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On the Road: Images of Truthtelling in Rural America
This narrative is a true story. It raises the same central issue as many of the core stories of race and gender that have haunted us over the last decade: the identification of truthtellers. Theoretical analysis of truth and bias abound. This story, like many of these other stories, nevertheless stands on its own, without the need for iterative analysis.“Trapped” in Sing Sing: Transgendered Prisoners Caught in the Gender Binarism
This Article first summarizes gender, transgendered identity, and legal issues facing transgendered people to contextualize the lives of transgendered prisoners. Parts II and III explore respectively the placement and treatment issues that complicate the incarceration of the transgendered. Corrections authorities, through indifference or incompetence, foster a shockingly inhumane daily existence for transgendered prisoners. In Part V, I examine the plight of transgendered prisoners through the metaphor of the miners' canary. Transgendered prisoners signal the grave dangers facing all of us in a wide array of social structures, elucidating the apparently intractable problems of gender. This Article simultaneously explores a human rights tragedy and proposes practical solutions while taking a critical perspective on the issues raised.Parens Patriae and a Modest Proposal for the Twenty-First Century: Legal Philosophy and a New Look at Children’s Welfare
This paper will turn to philosophy to seek material for limiting the exercise of parens patriae power. A significant reduction of the government's role will better serve the modern concern for child rearing which is this century's re-definition of best interests.An Emerging Ethical and Medical Dilemma: Should Physicians Perform Sex Assignment Surgery on Infants with Ambiguous Genitalia?
This article discusses the development of a surgical approach to treating intersex infants and others with genital anomalies that began in the late 1950s and 1960s and became standard in the 1970s. Although professional literature has recently questioned the surgical approach to the treatment of infants, controversy surrounding treatment persists and the medical community now is divided. How sex reassignment surgery for intersex infants became a routine recommendation of practitioners and how parents were persuaded to consent to such radical surgeries provide a cautionary tale that is relevant to both medicine and law.A Matter of Principle and Consistency: Understanding the Battered Woman and Cultural Defenses
To adequately explain and argue why feminists, as a matter of legal theory, must take both the BWS and cultural defenses seriously, these defenses need further elaboration. Section I details what these defenses are, how they developed, and how they work in the justice system. Section II enlarges the picture by revealing the similarities between the two defenses which share not only the same theoretical and practical goals, but also the same criticisms and flaws highlighted by scholars. Finally, Section III asserts that cultural evidence and evidence of battering must be admitted to show the absence of mens rea. However, because serious problems arise from the admission of these two defenses, Section III discusses one potential approach to mitigating or eliminating the resulting harms and urges the search for more alternatives. The Article concludes that feminists must accept the admission of cultural evidence and evidence of battering in domestic violence homicide trials. The proper response to the problematic aspects of each defense is the search for specific solutions and approaches to mitigate the harms, not the abandonment of either defense.Dowry Deaths: Proposing a Standard for Implementation of Domestic Legislation in Accordance with Human Rights Obligations
This article discusses the due diligence standard of governmental responsibility, and measures the adequacy of India's implementation of its national dowry death legislation in accordance with its international human rights obligations. India has enacted legislation designed to combat dowry violence. Although India's laws seem to follow the letter of its international human rights obligations, the country violates the spirit of human rights by lacking an actual commitment to implement this legislation. This Article demonstrates and examines India's breach of its duty of due diligence. Such a breach constitutes government complicity in condoning and perpetuating dowry deaths, which violate women's human rights in India. Through this complicity, India dishonors its obligations under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Social, Economic, and Cultural Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention of Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women, and the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action.Minors as Medical Decision Makers: The Pretextual Reasoning of the Court in the Abortion Cases
By examining the Court's failure to consider the allocation of authority between parents and children in the critical realm of medical decision making, this article exposes the irrationality of the Court's acceptance of limitations on the abortion rights of minors and reveals the pronatalist thrust of the parental involvement decisions. The article begins by looking at how the Roe Court characterized abortion as a medical decision, followed by a discussion about the medical decision-making rights of minors. Rooted in this medical paradigm, the article then turns to the parental involvement cases to examine the Court's failure to consider the medical decision-making of minors when evaluating the constitutionality of parental involvement laws as well as its emerging concern for the rights of the unborn.Regulating Sexual Relationships Between Faculty and Students
Universities must create an effective learning environment for students; university policy should be directed at creating an atmosphere of mutual respect and trust. Whenever a faculty-student sexual relationship causes a student to drop a class, or a thesis, or school, that student has suffered a serious harm. Universities cannot simply answer that the student consented to the relationship and should handle the consequences. A university without a well-established and promulgated policy, one that at least acknowledges the risks involved in faculty-student sexual relationships and gives students a list of faculty and staff members to contact for support, seriously fails the students. Professors should not be sexually involved with students who are in their classes or working closely with them on research or a thesis; students should have access to support. The difficulty should not be in deciding whether to have an established and easily accessible consensual relationships policy. The difficulty comes instead in deciding whether to ban or simply discourage sexual relationships, and in developing effective mechanisms to promulgate and enforce the policy. Part I of this article will evaluate university consensual relationships policies that ban or discourage sexual relationships. Part II focuses on consent and the potential harms that policy makers should consider in developing or reevaluating their policies. Part III critiques the liberal view that regulation of faculty-student sex overburdens individuals’ right to privacy. Part IV focuses on the writings of Jane Gallop and bell hooks, who offer stories about faculty-student relationships from the two professors' points of view.Foundations for 15(1): Equality Rights in Canada
The paper discusses a selection of important cases under section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It traces the development of equality jurisprudence from the introduction of section 15 to early approaches in Andrews, Hess, Weatherall, Symes, and McKinney. This review illustrates the persistence of formal equality analysis and the threats of biology, morality, and tradition to the realization of substantive equality. The May 25, 1995, trilogy of Egan, Miron, and Thibaudeau is critiqued in detail. Finally, we turn to more recent jurisprudence and offer a brief discussion of M. v. H.Be Careful What You Wish For: An Examination of Arrest and Prosecution Patterns of Domestic Violence Cases in Two Cities in Michigan
This Article will examine six months of data on arrests for domestic violence in the cities of Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor. In order to be able to interpret what the data means Lyon did some other research. The results were surprising- for example, although women tend to be injured most severely by domestic violence, they use violence in intimate relationships a little more often than men. Part I of this Article traces a brief history of domestic violence and discusses the issue of who commits domestic violence, Part II discusses the "must arrest" and "should arrest" policies and their history, Part III lays out what the data received from Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti revealed, and Part IV addresses the policy implications of this information and proposes some changes.