Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Tort Opinions

Martha Chamallas & Lucinda M. Finley, Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Tort Opinions (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

By rewriting both canonical and lesser-known tort cases from a feminist perspective, this volume exposes gender and racial bias in how courts have categorized and evaluated harm stemming from prenatal malpractice, pregnancy loss, domestic violence, sexual assault and harassment, invasion of privacy, and the award of economic and noneconomic damages. The rewritten opinions demonstrate that when confronted with gendered harm to women, courts have often distorted or misapplied conventional legal doctrine to diminish the harm or deny recovery. Bringing this implicit bias to the surface can make law students, lawyers and judges who craft arguments and apply tort doctrines, more aware of inequalities of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation or gender identity. This volume shows the way forward to make the basic doctrines of tort law more responsive to the needs and perspectives of traditionally marginalized people, in ways that give greater value to harms that they disproportionately experience. 

-Publisher's Description

Women as Constitution-Makers

Ruth Rubio-Marin & Helen Irving, Women as Constitution-Makers: Case Studies from the New Democratic Era (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

This collection offers, for the first time, comprehensive case-studies of women's campaigns for constitutional equality in nine different countries that have undergone constitutional transformations in the 'participatory era.' Against a richly-contextualized historical and political background, each charts the actions and strategies of women participants, both formal and informal, and records their successes, failures and continuing hopes for constitutional equality. 

-Publisher's Description

Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI

Jessica R. Pliley (Texas State University). Policing Sexuality (Harvard University Press, 2014).

"Policing Sexuality links the crusade against sex trafficking to the rapid growth of the Bureau from a few dozen agents at the time of the Mann Act into a formidable law enforcement organization that cooperated with state and municipal authorities across the nation. In pursuit of offenders, the Bureau often intervened in domestic squabbles on behalf of men intent on monitoring their wives and daughters. Working prostitutes were imprisoned at dramatically increased rates, while their male clients were seldom prosecuted."

—Publisher's website

Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation

Estelle B. Freedman (Standford University). Redefining Rape (Harvard University Press, 2013).

"Rape has never had a universally accepted definition, and the uproar over 'legitimate rape' during the 2012 U.S. elections confirms that it remains a word in flux. . . . In this ambitious new history, Estelle Freedman demonstrates that our definition of rape has depended heavily on dynamics of political power and social privilege. . . . Between the 1870s and the 1930s, at the height of racial segregation and lynching, and amid the campaign for woman suffrage, women’s rights supporters and African American activists tried to expand understandings of rape in order to gain legal protection from coercive sexual relations, assaults by white men on black women, street harassment, and the sexual abuse of children. By redefining rape, they sought to redraw the very boundaries of citizenship."
—Publisher's Website

Polygamy's Rights and Wrongs: Perspectives on Harm, Family and Law

Gillian Calder & Lori G. Beaman (eds.)(University of Victoria, University of Ottawa). Polygamy's Rights and Wrongs (UBC Press, 2014).

"Assumptions about the harmful nature of polygamy have left little room for debate, the monogamy coming to represent a hallmark of advanced societies, and polygamy the immoral alternative. Yet in this volume, eleven scholars ask whether this condemnation is justified by examining, among other perspectives, the lived experiences of polygamous families. In essays that fearlessly face difficult questions of choice, dignity, and love, the authors seek to complicate a conversation that is more often simplified."
—Polygamy's Rights and Wrongs book jacket