harassment, the prostitution, and the sexual abuse of children. Only in pornography is it called something else: sex, sex, sex, sex, and sex, respectively. Pornography sexualizes rape, battery, sexual harrassment, prostitution and child sexual abuse; it thereby celebrates, promotes, authorizes, and legitimates them. More generally, it eroticizes the dominance and submission that is the dynamic common to them all.
Some second-wave feminists (e.g., the Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force) reject MacKinnon’s harms-based analysis and caution against censorship. Post-modern (dare I say third-wave?) feminists suggest that pornography is “a way of seeing, a gaze” and claim “a more sophisticated approach to sexist imagery” that posits “the viewer’s activity in the production of meaning in pornography.” Kegan Doyle & Dany Lacombe, in Porn Power: Sex, Violence, and the Meaning of Images in 1980s Feminism, in“Bad Girls”/”Good Girls”: Women, Sex, and Power in the Nineties 188, 191-92 (Nan Bauer Maglin & Donna Marie Perry eds., 1996).
All three positions can be true — pornography can lead to harm, censorship can lead to harm, and some viewers are sophisticated. But not sophisticated enough to view the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ study. So you can download porn, but not data about its effects.
-Bridget Crawford
Professor Katherine Pratt of Loyola Law School – Los Angeles posted to the TaxProf listserv the following analysis of the income tax deductibility of sex change operations, previously blogged here. She makes an argument for tax deductibility based on the fact that gender-reassignment surgery is “medical care,” not a cosmetic enhancement. [Caution: Non-tax folks may find this post tough going.] 
The Tax Court should rule that the costs of GRS are deductible under section 213. For purposes of section 213, GRS is not similar to cosmetic surgery, in part because GRS is within the 1st prong of the 213(d)(1)(A) definition of medical care. From the perspective of medical necessity, the medical care in this case is absolutely not similar to a nose job or teeth whitening.
The 1990 cosmetic surgery amendment was designed to correct the overinclusive 2nd prong of the 213(d)(1)(A) definition of medical expenses (costs incurred for the purpose of affecting any structure or function of the body). Cosmetic surgery that does not affect normal biological functioning is not with the 1st definitional prong of 213 (costs incurred for the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of a disease, condition, disorder, or injury). The legislative history of the cosmetic surgery amendment is clear that cosmetic surgery that satisfies the 1st prong of the definition (e.g., breast reconstruction surgery after mastectomy) is medical care for purposes of section 213. The Service has ruled that the cost of laser vision correction surgery is a medical expense, even though the procedure improves the taxpayer’s appearance, because the surgery improves the biological functioning of the taxpayer’s eyes. On the other hand, the cosmetic surgery amendment has been applied correctly to deny a deduction for the costs of procedures that are”similar”to cosmetic surgery, such as teeth whitening, that do not affect normal biological functioning and are not within the 1st prong of the 213 definition.
The 213 baseline is normal biological functioning and the 213(d)(1)(A) definition must be interpreted in light of this benchmark. Courts have held that GRS to treat medically documented gender identity disorder is a”medical necessity;”the costs of GRS thus are within the 1st prong of the 213 definition and are not limited by the cosmetic surgery amendment.
Also, structurally, 213(d)(1)(A) defines medical care generally; the cosmetic surgery rule is an exception to the general definition. Where, as in this GRS case, the taxpayer can make a strong argument that the medical care is within the 213 definition (in this case, under the 1st prong), Congress should have to specifically exclude such care from the 213 definition (as Congress did in 1990 with the cosmetic surgery amendment) if it intends to deny taxpayers the deduction. Expressio unius est exclusio alterius.
See the following excerpts from Inconceivable? Deducting the Costs of Fertility Treatment, 89 CORNELL L. REV. 1121 (2004):
Section 213 provides that medical expenses include costs incurred for “the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease, or for the purpose of affecting any structure or function of [*1140] the body.” 107 The first prong of this two-part definition is potentially underinclusive; if read literally and narrowly, it might fail to characterize as medical expenses the costs of medically treating injuries, conditions, and defects. The Department of the Treasury (Treasury Department) has resolved some of this underinclusiveness problem by broadly interpreting the term “disease” to cover conditions (including those caused by personal injury), impairments, and disorders. 108
The potential underinclusiveness of the first prong of the definition is, to some extent, offset by the broader language in the second, or “structure or function,” prong of the definition. This second prong correctly characterizes as medical expenses the costs of medical treatment of a patient’s injuries, conditions, impairments, or disorders. The problem with the “structure or function” prong of the medical expense definition is that it is overinclusive. For example, read literally, the second prong would characterize even the costs of cosmetic surgery as medical expenses. 109 Consistent with this interpretation of 213, the IRS ruled that the costs of cosmetic surgery were medical expenses under the “structure or function” prong of the definition. 110 Although the IRS was no doubt unhappy about allowing taxpayers to deduct the costs of cosmetic surgery as medical expenses, such costs were within the broad second prong of the statutory definition. In 1990, Congress addressed this problem by amending 213 to specifically exclude “cosmetic surgery or other similar procedures” from the definition of medical expenses. 111
***
The cosmetic surgery amendment was drafted to create an exception for the cost of medical procedures that affect the structure and appearance of the body, but not the functioning of the body. In other words, Congress drafted the amendment to limit the “structure or function” prong of the medical expense definition, but not the first prong of the definition. Under this approach, the cost of breast augmentation, for example, cannot qualify as a medical expense because: (1) the cost is not incurred because of a disease or a medical condition, and thus is not within the first prong of the definition; and (2) the cost is not incurred for a procedure that affects the functioning of the body, and thus is not within the second prong of the definition. 149
On the other hand, the costs of cosmetic surgery procedures that either affect the functioning of the body or mitigate the affects of a disease or medical condition are deductible as medical expenses. 150
***
For purposes of characterizing costs as deductible medical expenses, the appropriate baseline in 213 is normal biological functioning, 170 [*1151] and the 213(d)(1)(A) definition must be interpreted in light of this benchmark. Recall that the costs of cosmetic surgery were thought to qualify as medical expenses, prior to the amendment of 213, under the “structure or function” prong of the definition. 171 For purposes of 213, however, medical care that affects a structure of the body should only be treated as medical care if it helps to restore or approximate normal biological functioning. For example, the cost of a prosthetic leg is a medical expense because the prosthetic limb affects both the structure and function of the body.Although cosmetic surgery affects the structure of the body, it is not generally medical care for purposes of 213 because it does not usually affect normal biological functioning. The change in the structure of the body merely affects appearance. Where cosmetic surgery is necessary to restore or approximate normal functioning, it is medical care. Medically necessary cosmetic surgery includes surgery to repair congenital abnormalities, injuries, and disfigurements from disease. Consistent with this language, a breast augmentation procedure is not medical care, for purposes of 213, but a breast reconstruction surgery following surgical removal of breast cancer is medical care. 172 The standard is not whether the patient would die or appear disabled without treatment; rather, it is whether the treatment is necessary to restore or approximate normal biological functioning. 173
***
In numerous health law cases, courts have had to define the terms “illness,” “disease,” and “medical necessity,” in order to determine the scope of medical insurance coverage. Some of these cases relate to medical care for various types of sexual and reproductive dysfunction. These cases may be relevant for purposes of considering whether, for tax purposes, such medical care should be treated as”voluntary”or”involuntary.”
