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Criminal Record Relief for Human Trafficking Survivors: Analysis of Current State Statutes and the Need for a Federal Model Statute
This Note defines criminal record relief and analyzes the effectiveness of three state criminal record relief statutes at protecting trafficking survivors. This analysis is based on State Report Cards: Grading Criminal Record Relief Laws for Survivors of Human Trafficking by Polaris, a leading human trafficking nonprofit. It next discusses the absence of federal criminal record relief and how a statute at the federal level could provide relief for survivors with federal convictions while simultaneously providing a model for states to ensure their statutes incorporate best practices for record relief moving forward. This Note then discusses how Polaris’s report stops short of providing a model statute for states to draw from. Finally, this Note provides a best practice statute based on Polaris’s evaluation criteria and recommends it be added as an amendment to the Trafficking Victims Protection Act.The Stability Paradox: The Two-Parent Paradigm and the Perpetuation of Violence Against Women in Termination of Parental Rights and Custody Cases
Despite changing family compositions, entrenched in family law is the antiquated idea that a two-parent household, or its approximation vis-à-vis a shared custody arrangement, promotes stability and integrity and, thus, is in the best interest of the child. Yet, the concept that the two-parent household (or shared involvement of both parents in the child’s life if the parents separate) promotes stability for the family and is best for the child is a dangerous fallacy. When rape or intimate partner violence (IPV) is present, or the re-occurrence of violence remains a threat, the family unit is far from stable. This Article explores the legal system’s glorification of the nuclear family, its resistance to shifting away from the two-parent paradigm, and how this resistance creates a stability paradox and perpetuates violence against women and children. The harmful impact that the nuclear family paradigm has on families is further explored by an examination of the statutory constructs and judicial interpretations of termination of parental rights (TPR) and custody statutes in cases where a child is conceived as a result of rape or exposed to ongoing IPV. Cases are utilized to examine how courts have interpreted parental rights statutes where a child is conceived as a result of rape. Additionally, a hypothetical case is discussed to explore arguments that may be advanced in TPR cases where children are exposed to ongoing IPV. The Article finds that although there are inherent problems in enacting statutes to terminate parental rights in cases involving rape or IPV, legislation is also a necessary tool for survivors. Model legislation is proposed for termination of parental rights in cases where a child is conceived as a result of a sexual offense or when a child is exposed to ongoing IPV.An Intersectional Approach to the Internal Protection Alternative for Asylum
In April 2006, the Refugee Protection Division of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada considered the asylum case of Erika Cardenas Parrales, a lesbian from Mexico who suffered years of persecution due to her sexuality.1See Parrales v. Canada (Minister of…A Feminist Economic Perspective on Contract Law: Promissory Estoppel as an Example
Economic analysis is a highly influential theoretical approach to contract law. At the same time, feminist analysis of contract law offers an important critical approach to the field. However, feminist economics, a prominent alternative approach to mainstream neo-classical economics drawing from both economic theory and feminist theory, has only been applied scarcely and sporadically to contract law. This Article seeks to bridge this gap and to apply the key features of feminist economics to an analysis of the doctrine of promissory estoppel. This Article uses promissory estoppel as an example to demonstrate a feminist economic analysis of contract law.“Champion Man-Hater of All Time”: Feminism, Insanity, and Property Rights in 1940s America
Legions of law students in property or trusts and estates courses have studied the will dispute, In re Strittmater’s Estate. The cases, casebooks, and treatises that cite Strittmater present the 1947 decision from New Jersey’s highest court as a model of the “insane delusion” doctrine. Readers learn that snubbed relatives successfully invalidated Louisa Strittmater’s will, which left her estate to the Equal Rights Amendment campaign, by convincing the court that her radical views on gender equality amounted to insanity and, thus, testamentary incapacity. By failing to provide any commentary or context on this overt sexism, these sources affirm the court’s portrait of Louisa Strittmater as an eccentric landlady and fanatical feminist. This is troubling. Strittmater should be a well-known case, but not for the proposition that feminism is an insane delusion. Despite the decision’s popularity on law school syllabi, no scholar has interrogated the case’s broader historical background. Through original archival research, this Article