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Trek to Triumph
I was screaming in the stairwell of my home, holding a dead baby. The air was so thick that I could barely breathe. Tears were racing down my face as her twin sister, Zola, was screeching at the top of her lungs. “WHY LORD, don't take my baby!” Every emotion, every word, and every second after that moment felt black. All the sweet memories from just eight days of being able to hold her, kiss her, and love her fell in a black pit along with the dreams I had for my life. As I looked down at my sweet Zaina, I could not help but see at that moment that we were the same—lifeless. I rode to the hospital in the front of the ambulance while EMS performed CPR on her in the back. I kept repeating “breathe baby, please, just choose to live,” hoping that she would hear me and fight for her life. As the double doors to the emergency room swung open, the doctor took one look at her, and I could tell it was not good. My knees gave out and I fell onto the floor. It was so cold. There was nothing left that I could do. As I struggled to gather the strength to pick myself up from the cold ground, I realized something: nothing that could happen to me for the rest of my life is worse than this. Nothing is worse than losing a child. This was my biggest fear, and I was staring face-to-face with it at age twenty-three.The Ground on Which We All Stand: A Conversation About Menstrual Equity Law and Activism
This essay grows out of a panel discussion among five lawyers on the subject of menstrual equity activism. Each of the authors is a scholar, activist, or organizer involved in some form of menstrual equity work. The overall project is both enriched and complicated by an intersectional analysis. This essay increases awareness of existing menstrual equity and menstrual justice work; it also identifies avenues for further inquiry, next steps for legal action, and opportunities that lie ahead. After describing prior and current work at the junction of law and menstruation, the contributors evaluate the successes and limitations of recent legal changes. The authors then turn to conceptual issues about the relationship between menstrual equity and gender justice, as well as the difference between equity and equality. The essay concludes with consideration of the future of menstrual equity and menstrual justice work. The authors envision an expanded, inclusive group of individuals working for greater gender justice.Draft of a Letter of Recommendation to the Honorable Alex Kozinski, Which I Guess I’m Not Going to Send Now
This legal-literary essay engages the current social and jurisprudential moment, encapsulated by the hashtag #metoo. It focuses on the allegations, made in the first week of December 2017, that Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Alex Kozinski verbally sexually harassed former law clerks Emily Murphy and Heidi Bond. I wrote the lioness’s share of the piece during December 10–11—that is, in the days before news outlets reported that other women complained of Kozinski touching them on the thigh or breast while propositioning them for sex or discussing recent sexual encounters—and concluded that Kozinski was unlikely to face impeachment or meaningful judicial censure, but that he should nevertheless resign because his maintenance of his judicial position was untenable. What occurred next proved a shocking installation in the annals of American judicial history: After hiring feminist icon Susan Estrich as counsel and asserting that the claims against him were “not true,” Judge Kozinski did retire on December 18, 2017, explaining that he could not “be an effective judge and simultaneously fight this battle. . . . Nor would such a battle be good for [his] beloved federal judiciary.” Beyond qualifying me, for the first time in my life, more as a baffled Hildegard von Bingen than as a grouchy Cassandra, the most notable aspect of my essay is its form. It is auto-fiction, composed in the style of a letter of recommendation that an unnamed U.S. law professor attempts to write for a student who seeks a clerkship with Judge Kozinski during those frenzied and confusing first weeks of December. The “letter” also contains editorial comment flags, written by an unidentified colleague. The “foul papers” style of this letter permits an expression of the intense emotion catalyzed by the allegations against Judge Kozinski, and also allows us to consider the double bind that law professors and law students find themselves in with regard to clerkship applications tendered within a legal culture shaped by male dominance and white supremacy. Further, the document’s footnotes denote the copious subtext that can lie beneath the surface of oppressed people’s sometimes strangled speech. The employment of the comment flags allows for a certain amount of “cross talk” to this outpouring, critiques that mainly express the position of the hegemonic power structure (except for some gadfly citations to Janet Halley, Jacob Gersen, and Jeannie Suk). In these comment flags, we can see how even the most basic aspects of legal discourse (Bluebook conventions; formatting;professionalism) encourage denial of the emotional disorganization and rage that flow from sexual harassment and other kinds of oppression. We also can discern how legal discourse’s obsession with “relevance” stymies the engagement of racial, class, and queer intersectionalities. Additionally, it is worth noting that some of these comment flags ask hard and valuable questions. Together, this contest of voices and perspectives interrogates why calls for Kozinski’s resignation were “off the wall” on December 8—that is, that they were so unthinkable that he could gleefully brush them off during that first week of the month—but legitimate on December 18. N.B.: The piece is written as if it is still December 11, just after the allegations of verbal harassment were reported, but before the complaints about physical touching came out in national news. That is, it is “written” in the moments before Judge Kozinski’s reputation suffered irreparable blows, and his remained a sought-after clerkship despite longstanding rumors and complaints of his misogyny. In my efforts to harness the legal-literary style to uncover the effects and constructions of oppression, I take inspiration from Derrick Bell's Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (1993), Richard Delgado’s Storytelling for Oppositionists and Others: A Plea for Narrative, 87 Michigan Law Review 2411 (1989), and Patricia Williams' the Alchemy of Race and Rights (1992). I also build upon Kathryn Abrams and Hila Keren’s Who’s Afraid of Law and the Emotions? 94 MINN. L. REV. 1997 (1998).Working Sex Words
Imagine yourself tasked to speak for a few minutes about legal controls on sex-selling in the United States, or any other country you choose. You need not have thought about the particulars. As someone willing to read a law review article, you have enough to say because sex-selling overlaps with the subject knowledge you already have. Criminal law, contracts, employment law, immigration law, tort law, zoning, commercial law, and intellectual property, among other legal categories, all intersect with this topic. In your brief remarks on how law attempts to mediate the sale and purchase of sex, you have only one modest constraint: Omit a short list of nouns. Describe paid-for sex as a regulated activity without using the words “prostitute” (including “prostitution”), “sex work” (or “sex worker”), “legalization,” “decriminalization,” “john,” “pimp,” “madam,” “trafficking,” and “Nordic model” or “Swedish model.” The premise of the exercise may be familiar from a game marketed under two names, Taboo and Catchphrase. When competing, a member of a team is told a word or phrase and then has to convey its meaning to teammates from whom the word has been hidden. Rules constrain players: The clue-giver is allowed to make any physical gesture and give almost any verbal clue to get his/her team to say the word. But you may NOT: • Say a word that RHYMES with the word. • Give the FIRST LETTER of the word. • Say A PART OF THE WORD in the clue (i.e., shoe for shoe horn). But why, you may reasonably wonder, would anyone discuss an issue in American legal regulation by copying a game that demands dodging? Evasion is anathema to regulation, an endeavor that references an activity and then tries to give intelligible guidance about what participants in the regulated sector must, must not, and may do. Playing Taboo/Catchphrase about the law of sex-selling and -buying seems unproductive, to say the least.Rape and the Querela in Italy: False Protection of Victim Agency
This Essay describes the history of the querela in Italy and explores the controversy surrounding the decision to maintain this institution. In addition, this Essay questions the degree to which the querela can protect victim agency when the attitudes of judges and lawyers in the Italian criminal justice system reflect persistent rape myths.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.Prostitution: A Narrative by a Former “Call Girl”
Why do women get involved in prostitution? I believe there are two primary causes: money and drugs.