These cases indicate that courts seem to appreciate the importance of sex and reproduction more than insurers. 277 In part, this is due to the fact that insurers have narrowed the scope of insurance coverage to contain growing health care costs. Traditionally, insurers deferred to doctors’ medical judgment and covered medical care that was ordered by doctors. 278 When expensive new high-tech treatments began driving up the cost of health care dramatically, however, insurance companies changed their practices. 279 Beginning in the mid-1970s, following the 1965 enactment of Medicare and Medicaid, our national health policy objectives shifted from a policy of expanding health care coverage to a policy of cost containment. 280 Private insurers attempted to control skyrocketing health care costs by stating in their contracts that coverage is limited to treatment: (1) of a “disease” or “illness,” 281 (2) that is a “medical necessity,” 282 and (3) that is not “experimental” or “investigative.” 283 Medicare and Medicaid also [*1171] exclude from coverage services that are not medically necessary. 284 Insurers use these definitions to support their denials of coverage.
Courts have defined the terms “illness,” “disease,” and “medical necessity,” in cases involving sexual and reproductive dysfunction. In Egert v. Connecticut General Life Insurance Co., the court held that infertility was an “illness” and that IVF was “medically necessary” treatment for infertility, so the patient was entitled to reimbursement for the costs of IVF. 285 Several courts have also held that sex reassignment surgery for treatment of a transsexual with gender identity disorder is a medical necessity. 286 Shortly after the FDA approved Viagra, the federal agency that administers the Medicaid program 287 took the position that Viagra is a medically necessary treatment for erectile dysfunction and mandated that state Medicaid programs cover the drug. 288
Professor Pratt’s TaxProf listserv posting is reprinted in its entirety with her permission. Her TaxProf profile is here.
-Bridget Crawford
Carlin Meyer is a Professor at New York Law School. Professor Meyer served on the New York City Mayor’s Commission on the Status of Women and was a consultant to its Sexual Harassment Task Force, has written about prostitution and pornography. She has taught and written on matters ranging from feminist jurisprudence to separation of powers under the U.S. Constitution and is a frequent speaker and commentator on issues related to sex, sexuality, and gender, as well as issues related to labor and world trade.
Before New York Law School, Professor Meyer was bureau chief for labor in the New York State Attorney General’s Office, and represented the State Labor Department and Workers’ Compensation Boards. She earlier served as assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division of that office; as assistant general counsel to District Council 37 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees; and as partner in the firm of Gladstein Meyer and Reif (currently Gladstein Reif & Meginniss). Professor Meyer has served as legislative liaison for both the Sex and Law and Civil Rights committees of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. She belongs to the City’s Office of Collective Bargaining Panel of Independent Arbitrators, has written numerous arbitration decisions, and occasionally mediates public employment disputes. She is a pro bono consultant to nonprofit organizations on labor matters and was selected by the New York State Attorney General to help oversee enforcement of a pathbreaking”Code of Conduct”for New York City’s greengrocers. She is a member of the Society of American Law Teachers, and of the Law & Society Association, and is a former president and current member of the New York City Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild.
FLP: What is your educational and professional background?
CM: I’m a graduate of Harvard/Radcliffe College (when there were still two); Rutgers Law School (JD), and Yale Law School (LLM). More important to me, I joined the National Lawyers Guild the summer before I began law school, recruited by a funky group of lawyers who were talking law and politics at a diner where I stopped en route from Chicago to New Jersey for my first year of law school. Those folks are still my friends as are many more folks I met through the Guild; they (the men as well as the women) would all call themselves feminists; I would count on most of them to support me in time of need.
FLP: What courses do you teach?
CM: Employment Law, Family Law, Feminist jurisprudence (and I have taught lawyering, evidence, legal ethics.)
FLP: How does feminism influence your teaching/scholarship/service?
CM: I don’t separate being a feminist from being who I am. So it influences everything I do — although I wish it did so more. (For instance, I know what I should do in the classroom to be a better teacher to both women and those males who feel excluded by the pace and aridity of dominant legal discourse, but I still have trouble pausing and allowing for silence (so as to give those who need time to collect their thoughts to raise a hand) before calling on someone; I still often rely on the teacher/student hierarchy to protect myself from deep questioning; stuff like that. Re scholarship, I tend to write on things that interest me, which turn out a lot to be issues that would be identified as feminist (pornography, women/internet, etc.) I’m currently reviewing several books on brain and gender, and thinking about how what we are learning may (or may not) influence law.
