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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.Resolutions Without Resolve: Turning Away from UN Security Council Resolutions to Address Conflict-Related Sexual Violence
In 2008, the United Nations first recognized rape as a war crime with the passage of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1820. Since then, the fight against conflict-related sexual violence has become a frequent subject of Security Council Resolutions. But what, if anything, has changed? Wartime sexual violence is still prevalent today and shows no signs of slowing down. This Note argues that Security Council Resolutions are not an effective method to prevent conflict-related sexual violence. The procedural weaknesses in passing Security Council Resolutions and the structure of the Security Council itself may do more harm than good to the efforts to end wartime sexual violence. Instead, this Note finds a solution in an unlikely realm: using voluntary pollution prevention programs as a template to address wartime sexual violence. In examining the parallels between the two issues, this Note suggests a new framework for addressing wartime sexual violence, relying on three factors in particular: adequate and consistent funding to key organizations, regular and credible monitoring of vulnerable communities, and the credible threat of enforcement.The Intersection of Wrongful Convictions and Gender in Cases Where Women Were Sentenced to Death or Life in Prison Without Parole
This Note examines National Registry of Exonerations data and discusses the prevalence of false confessions and presence of a child victim in cases of women who were convicted of murder, received a serious sentence, and were later exonerated. After looking at the cases of women exonerated after receiving death sentences or life without parole sentences in light of the prevalence of these factors, this Note argues that examination of the cases reveals that the presence of a false confession or a child victim may have contributed to some of the wrongful convictions where these factors may have led to the women being viewed as having failed to conform to society’s expectations for women. This Note then discusses why evidence that portrayed the women as having violated society’s expectations could not have been excluded at trial and why exclusion in future cases through the rules of evidence or new legislation is challenging. This Note concludes by arguing that an awareness of how gender can contribute to wrongful convictions or the imposition of harsher sentences can help attorneys and judges guard against gender affecting the outcomes of criminal proceedings.Prescription Restriction: Why Birth Control Must Be Over-the-Counter in the United States
This Note argues that it is harmful and unnecessary to require women to obtain prescriptions for access to hormonal birth control. Requiring a prescription is necessarily a barrier to access which hurts women and hamstrings the ability to dictate their own reproductive plans. It is also an irrational regulation in light of the relative safety of hormonal birth control pills, particularly progestin-only formulations, compared to other drugs readily available on the shelves. Leading medical organizations, including the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists, advocate for over-the-counter access to hormonal birth control. While acknowledging that not every woman will have positive outcomes taking hormonal birth control pills, this Note argues that women are capable of taking hormonal birth control as directed and are able to self-identify if they themselves are at risk for complications. Following a long line of cases that establish reproduction as a fundamental right in the United States, it follows that requiring a prescription for access can and should be analyzed under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment Due Process clauses, particularly under the Undue Burden standard. Certain prerequisites, such as pelvic exams, once thought to be necessary to safely prescribe hormonal birth control, are now widely considered unnecessary in determining whether a particular woman can safely take birth control pills. This Note goes further and argues that such prerequisites are an unconstitutional method of holding vital medication hostage from women who desire to control their reproductive health.Contracting Around Gender Constructs: Transgender Men at Women’s Colleges
As the transgender community gains increasing visibility in society, women’s colleges have begun to address new questions about who is eligible to attend. One such question is whether students who come out as transgender men after matriculation are eligible to remain enrolled and graduate from these institutions. The main claims relevant to this discussion are (1) colleges’ right to retain their identity as all-women’s institutions; (2) the parallel rights of cisgender female students who explicitly choose to attend an all-women’s institution, and (3) transgender students’ competing right to avoid arbitrary or capricious dismissal based on gender identity. This Note posits that contract law provides a useful framework for colleges to evaluate this question since both express and implied contracts form the basis of the student- college relationship. Ultimately, this Note argues that, although solutions that satisfy all parties are impossible, harms can be minimized if transgender students are permitted to graduate and given appropriate support throughout the transition process, and other policies are adapted to address the concerns of cisgender female students.Removing Camouflaged Barriers to Equality: Overcoming Systemic Sexual Assault and Harassment at the Military Academies
