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Succeeding in Law School: A Comparison of Women’s Experiences at Brooklyn Law School and the University of Pennsylvania
This Article reports our findings from a replication of the Penn research conducted at Brooklyn Law School in order to test the experience-performance link reported by the Penn researchers. Brooklyn Law School offers an ideal setting for a test of the Penn research because it already has adopted most of the reforms that the Penn researchers believe would reduce women's alienation from the learning environment and thus improve their academic performance. First, Brooklyn Law School, as compared to other American law schools, has a large proportion of women faculty. During the 1994-95 academic year, thirty-seven percent of its tenured and tenure-track faculty and forty-five percent of its full faculty were women. Second, Brooklyn has already adopted most of the Penn researchers' recommendations regarding curricular restructuring in the first year. Although Brooklyn retains the traditional, large class for much of its first-year curriculum, each student also is enrolled in a small (fifteen to seventeen students) legal writing class and a somewhat larger (thirty-one to thirty-four students) "seminar section" for one of the standard, substantive first-year courses. Grading in the seminar section is not exclusively exam-based and faculty members who teach these courses use varied teaching techniques, including cooperative approaches, to provide a counterweight to the more traditional approach of the larger first-year classes. Even within the larger classes, faculty surveys suggest that the Socratic method is by no means the exclusive approach or even, in some classes, the dominant one; many faculty members teaching first-year classes use problems, simulations, "gaming" techniques, negotiation, and other non-Socratic teaching methods as key features of their pedagogy.Husband and Wife are One – Him: Bennis v. Michigan as the Resurrection of Coverture
Although the legal fictions of coverture and guilty property have been repudiated by statutes and the Court respectively, the Supreme Court implicitly resurrected and fused the coverture and guilty property myths in Bennis v. Michigan. In that decision, the Court approved the forfeiture of Ms. Bennis' interest in a car in which her husband engaged in sexual activity with a prostitute. This Article explores that resurrected conglomerate in three parts. Part I is a concise review of the feudal doctrine of coverture and the disabilities it imposed on married women. Part II focuses almost entirely on the decision in Austin, in which the Supreme Court held that the Eighth Amendment's Excessive Fines Clause applies to in rem forfeiture proceedings. Part III begins with a summary of the Bennis decision and ends with an expose of Bennis as the resurrection and fusion of both the guilty property and coverture fictions.Slavery Rhetoric and the Abortion Debate
There are many things that could be, and have been, said about the question of abortion. This article focuses on the rhetoric of the abortion debate. Specifically, I discuss how both sides of the abortion debate have appropriated the image of the slave and used that image as a rhetorical tool, a metaphor, in making legal arguments. Further, I examine the effectiveness of this metaphor as a rhetorical tool. Finally, I question the purposes behind this appropriation, and whether it reflects a lack of sensitivity to the racial content of the appropriated image.The Key to Unlocking the Clubhouse Door: The Application of Antidiscrimination Laws to Quasi-Private Clubs
This article focuses on discrimination in quasi-private clubs and the impact of laws and the United States Constitution on that discrimination. For the purposes of this article, a quasi-private club is any organization that claims to be private but which might in fact be viewed as public. The term "quasi-private" is used because litigation concerning discrimination in such organizations often rests on whether the entity is private, and therefore cannot be regulated.The Worldwide Market for Sex: A Review of International and Regional Legal Prohibitions Regarding Trafficking in Women
This essay considers whether international treaty law is a useful weapon in the battle against the global sex trade. The introduction to this essay surveys the extent of global sex trafficking. Part I of this essay discusses the international legal conventions that address the issue of trafficking in women. Part II of this essay assesses the effectiveness of these international instruments and considers why they have failed to and the world sex trade. In Part III, this essay describes the European and Inter-American human rights systems, focusing upon substantive law in the regional systems that might be relevant to the issue of prostitution. It then briefly examines the procedures through which this substantive law could be enforced.An Analysis of Individual, Institutional, and Cultural Pimping
A pimp is a man .. .who takes all or a part of the earnings of women who sell their bodies for gain. He may have inveigled her into becoming a prostitute or acquired her after she started the business. Invariably he encourages her to continue in prostitution, and he may be either her lover or her husband, but always he is her supposed protector.An Imperfect Remedy for Imperfect Violence: The Construction of Civil Rights in the Violence Against Women Act
Along with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) could be the most significant addition to federal civil rights laws in the last century. While potentially revolutionary, the VAWA's civil rights remedy forges two problematic legal concepts-traditional civil rights jurisprudence and "perfect" violence-into a super-remedy that risks combining the worst aspects of each. Those who utilize and interpret the Act can avoid this outcome by situating individual violent acts in the broader social and historical context of gender-motivated violence.