FLP: When did you first make a connection between feminism and the law?
CM: In college. I joined Bread and Roses, a Boston umbrella for small women’s groups like the “Red Coven” to which I then belonged. Our early talk was about how women always ended up with purple hands from running the mimeo machines rather than serving as leading speakers or scholars. From there it was a short hop to the role of law in promoting male dominance.
FLP: Has feminism reached the limits of what it can accomplish via the law? Should feminists focus on issues other than the law (i.e., culture, youth education, etc.)?
CM: To question #1, hardly, and we never will. That is, law is too central to our culture to let it be addressed without an explicit and implicit feminist agenda. Look who the lawmakers are, and what direction we are going in, and ask yourself if feminists have “finished” with law. More than that, the either/or questions aren’t that helpful. Women trained in law can use law to influence areas like culture and education: we can draft the bills that those in such struggles will need (whether bills to provide more tax support; fiscal equity; gender equity in distribution of resources, etc.). I gave a talk at Law & Society aimed at whether law could contribute to reducing the sexism in advertising; my conclusion was that it could, but only by challenging corporate culrtural dominance by supporting public and alternative media. My own view is that feminists need to more explicitly incorporate an understanding of class and its interrelation to gender, if we want to move forward on issues of importance to women.
FLP: What is the “feminist climate” at your school? Does your self-identification as a feminist impact the way you are perceived by students, colleagues or university administrators?
CM: You’d have to ask a student about the “climate” – we faculty exist in somewhat rarified circumstances. My self-identification certain does impact the way I’m perceived, in ways both good and bad. Some students and faculty tune me out; but many others tune me in and seek assistance and mentoring. (I think for all women faculty it becomes a burden as well as a pleasure; there are too many who want mentoring and too few of us to provide it.
FLP: What are you working on now?
CM: See above: Brain, gender, law. Also gender and class. Also a book of questions aimed at helping students to think through (and ask) race/gender/class questions while studying law.
FLP: Could you recommend at least one book/article/theorist to law students who are interested in feminism’s relationship to the law?
CM: The Way We Never Were, Stephanie Koontz. Articles, especially early ones, by Martha Fineman. Recent articles by Carol Sanger. Articles by Sylvia Law. The problem is that there are WAY too many fabulous articles, and too few hours in which to read them.
FLP: Has blogging changed academic feminism?
CM: Blogging either helps or hurts, depending. Am waiting to see. I’m still unfortunately struggled to keep up with email, and haven’t done much blogging yet.
-Amanda Kissel and Bridget Crawford
I am a law professor because of the influence of feminist legal theorists. I was trained as an economist at Harvard, but I always found the methodological norms in the field to be too limiting and was drawn toward interdisciplinary inquiries. In 1995, I was invited to one of Professor Martha Fineman’s feminist legal theory workshops at Columbia Law School. I found the atmosphere to be supportive and friendly at the same time that the discussions were substantive and fascinating. After attending several more feminist workshops over the next few years, I entered law school at Michigan (where I took Catharine MacKinnon’s “Sex Equality” course) and soon became a law professor. Although my current scholarship does not engage directly with feminist legal theory, my inquiry is always guided by the concerns about equality that motivate feminist scholars. In my teaching (tax policy, contracts, and basic tax), I find myself emphasizing gender issues whenever possible, pointing out to students the sexist assumptions and attitudes that so often permeate legal analysis. Students are often surprised to find a male professor who is an avowed feminist, but the results have always been quite positive.
For a longer and more personal bio, interested readers can navigate to this URL.
-Neil Buchanan
The article by Paul Edelman and Tracey George is here. It’s funny. This is the abstract:
Degrees of separation is a concept that is
intuitive and appealing in popular culture as well as academic discourse: It tells us something about the connectedness of a particular field. It also reveals paths of influence and access. Paul ErdÅ‘s was the Kevin Bacon of his field – math – coauthoring with a large number of scholars from many institutions and across subfields. Moreover, his work was highly cited and important. Mathematicians talk about their ErdÅ‘s number (i.e., numbers of degrees of separation) as a sign of their connection to the hub of mathematics: An ErdÅ‘s number of 2 means a scholar did not co-author with ErdÅ‘s but did collaborate with someone who did (i.e., an ErdÅ‘s 1). In this study, we examine collaboration networks in law, searching for the Legal ErdÅ‘s. We crown Sunstein as the Legal ErdÅ‘s and name a complete (as possible) list of Sunstein 1s and 2s.
Is there a feministlawprof equivalent? Do women co-author less than men?
-Bridget Crawford
The Associated Press reports this story, under the headline “Mass. Woman Sues IRS Over Sex-Change Tax Deduction:”
After a tormented existence as a father, a husband, a Coast Guardsman and a construction worker, a 57-year-old suburban Boston man underwent a sex-change operation. Then she wrote off the $25,000 in medical expenses on her taxes.
But the IRS disallowed the deduction — ruling the procedure was cosmetic, not a medical necessity — in a potentially precedent-setting dispute now before the U.S. Tax Court.
Rhiannon O’Donnabhain is suing the IRS in a case advocates for the transgendered are hoping will force the tax agency to treat sex-change operations the same as appendectomies, heart bypasses and other deductible medical procedures. The case is set to go to trial July 24. ***
The U.S. Tax Court has never issued an opinion in a similar case, said Jennifer Levi, an attorney with Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, the Boston-based legal organization representing O’Donnabhain. But the IRS has ruled against allowing the deduction in at least one other case.
In a 2005 case, the IRS ruled the costs of a woman’s gender reassignment surgery and related treatments were not deductible as medical expenses. ***
In 1996, O’Donnabhain began seeing a psychotherapist who eventually diagnosed her with gender-identity disorder. Five years later, her therapist recommended sex-change surgery, finding it was a medically necessary. A psychologist who examined O’Donnabhain concurred.