The Education Amendments of 1972 introduced requirements to protect female students from discriminatory policies at post-secondary institutions. A portion of those amendments, commonly known as Title IX, require that no students be subjected to discrimination based on their sex by any educational institution or activity receiving federal financial assistance. An exemption under § 1681(a)(4), however, explicitly prohibits application of Title IX to any educational institution whose primary purpose is to train individuals for military service or the merchant marine. Although those students are still subject to stringent conduct standards, the service academies themselves are tethered to sex discrimination policies only by their goodwill, reputation, and the boundaries of the Constitution. Answering only to the Department of Defense (or Transportation, in the case of the United States Merchant Marine Academy) does not hold these institutions accountable to their students or to the American public. The academies’ attempts at combatting this widespread problem have been ineffective, and they continue to perpetuate a culture of sexual violence. This Note proposes the removal of exemption language from Title IX, or, alternatively, insists that the academies comply with mandatory reporting requirements under the Clery Act.Running from the Gender Police: Reconceptualizing Gender to Ensure Protection for Non-Binary People
Non-binary people who are discriminated against at work or school are in a unique and demoralizing position. Not only have some courts expressed reluctance to use existing antidiscrimination law to protect plaintiffs who are discriminated against based on their gender identity and not simply because they are men or women, in most states non-binary genders are not legally recognized. I argue that a fundamental right to self-identification grounded in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment would provide non-binary plaintiffs with the ability to assert their gender in court and have that assertion carry legal weight, regardless of how friendly the Court is to queer rights issues. I argue that a fundamental right to selfidentification would require courts to give the same wide degree of deference to a plaintiff’s self-identification of their gender as they do to a plaintiff’s self-identification of their religious beliefs. This legal framework would prohibit courts from policing the gender of the parties before them and allow them only to assess whether the plaintiff’s gender-related beliefs are sincerely held. Such a legal framework would allow non-binary plaintiffs to bring claims under federal anti-discrimination law without worrying that the Court will refuse to recognize their gender as valid.R-Egg-Ulation: A Call for Greater Regulation of the Big Business of Human Egg Harvesting
When it comes to young healthy women “donating” their eggs, America has a regulation problem. This Note explains the science behind the harvesting of human eggs, focusing on potential egg donors, and describes the specific factors that make egg donation a unique type of transaction. It describes the current regulatory status of the assisted reproductive technology industry in the United States and highlights the ways in which this scheme fails to protect egg “donors.” This Note concludes with a call for comprehensive regulation of the assisted reproductive technology industry.Missed Opportunities: The Unrealized Equal Protection Framework in Maher v. Roe and Harris v. McRae
This Note focuses on two cases, Maher v. Roe and Harris v. McRae, and argues that they represent watershed moments in the reproductive rights movement because they positioned abortion as a fundamental right in name only. In both cases, the Supreme Court sanctioned severe funding restrictions and refused to grant poor women the right to state and federal assistance for elective and “nontherapeutic” abortions. “Non-therapeutic abortion” refers to those abortions performed or induced when the life of the mother is not endangered if the fetus is carried to term or when the pregnancy of the mother is not the result of rape or incest reported to a law enforcement agency. This Note contends that by articulating the abortion right as stemming from the “right to privacy,” the Court effectively ruled out the possibility of public assistance for abortions. In contrast, a better approach to this issue would be to use an equality framework grounded in the Equal Protection Clause. This approach would instruct courts to invalidate state abortion restrictions that either 1) impose a burden on the reproductive choices of women when there is no equivalent restriction placed on men; or 2) have a disparate impact on indigent women. These missed opportunities to reorient the Court’s reproductive rights jurisprudence under the Equal Protection Clause continue to have lasting effects on women’s access to abortion, as the Court continues to weaken the Due Process standard articulated in Roe, enabling it to uphold increasingly prohibitive state restrictions on abortion.Sexual Assault and Rape in the Military: The Invisible Victims of International Gender Crimes at the Front Lines
In the past several years in particular, intra-military sexual assault and rape in the U.S. armed forces have been the focus of frequent media attention and intense congressional debate. Despite reforms, the rate of intra-military sexual crimes continues to remain high, as does soldiers’ wariness to report instances of sexual violence to military commanders. These problems and others have invigorated the position taken by some that outside judicial review of intra- military sexual crimes is necessary to provide justice to victims and lower the rate of intra-military sexual assault and rape. This Note argues that one of the primary contributors to intra-military sexual assault and rape is the gendered nature of the military itself. Given the nature of these acts, intra-military sexual assault and rape can be properly qualified as “gender crimes.” This Note also points out that this problem is not unique to the United States, as other militaries around the world struggle with intra-military sexual violence. Due to this widespread occurrence and international human rights laws prohibiting rape and gender-based violence more generally, this Note argues that intra-military sexual assault and rape should be viewed as international gender crimes in violation of international customary law. It is theorized that recognizing intramilitary sexual assault and rape in this manner can bring greater attention to these crimes and help push for independent judicial review of intra-military sexual crimes on the domestic level worldwide.