centers Strittmater as a case study in how social views on gender, psychology, and the law shaped one another in the immediate aftermath of World War II, hampering women’s property rights and efforts to achieve constitutional equality. More than just a problematic precedent, the case exposes a world in which the “Champion Man-Hater of All Time”—newspapers’ epithet for Strittmater—was not only a humorous headline but also a credible threat to the postwar order that courts were helping to erect. The Article thus challenges the textbook understanding of “insane delusion” and shows that postwar culture was conducive to a strengthening of the longstanding suspicion that feminist critiques of gender inequality were, simply put, crazy.Reasonableness in Hostile Work Environment Cases After #MeToo
The #MeToo movement, a global social response to sexual harassment in the workplace, has turned the traditional approach to sexual harassment on its head. Instead of shielding perpetrators and discrediting survivors, employers, the media, and the public have begun to shift from presuming the credibility of the perpetrator to presuming the credibility of the survivor. But this upending of the status quo has occurred almost entirely in the social sphere—and the legal system, where survivors of workplace sexual harassment can seek remedies for the abuse they have suffered, is proving much slower to adapt. While our social presumptions are flipping to center the behavior of the accused instead of the accuser, the legal standard for workplace sexual harassment still focuses squarely on the victim’s reasonableness. In order to bring a legally actionable claim of sexual harassment, a victim must demonstrate that she was objectively and subjectively reasonable in believing that she was subjected to sexual harassment. Even if she succeeds in demonstrating this, if her employer had mechanisms in place to address sexual harassment, she must also demonstrate that her response to her harassment— such as reporting or not reporting the harassment through an employer’s complaint process—was reasonable. This Comment analyzes the effects of the #MeToo movement on federal courts’ definitions of sexual harassment under the existing legal standard. Since reasonableness is a socially-defined term, courts have plenty of room to incorporate shifting conceptions of sexual harassment into their jurisprudence—but many are remarkably slow to do so. While it is too soon to state definitively what effect #MeToo will have on sexual harassment law in the long run, this Comment should leave practitioners and scholars with a clearer picture of the direction circuit courts have taken since #MeToo began. LA Podcast of One’s Own
In this short Essay, we discuss the lack of racial and gender diversity on and around the Supreme Court. As we note, the ranks of the Court’s Justices and its clerks historically have been dominated by white men. But this homogeneity is not limited to the Court’s members or its clerks. As we explain, much of the Court’s broader ecosystem suffers from this same lack of diversity. The advocates who argue before the Court are primarily white men; the experts cited in the Court’s opinions, as well as the experts on whom Court commentators rely in interpreting those opinions, are often white men; and the commentators who translate the Court’s work for the public are also largely white men. We suggest this lack of diversity has consequences both for the Court’s work and for the public’s understanding of the Court. We also identify some of the factors that contribute to the lack of diversity in the Court’s ecosystem, including unduly narrow conceptions of expertise and a rigid insistence on particular notions of neutrality. We also note and discuss our own modest efforts to disrupt these dynamics with Strict Scrutiny, our podcast about the Supreme Court and the legal culture that surrounds it. To be sure, a podcast, by itself, will not dismantle the institutional factors that we have identified in this Essay. Nevertheless, we maintain that our efforts to use the podcast as a platform for surfacing these institutional dynamics, while simultaneously cultivating a more diverse cadre of Supreme Court experts and commentators, is a step in the right direction.Life Cycle of the Journal (Pt. II)
This is one blog post in a series about law journals written by Michigan Journal of Gender & Law. The goal of the series is to ‘demystify’ law journals, something that many first-year law students, especially those who are first generation and haven’t had many opportunities to interact with…Life Cycle of the Journal (Pt. I)
This is one blog post in a series about law journals written by Michigan Journal of Gender & Law. The goal of the series is to ‘demystify’ law journals, something that many first-year law students, especially those who are first generation and haven’t had many opportunities to interact with the…To Join a Journal or Not to Join a Journal
This is one blog post in a series about law journals written by Michigan Journal of Gender & Law. The goal of the series is to ‘demystify’ law journals, something that many first-year law students, especially those who are first generation and haven’t had many opportunities to interact with…