My prediction is that the government will win this one, not because the IRS is substantively “right,” but because the Tax Court gives tremendous deference to the agency’s interpretation of Treasury Regulations. See Mitchell M. Gans, Deference and the End of Tax Practice, 36 Real Prop. Prob. & Tr. J. 731 (2002).
Hat tip to Ralph Stein.
-Bridget Crawford
Jessica E. Price joined the Marquette faculty in 2002.
Professor Price recently answered these questions for FeministLawProfs:
FLP: What is your educational and professional background?
JEP: I received my JD from the Univ. of Minnesota in 1998. I worked at Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights during and right after law school; was clerk to Justice Jon Wilcox on the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 1999-2000; and worked in the litigation department at Foley & Lardner 2000-2002, before joining the faculty here at Marquette in 2002.
FLP: What courses do you teach?
JEP: I teach our first-year legal writing courses, Legal Analysis, Writing, and Research 1 & 2; Appellate Writing and Advocacy; and a seminar entitled Comparative Refugee and Asylum Law.
FLP: Has feminism reached the limits of what it can accomplish via the law? Should feminists focus on issues other than the law (i.e., culture, youth education, etc.)?
JEP: I’m not sure I understand this question. The questions about law that interest me most have to do with what we mean when we label something”the law”as apart from”culture”, how we determine that certain forms of expression are”legal”and others aren’t, etc. In any case, I guess the short answer is no, I do not believe that feminism’s impact on law is complete.
FLP: What are you working on now?
JEP: Research about why and how legal writing professors advise students to use the”IRAC”formula for organizing their writing, and whether and how practitioners use that formula in appellate briefs.
FLP: Could you recommend at least one book/article/theorist to law students who are interested in feminism’s relationship to the law?
JEP: One of my favorite feminist legal scholars is Kathryn Stanchi at Temple. For instance, I’d recommend her articles Dealing with Hate in the Feminist Classroom: Rethinking the Balance, 11 Mich. J. Gender & L. 173 (2005); Who Next, the Janitors? A Feminist Critique of the Social Hierarchy of Law Professors, 73 U.M.K.C. L. Rev. 469 (2005); Feminist Legal Writing, 39 San Diego L. Rev. 387 (2002) and Resistance is Futile: How Legal Writing Pedagogy Contributes to the Marginalization of Outsider Voices, 103 Dick. L. Rev. 1 (1998).
– Bridget Crawford and Amanda Kissel
Many people:both gay and straight:think that same-sex couples should settle for civil unions or domestic partnerships and shouldn’t bother fighting for marriage. After all, if you already have all of the rights and obligations of marriage, what’s so important about calling your legal relationship a civil union or a domestic partnership rather than a marriage?
Evidencing the real importance of the name given to same-sex legal relationships, Lambda Legal recently announced that, following the enactment of New Jersey’s civil union regime, UPS drew an important distinction between its employees who had entered into same-sex marriages in Massachusetts and those who had entered into civil unions in New Jersey: The Massachusetts employees were allowed to add their spouses to their health coverage, but the New Jersey employees were not allowed to do so. The reason:according to UPS, the Massachusetts couples were legal”spouses”because they were”married,”but the New Jersey couples were not legal”spouses”because they were not”married,”just parties to a civil union. Naturally, this distinction will entail serious financial and medical consequences for UPS’ lesbian and gay employees in New Jersey.
So, those who think that the word”marriage”doesn’t matter should think again.
-Anthony C. Infanti
Marcia L. McCormick is an associate professor at Samford University, Cumberland School of Law. Her undergraduate education was at Grinnell College, where she majored in philosophy with a focus on postmodern and feminist thinkers. Her law degree is from the University of Iowa, where she served as a managing editor for the Iowa Law Review and was named Outstanding Woman Law Graduate. Professor McCormick began her legal career as a staff attorney with the International Human Rights Law Institute where she directed analysis and research of allegations of sexual violence committed during the war in what was then Yugoslavia. She then went to the Illinois Attorney General’s office where she litigated civil appeals in state and federal courts. She left the Illinois Attorney General’s office to join the faculty at Chicago Kent and recently moved to Cumberland. Professor McCormick recently answered a few questions for FeministLawProfs.
FLP: How does feminism influence your teaching/scholarship/service?
MM: Feminism really is so much a part of the way that I think, teach, and write, that it’s difficult for me to see how it influences my work. I teach Federal Courts, Employment Law, Civil Rights, and Criminal Law. In each of those classes, I get students to explore their assumptions about gender, behavior, rights, privileges, class, and the power of law. I have written about how the structure of legal institutions promotes (or fails to promote) civil rights and equality. In terms of service, because I am an outspoken and self-identified feminist, I’ve been appointed to the main university’s diversity committee, and at the law school I’ve served on the admissions committee, hiring committee, and policy committee, which is sort of an executive committee that vets issues before bringing them to the whole faculty.
FLP: Has feminism reached the limits of what it can accomplish via the law? Should feminists focus on issues other than the law (i.e., culture, youth education, etc.)?
MM: I wouldn’t say that feminism has reached the limits of what it can accomplish through the law, necessarily, but I do think that lasting change requires a significant culture shift, and so law and other methods of change must work together. In line with that, Cassandra Adams, one of my colleagues, and I started a discussion group this year to explore issues of race and gender in a safe and more loosely structured format than the usual law school class. Learning to reflect is critical for individual growth, but it’s also essential for social change. Research in a wide variety of disciplines shows that reflection is the only way to remove biases and to fundamentally change patterns of behavior. And so each person in the group who develops better skills of reflection can take those skills and influence others that they meet in the future to do the same thing. And just as importantly, the members of the group take those skills into their practice, which I hope makes them better able to serve the traditionally underserved and to advance the law.
FLP: Could you recommend at least one book/article/theorist to law students who are interested in feminism’s relationship to the law?
