• Selected
• Entire List

Abstract:
As parents, policymakers, and educators search for solutions to the crisis in the nation's public schools, single sex education emerges time and again as a promising strategy, particularly for African American students. As the abstract indicates, the Bush Administration has indicated its support for sex segregation and announced its intention to loosen the applicable legal standards to enable school districts to experiment with single sex schools and classes. This paper argues that, in order to comprehend fully the implications of single sex schooling in inner city schools, examining the history of sex-based and race-based segregation in education is essential.

History demonstrates that sex and racial segregation in education has supported gender and hierarchies and the attendant subordination of African Americans and white women. For example, when public education became available for Blacks, its primary purpose was to prepare males and females alike to work. To the extent that gender-based educational opportunities were available, they were to train Black women for the social roles relegated to them - as domestics, for example - and to compensate for their perceived moral shortcomings. For white students, sex segregated education was key to perpetuating the cult of true womanhood, which, in turn defined and privileged white masculinity and white femininity. Thus, state-established schools for "white girls" prepared their charges to take their rightful places as keeper of home and hearth. The lasting nature of the sex- and race-based stereotypes underlying these forms of education were particularly apparent during the effort to racially desegregate schools in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education. In this context, recalcitrant southern school districts resorted to sex segregation as a way to "dull the edge" of integration.

With this history, the paper examines current efforts to segregate students based on sex, which reveals the intransigence of the racial and gender stereotypes, and the limitations they impose on students' educational opportunities. The paper thus argues that critical examination of single sex schooling, considering the intersection of race and gender, at a minimum, is necessary to ensure that current efforts do not perpetuate subordination of already under-served students.

Discrimination, Segregation, Single Sex Education, Title IX

Abstract:
For the past three years, women leaders from national groups, grassroots organizations, academia and beyond have gathered to address dissonance in the women's movement, particularly dissatisfaction with the movement's emphasis on women privileged on account of their race, class, or sexuality. At these meetings of the New Women's Movement Initiative (NWMI), advocates who no longer want to do feminism have articulated a desire for social justice feminism. This article analyzes what such a shift might mean for feminist practice and legal theory.

Drawing on history, specifically the work of the women behind the Brandeis brief in the Muller v. Oregon workers' hours' restriction case and the National Women's Conference of 1977, this article takes initial steps at broadly defining social justice feminism as that which is productive, constructive, and healing. Moving from practice to theory, it suggests a new way of articulating and understanding the feminist work that is being done in this current stage of feminist jurisprudence, after the path-breaking interventions of anti-essentialism and intersectionality. This article also sets forth certain methodological tools for doing social justice feminism and then uses them to examine the recent Supreme Court case, Long Island Care at Home v. Coke, a case upholding the lack of wage protections for certain domestic workers.

With this article, we hope to advance the conversation that has already begun, both in the world of practice as evidenced by the work of the NWMI, as well as the world of feminist legal theory. Social justice brings to feminism a particular emphasis on fairness and transformation; it is a modification that signals change. At this critical time, with efforts to exacerbate the divides of race and gender, social justice feminism provides a new paradigm for talking about and examining these and other issues that threaten movements dedicated to dismantling oppression and bettering people's lives.

Social justice feminism, oppression, Women's Legal History, Intersectionality, Race, Feminist Legal Theory, Women's Movement, Employment Discrimination, Race and Sex Discrimination, Feminist Jurisprudence, Civil Rights,

Abstract:
First Lady Michelle Obama is an accomplished woman in her own right, defying racial, gender, and class stereotypes to excel in private practice and public service. Yet, during the campaign, a different portrait of this remarkable woman emerged that was noteworthy for its persistence and vitriol. Characterized as bitter, angry, and sassy, among other things, Michelle Obama exemplified life at the intersections of race and gender. Depicting Mrs. Obama in this intensely negative light, her critics essentially asked: How can Michelle Obama be First Lady when she’s no lady at all?

This essay examines the social meaning of the First Lady, an unelected position lacking any Constitutionally-defined job description. As the discourse during the campaign suggested, this role is a national institution of great significance, largely because it personifies domesticity and traditional femininity. This essay argues that, as traditionally understood, the role of First Lady supports privileged white femininity. The essay further argues that the gender and racial norms contributing to the traditional First Lady trope exemplify the intertwined nature of racism and sexism, and particularly, how together they have been used to justify Black subordination. In this regard, the essay discusses how African Americans have embraced gender conformance as a way of attaining acceptance and status within the existing social order, specifically through the “Black lady” trope, which has been applied to Michelle Obama in response to the hostility she confronted in the media. Finally, the essay proposes ways in which Mrs. Obama’s First Ladyship has transformative potential.

