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Innocent Spouses, Reasonable Women and Divorce: The Gap Between Reality and the Internal Revenue Code
This Article asks whether the "reasonable woman" should become the standard for women seeking relief from tax liabilities under the innocent spouse provision of the I.R.C. and whether an even more specific standard should be adopted for women who are also going through divorce or are in similar situations.“What’s so Magic[al] About Black Women?” Peremptory Challenges at the Intersection of Race and Gender
This Article addresses the evolving constitutional restraints on the exercise of peremptory challenges in jury selection. Approximately ten years ago, in the landmark case of Batson v. Kentucky, the United States Supreme Court held that the Equal Protection Clause forbids prosecutors to exercise race-based peremptory challenges, at least when the excluded jurors and the defendant share the same race. Over the next ten years, the Court extended Batson's reach.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.Our Pain
A poem.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.Prostitution and Male Supremacy
The assumptions of academia can barely begin to imagine the reality of life for women in prostitution. Academic life is premised on the notion that there is a tomorrow and a next day and a next day; or that someone can come inside from the cold for time to study; or that there is some kind of discourse of ideas and a year of freedom in which you can have disagreements that will not cost you your life. These are premises that those who are students here or who teach here act on every day. They are antithetical to the lives of women who are in prostitution or who have been in prostitution.Prostitution and Civil Rights
The gap between the promise of civil rights and the real lives of prostitutes is an abyss which swallows up prostituted women.' To speak of prostitution and civil rights in one breath moves the two into one world, at once exposing and narrowing the distance between them.