MM: I see that other people have suggested some of the great books and thinkers. Catharine MacKinnon, Robin West and bell hooks are certainly essential. But there is a British sociologist named Carol Smart who I would also highly recommend. She has written a number of books, and”Feminism and the Power of Law”is a must-read.
– Bridget Crawford and Amanda Kissel
According to a Journal of Higher Education article (sorry, pay site), students returning to campus next month will have to pay a lot more for contraception from campus health centers. The Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 removed incentives for drug companies to provide deep discounts to students, so oral contraceptive prices on campus are doubling, tripling, or more. As long as the same thing is happening to all drugs, it’s not a Title IX problem, but it sure is a public health problem for students. One student put it perfectly:
Paula Tran, a senior at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, sees it differently. “I work over 20 hours a week to pay for rent and pay for books,” she said. “It’s tough when something I feel is a necessity, like a utility bill, goes up from $7 to $40 a month.”
When the price for birth-control pills rose to nearly $50 a pack, she said, one of her friends realized she would have to choose between birth control and her monthly grocery bill. “She chose groceries,” said Ms. Tran. “She had no other choice.”
– David S. Cohen
Equal Benefits for Same-Sex Partners
It appears from an editorial in my hometown newspaper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, that faculty at state universities in Pennsylvania will soon be getting access to domestic partner benefits. This is great news, but not as great news as the editors seem to believe.
I have a quibble:well, really more than a quibble:with the way that the editors describe these benefits as putting”gay and lesbian faculty members on equal footing for benefits with colleagues at public and private colleges here and across the nation.”(my emphasis) These benefits might be called many things; for example,”useful”or”beneficial,”not to mention”overdue.”However,”equal”is not a word to use in describing these benefits.
Even when employers provide the exact same benefits to their heterosexual and lesbian and gay employees, what those employees receive is often demonstrably not equal. The federal government and many states step in between the employer and the employee to ensure that same-sex relationships are not put on equal footing with different-sex relationships. To this end, they tax the value of benefits:most notably expensive health insurance benefits:when provided to same-sex partners but not when provided to the spouses of married, heterosexual employees.
Lesbian and gay employees can avoid the federal income tax only if they can show that their partner is also their”dependent”for tax purposes, something that heterosexuals are not required to do. Moreover, all of the uncertainty surrounding the tax treatment of same-sex couples makes even this showing difficult. My sister, who is in a lesbian relationship and a stay at home mom for her three children, clearly qualifies as my sister-in-law’s dependent for tax purpose. But my sister-in-law had to fight with her employer to stop withholding tax on the value of the health insurance premiums paid for my sister:after she had to fight with her employer to provide those benefits to begin with and then had to go to Connecticut to enter into a civil union because a New Jersey domestic partnership simply was not sufficient evidence (at least for her employer) of their commitment. So, use whatever other adjective you think best describes the belated extension of domestic partner benefits to lesbian and gay employees, just don’t call them”equal.”
Equal Benefits for Same-Sex Partners
It appears from an editorial in my hometown newspaper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, that faculty at state universities in Pennsylvania will soon be getting access to domestic partner benefits. This is great news, but not as great news as the editors seem to believe.
I have a quibble:well, really more than a quibble:with the way that the editors describe these benefits as putting”gay and lesbian faculty members on equal footing for benefits with colleagues at public and private colleges here and across the nation.”(my emphasis) These benefits might be called many things; for example,”useful”or”beneficial,”not to mention”overdue.”However,”equal”is not a word to use in describing these benefits.
Even when employers provide the exact same benefits to their heterosexual and lesbian and gay employees, what those employees receive is often demonstrably not equal. The federal government and many states step in between the employer and the employee to ensure that same-sex relationships are not put on equal footing with different-sex relationships. To this end, they tax the value of benefits:most notably expensive health insurance benefits:when provided to same-sex partners but not when provided to the spouses of married, heterosexual employees.
Lesbian and gay employees can avoid the federal income tax only if they can show that their partner is also their”dependent”for tax purposes, something that heterosexuals are not required to do. Moreover, all of the uncertainty surrounding the tax treatment of same-sex couples makes even this showing difficult. My sister, who is in a lesbian relationship and a stay at home mom for her three children, clearly qualifies as my sister-in-law’s dependent for tax purpose. But my sister-in-law had to fight with her employer to stop withholding tax on the value of the health insurance premiums paid for my sister:after she had to fight with her employer to provide those benefits to begin with and then had to go to Connecticut to enter into a civil union because a New Jersey domestic partnership simply was not sufficient evidence (at least for her employer) of their commitment. So, use whatever other adjective you think best describes the belated extension of domestic partner benefits to lesbian and gay employees, just don’t call them”equal.”
Equal Benefits for Same-Sex Partners
It appears from an editorial in my hometown newspaper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, that faculty at state universities in Pennsylvania will soon be getting access to domestic partner benefits. This is great news, but not as great news as the editors seem to believe.
I have a quibble:well, really more than a quibble:with the way that the editors describe these benefits as putting”gay and lesbian faculty members on equal footing for benefits with colleagues at public and private colleges here and across the nation.”(my emphasis) These benefits might be called many things; for example,”useful”or”beneficial,”not to mention”overdue.”However,”equal”is not a word to use in describing these benefits.
Even when employers provide the exact same benefits to their heterosexual and lesbian and gay employees, what those employees receive is often demonstrably not equal. The federal government and many states step in between the employer and the employee to ensure that same-sex relationships are not put on equal footing with different-sex relationships. To this end, they tax the value of benefits:most notably expensive health insurance benefits:when provided to same-sex partners but not when provided to the spouses of married, heterosexual employees.
Lesbian and gay employees can avoid the federal income tax only if they can show that their partner is also their”dependent”for tax purposes, something that heterosexuals are not required to do. Moreover, all of the uncertainty surrounding the tax treatment of same-sex couples makes even this showing difficult. My sister, who is in a lesbian relationship and a stay at home mom for her three children, clearly qualifies as my sister-in-law’s dependent for tax purpose. But my sister-in-law had to fight with her employer to stop withholding tax on the value of the health insurance premiums paid for my sister:after she had to fight with her employer to provide those benefits to begin with and then had to go to Connecticut to enter into a civil union because a New Jersey domestic partnership simply was not sufficient evidence (at least for her employer) of their commitment. So, use whatever other adjective you think best describes the belated extension of domestic partner benefits to lesbian and gay employees, just don’t call them”equal.”
The New York Times reports today on the controversy over the new TV ad campaign for Trojan condoms:
In the commercial, women in a bar find themselves sitting next to pigs, one of which metamorphoses into a handsome suitor after it procures a condom from a vending machine. The tag line: “Evolve. Use a condom every time.”
According to the Times article, local TV stations in Pittsburgh have refused to show the ad. You can view the ad for yourself at the trojanevolve website.
In response to criticism over the ads, Trojan responds to what it perceives as the hypocrisy of some programmers:
[W]e promote ideology over information:such as when we deny people comprehensive sex education in favor of”abstinence-only”programs even though government studies show they don’t work. (1) Our television networks regularly put sexual content in prime-time programming, (2) but restrict or even forbid ads for condoms during those very shows.
Messages about sexual responsibility should get their airtime, no doubt. But is there even a scintilla of a possibility that the networks are objecting to something other than the advertisement of condoms per se? Maybe they don’t like the (subtle?) suggestion that (a) men are like pigs (or at least men who don’t use condoms are like pigs), or that (b) women have sex with pigs (or at least men who don’t use condoms are like pigs)?
-Bridget Crawford
Dahlia Litwick writes in this article at slate.com, “With the court’s newly dominant conservative wing focused pretty much on whether to ignore or overrule her outright, it’s clear that one real casualty of the new Roberts Court is O’Connor’s lifetime of work on an extraordinary range of constitutional issues.”
-Bridget Crawford
Echidne of the Snakes does a terrific job unpacking the rhetoric around the new Pew Center findings.
Whataboutourdaughters, a blog by “[a]n African American woman who thinks that now is the time to take some organized action to combat the destructive portrayals of African American women in popular culture,” addresses this critique to BET President Reginald Hudlin, the network that plans to air a new show “Hot Ghetto Mess:”
Why on EARTH would we not trust BET to do the right thing? I mean we must have all been making the past 10 to 12 years up in our heads. Why on earth would we think that BET has ill intent when its producers have been running all over the internet encouraging people to go looking for the most embarrassing African Americans that they could find….Why on EARTH would we not trust you when your own site says you’ll be exploring “shaking booties, thug life, baby-mama drama and pimped-out high schoolers. Your own site says “‘Hot Ghetto Mess’ is like the traffic accident you can’t look away from. Viewers will laugh.” Why should we distrust you when you have licensed a clip like this abomination to air on your show?
Emphasis and links in the original. The full post is here.
-Bridget Crawford
September 7-8, 2007 – Emory University School of Law
To view the original call for papers, click here.
This is the final workshop in a five part series co-sponsored by the Centre for Law, Ethics and Society (Keele University) and the Feminism and Legal Theory Project (Emory University). This series of cross-legal cultural sessions were designed to focus on issues of interest to feminist and critical scholars from both jurisdictions and addressed four general topics:
Organized around a particular problem or concept as a focal point, the workshops objectives are to interrogate points of conflict, consistency and contradiction in feminist legal theory and method in the two national contexts. In this last session, the subject under consideration is”the family”. We anticipate a dialogue addressing its different and evolving meanings and the associated implications for law revision and reform.
The Workshop begins on Friday afternoon at 4:00 PM with a panel discussion to be held at the Law School – Gambrell Hall – 1301 Clifton Road, Atlanta, GA. There will be a reception and dinner that evening at the Law School. All interested participants are welcome. Saturday there will be four panel presentations convening at 9:30 AM. All events will be held in the Faculty Library Room 575.
To view the Workshop Schedule, click here.
To register for the Workshop, please click here.
Boys sizes only. Other “Illegal Briefs” punditwear here. Something about the “Dick Posner” option gave me the giggles.
–Ann Bartow
So Zogby did a poll on public support for tenure and beliefs about political bias, and the results are not surprising: many people don’t think tenure is a good thing and believe professors to be biased. See Inside Higher Ed’s Skepticism of Faculty and Tenure . Of the 9,464 adults polled online (the poll was conducted by the polling company itself, and was not sponsored by any group), more than 58 percent of those polled”believe that political bias is a somewhat serious or very serious problem.” A more interesting aspect, perhaps, is the breakdown with respect to the views on classroom bias by various factors:”There are sharp divisions by party lines (73.3 percent of Republicans view the problem as very serious, while only 6.7 percent of Democrats do), gender (46.8 percent of men view the problem as very serious, compared to 32.1 percent of women) religion (57.9 percent of those who are born again view the problem as very serious, while only 17.6 percent of Jews do), and those who shop at Wal-Mart (56.7 percent of those who shop there weekly believe the problem is very serious, while only 17.6 percent of those who never do think that).” The results with respect to tenure were not that clear-cut (though whether the public actually understands what tenure involved may be part of the story).
The opening quote of the official story on the Zogby website is also interesting: “As legislation is introduced in more than a dozen states across the country to counter political pressure and proselytizing on students in college classrooms, a majority of Americans believe the political bias of college professors is a serious problem…” Wow. I guess based on this I ought to re-think my classroom decisions about making suggestions with respect to wetlands protections or reducing carbon footprints…
But this has me wondering: what (if anything) does this tell us about the nation? About the future of academia? The issues in this poll are, of course, not new concerns (though the Wal-Mart shoppers perspective is an interesting twist). It seems unlikely a public relations campaign could alter such perceptions. Is it thus simply something we should ignore and go about our business?
–Kim Diana Connolly
Not really a surprise but not something that received much attention in the past. From Yahoo News:
For decades no one wanted to remember the concentration camp “special blocks” where the Nazis forced female inmates to entertain their male peers.
Nazi commander Heinrich Himmler had ordered the creation of camp brothels in 1941. His logic was chilling — male prisoners would work harder if offered the incentive of sex, and if only a few had this privilege it would crush solidarity.
As the horrors of Hitler’s death camps emerged, the brothels swiftly became taboo. The mainly German women who had staffed them were too scarred by the experience to speak of it, whereas the male inmates who used them remained silent in shame.
Now an exhibition in Ravensbrueck women’s concentration camp north of Berlin aims to shed light on the brothels and expose the Nazis’ sinister attempt to manipulate prisoners’ sexuality. ….
… Although prostitution was officially forbidden by the Nazis, the elite SS guards had set up a network of brothels catering to German soldiers, forced laborers and prisoners, which they intended in part to stamp out homosexuality.
From 1942 onwards, 200-300 gentile prisoners from the camp were forced to work in 10 camp brothels across Germany, Austria and Poland. Almost all had been imprisoned as “anti-social.”
At first some women volunteered for service as prostitutes, falsely informed they would be released after 6 months. Later they were forcibly recruited during roll call or even from the camp sick bay.
Although the women got slightly better rations and could wear civilian clothes, the work reduced most to physical wrecks. Many caught sexually transmitted diseases, were subject to medical experiments or were forced to have abortions. …
Bizarrely, the man who is publicizing the issue still seems convinced that one of the forced prostitutes liked him:
Frieda was the first woman Van Dijk had seen in 6 months. He was a teenager, sent to Buchenwald for fleeing a forced labor troop and smuggling rations to Kampen’s Jews and was in awe of her. She appreciated his youthful coyness.
“One day I was sent to clean in the block and I found myself alone with her… She gave me some Schnaps, blew cigarette smoke in my mouth and we landed in bed. It was my first time and you never forget.”
Later he had to pay like the others to see Frieda, a privilege allowed him as he was imprisoned neither on racial nor political grounds.
In any event, you can read the article in its entirety here.
–Ann Bartow
From the WaPo:
How David Vitter Got Nabbed in Madam Scandal
In a Wednesday afternoon news conference, Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt gloated over taking credit for catching socially conservative Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) on the phone list of the D.C. Madam. But while he hinted that he has the goods on other members of Congress, he doesn’t – at least not yet.
As for Vitter, Dan Moldea, the gumshoe Washington-based reporter who moonlights as an investigator for Flynt, says his birthday was the magic date that led him to ensnare the Louisiana senator in the D.C. Madam scandal.
Moldea also had a different set of phone records than Brian Ross of ABC News, the reporter who had the exclusive market on the client list of Deborah Jeane Palfrey but who turned up very little in the way of scoop, in fact – a real dud as sex scandals go.
Moldea is working for Flynt — as he did in 1998 when Flynt successfully nailed Republicans leading the impeachment brigade against President Bill Clinton — to expose “hypocrites” on Palfrey’s client list. The gumshoe decided to take the phone records from Nov. 2000 to Jan. 2001 – records Ross did not have – because Moldea thought he’d try to snag some giddy new Bush administration officials fresh in town and ready to celebrate their newfound power. …
Goodness knows Larry Flynt is feeling the love from the liberal doods over this, and that has to be something he’d pay a lot for. Larry Flynt is taking credit for exposing David Vitter’s disgusting hypocrisy, but the effectiveness of the Flynt self-promoting PR campaign on this issue relies in large part on the shame and social stigma associated with prostitution. Flynt is no hero and I don’t believe for a moment that mainstream media outlets would have ignored this story if they got the same access to the relevant phone records that Flynt mysteriously obtained exclusive access to.
–Ann Bartow
Via Alternet, an article about “amateur pornography” that discusses privacy concerns but not copyright issues.
Jessica Valenti, one of the bloggers at feministing.com, asserts in her book Full Frontal Feminism, that there are many women who are feminists but don’t know it yet. We all have colleagues and friends that we “know” are feminists, but they preface their feminist comments with,”I’m not a feminist, but….” Valenti will convince these folks where we haven’t. Within the first chapter of the book, if not the introduction itself, Valenti will have the most closeted feminist questioning her or his fear of the word”feminist.” Valenti holds out the promise that feminism, when separated from its negative connotations, gives women both the vocabulary and tools to assert an equal place in society.
Upon initial read, Valenti’s less-than-scholarly tone is misleading; she seems dismissive of “high feminism” (our term) – the feminist ideas that undergird the equality jurisprudence of the 1970s and 1980s. But by writing in a more conversational style, Valenti makes her words serve her – dare we say? – theory. Valenti’s basic thesis that all women can (and should) be feminists, that feminism is not dead, and that feminism is for everyone, not just impact litigators and academics. Feminist legal scholars will want to take note of work like Valenti’s. Most of the new ideas in feminism are coming out of culture work, not law review articles.
One of Valenti’s most amusing claims is that feminists have better sex (presumably with each other as well as non-feminists). Feminism, she says, allows women to be more knowledgeable about and accepting of their own bodies. We like this idea. We can see the t-shirts now – “Feminists Do It Better.” But if Valenti is correct (and gee, how to study that one empirically?), what does one make of Catharine MacKinnon’s assertion that”sex inequality takes the form of gender; moving as a relation between people, it takes the form of sexuality”? In some sense, Full Frontal Feminism is a (non-explicit) response to MacKinnon’s concept of false consciousness: we really know what we’re doing and it is really fun.
Valenti, like many other young feminist writers (e.g., Walker, Baumgardner), claims control of her sexuality and the power she derives from it. Valenti asserts that sexuality can take a “feminist” form, but she does not fully explain what this means. Is it soft, nurturing feminist sexuality a la Robin West (nod to Janet Halley’s critique), or is it a strap-on sort of feminism? How does a “feminist” sexuality differ from other sexualities?
Call in the theorists. And do some field work while you’re waiting.
-Amanda Kissel and Bridget Crawford
Exactly what possessed Eugene Volokh to look into the sexual orientation of female law profs whose scholarship gets cited a lot? See his “update” at end of this post and try to avoid banging your head on the computer monitor.
Not sure I’m buying this story but if it does reflect more than sweeps week snark on a slow news day, town residents probably ought to stay away from Utah and the Brooklyn Botanical Garden.
Update: See also Shakesville.
From Feminist Philosophers:
A tricky but important thing to teach critical thinking students is how to distinguish illegitimate ad hominem attacks from legitimate questions about a source of information. There’s a nice example in this article on Katie Roiphe. Roiphe wrote a book back in the 1990s arguing that feminist claims about date rape were overblown and that feminism was monolithically anti-sex. A lot of it took the form of personal anecdotes well-summed-up by Rebecca Traister as”I’m too sexy for this movement”. She supported her claim that rape statistics were overblown by noting that none of her friends ever told her they’d been raped. Katha Pollit, in a review, asked,”if Katie Roiphe was your friend, would you tell her if you were raped?”Roiphe now says that she found this an extremely personal and inappropriate attack. Could be a nice exercise to get students to explain why in this case, but not in most, it is legitimate to talk about the nature of an author’s friendships. Of course, there’s also the weakness of anecdotal evidence to be discussed. Lots of good stuff here that could bring politically interesting material into critical thinking courses!
Katie Roiphe’s work interests me because she is typically cited as one of the intellectual antecedents of third-wave feminism (along with Camille Paglia and Rene Denfeld). Like Roiphe, many third-wave writers use first person narrative to communicate their ideas. It seems a bit odd, then, that Roiphe objected when the tables were turned, i.e., when Pollit asked readers to imagine their personal (hypothetical) narrative.
-Bridget Crawford
Here at The Hidden Side of a Leaf.
Michael Moore did a fairly contentious interview on CNN about his new movie that can be viewed here.
Here. Below is an excerpt:
What distinguishes the Federalist Society, I suggest, is that it, alone among legal scholars’ groups, is not uncomfortable with the patterns of gender disparity that Eugene has identified, and is therefore not interested in working against them in its speaker choices and management structure. (I note that scholars who wish to present at ASLH and ALEA must apply to do so, and that their programs therefore do not directly reflect those organizations’ invitation strategies. However, the organizations do screen the applications, approving some and declining others. I know from experience that gender and racial diversity are among the important criteria for ASLH; I suspect (but don’t know for sure) that something similar is at least in the mix for ALEA too.)
This difference between the Federalists and these other organizations should not be controversial or surprising. Declining to work against broad cultural patterns of bias against traditional American targets (racial minorities and women) is, as I have always understood it, a matter of ideological commitment for the Federalists, who view goals such as racial or gender balance as the “political correctness” of affirmative action. As Eugene, presumably speaking for the Federalist Society, rather derisively put it in the title of his opening comment in this discussion, “Here We Thought That Ideological Diversity Is Good Enough.” Gender and racial diversity are among the goals worth seeking for groups like ASLH and ALEA. For the Federalists, those goals are often matters of derision. They are instances of unfairness — a visiting on today’s white men of what they view as some prior generation’s sins against non-whites and women. They are unjust deviations from a color-blind and gender-blind system of pure “merit.”
Last year’s Federalist Society National Lawyers Convention featured few women. Out of 110 people listed on the program, looks like only 10 women participated, and 3 of them were “moderators” rather than speakers. One of the all-male panels convened around Intellectual Property law, a subject area in which there is a huge number of successful women law profs and practitioners. Half of the Leiter Citation Index IP Law “Top 10” are female. Yet none of the five panel participants were. This doesn’t look accidental to me.
–Ann Bartow
From the AP:
Georgia’s top court said Monday it will move up by three months a hearing for a man serving a 10-year sentence on a child molestation charge for having consensual oral sex with a fellow teenager.
The state Supreme Court had set an October hearing on the state attorney general’s appeal of a judge’s order that Genarlow Wilson should be freed from what the judge called “a grave miscarriage of justice.”
Instead, the justices set a hearing for next week on that matter and Wilson’s appeal of his detention pending the outcome of the case.
The court gave no reason for the decision to move the case ahead on the docket. * * *
Last week, hundreds of supporters including the Rev. Al Sharpton held a rally on the steps of a county courthouse demanding Wilson’s release from prison.
-Bridget Crawford
Watch it here. Below is an excerpt from a review:
… the real success of the program lies in its ability to provide tangible examples of the increasingly closer connection between pornography and community-sanctioned corporations. While not as visually enticing, a significant part of the first fifteen minutes of the documentary resembles a CNN special on the influence of technology on communications, Internet, and hotel companies. There is little mention of the content of pornography (nor are there the audio-visual aids to accompany it), but lots of emphasis on the economic and historical changes of the industry. The corporate giant AT&T is reaping huge financial benefits through ownership of its cable network AT&T Broadband, which shows explicit porn on channels such as the Hot Network. General Motors, which owns Direct-TV, receives big profits every time an adult movie is purchased by viewers across America. Now, it seems, there are infinitely more ways to sell a dirty picture, and pornography has become associated with some big American brand names. Hotel chains are part of the association, too. As an amenity in large hotel chains, pay-per-view adult films are made available by one of two major distribution companies:Lodgenet or On-Command Video. Even internet companies such as Yahoo!, a search engine used in millions of American households, make money by selling ads and links to porn websites. Both sides of the business equation are satisfied: the mainstream companies receive large profits and the porn industry gets the stamp of approval by legitimate businesses. …