Abstract:
This Article examines reparations as a means of supporting systemic reform of public education, focusing on a recent enactment of the Virginia General Assembly, the Brown v. Board of Education Scholarship Program and Fund (Brown Fund Act). This provision seeks to remedy the state's refusal to integrate schools after the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education by providing scholarships to persons denied an education between 1954 and 1964, a period known as massive resistance. Under this regime, the state's executive and legislative branches colluded to develop laws that defied Brown's mandate, including authorizing the governor to close public schools. One locality, Prince Edward County, went so far as to keep its schools closed for five years, but provided state-funded scholarships to enable white children to continue their learning. Black students, however, went without an education, or had to leave the area to get what state officials denied them.

The paper examines the Brown Fund Act within several contexts to assess its efficacy as a remedy and as a form of reparations. Specifically, the paper examines key aspects of Virginia's history and finds that state imposed limits on educational opportunities were part of larger systemic subordination of African Americans. Thus, for example, laws proscribing literacy for slaves, limiting the franchise for Blacks, denying integration in schooling, and enabling Black taxpayer dollars to be diverted to white schools combined to maintain a caste system in which Blacks perpetually would occupy the lower rungs. Viewed in this light, the Brown Fund Act is only a partial remedy and not truly reparative.

The paper thus concludes by building upon the work of Professor Eric Yamamoto, and others, who have posited that reparations should emphasize material change by, inter alia, repairing institutions that have been tainted by state-sanctioned, state-enforced subjugation. The institution in need of repair in this instance is public education. In this regard, the paper explores a variety of legislative measures the state should pursue to effectuate such change and provide justice that it so long denied its Black citizens.

Reperations, Public Education, Brown v. Board of Education, Slavery

Abstract:
Using the Supreme Court's decision in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris as a focal point, this article examines the meaning of private choice in public education reform. In Zelman, the Court addressed the validity of the Cleveland city schools' voucher program, which provided public money for students to attend private parochial schools. The Court concluded that because the program gave parents a "true private choice" it did not run afoul of the Establishment Clause. This article submits that the subtext of the decision, however, suggests that the Justices were influenced by the abysmal condition of the Cleveland schools and were reluctant to tie the hands of public officials seeking to remedy the shortcomings of a system that had failed primarily poor students of color.

The article foregrounds this concern and applies critical feminist theory to interrogate the meaning of choice in this context. In this connection, the article examines the events that lead to enactment of the voucher program at issue in Zelman: specifically, three decades of school desegregation litigation characterized by state "recalcitrance," "hostility" and "reckless maladministration," in the words of the district court. The article concludes that the crisis precipitating enactment of the voucher program was a crisis of the state's own making. In this regard, the article posits, the voucher program entrenched historic and ongoing racial subordination in the school system, and in so doing, failed to provide meaningful, nondiscriminatory choices to parents, as understood by critical feminist theory.

Education Reform, Feminism, School Choice

Abstract:
This article frames the issues in the Supreme Court case, Nevada Department of Human Resources v. Hibbs, and introduces the articles making up the inaugural symposium of the Law and Women's Studies Program at the University of Cincinnati. Hibbs involved a husband who was trying to get leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) in order to take care of his severely injured wife. The case presents an opportunity to rethink issues of work and family, the legal subordination of women, and the law as an agent for social change, and it was therefore an ideal focus for the symposium.

Feminism, Employment Law, Work/Family

Abstract:
This article examines how race and educational equity issues shape women's sports experiences, building upon the narrative of Darnellia Russell, a high school basketball player profiled in the documentary The Heart of the Game. Darnellia is a star player who, because of an unintended pregnancy, has to fight to play the game she loves.

This girl's story provides a unique and underutilized lens through which to examine gender and athletics, as well as evaluate the legal framework for gender equality in sport. In focusing on this narrative, we seek to give voice to black female athletes and to express their concerns in ways the law and scholarship have yet to do. The article focuses on several under-theorized areas: among them, how the push for greater Title IX enforcement in the context of ongoing inequalities in public education has ignored the deeper educational inequalities and educational policy issues that provide the broader context for sports programs, and the impact of policies concerning pregnancy and motherhood on female athletes. The absence of attention to these issues in the discourse and public policy debates surrounding Title IX undermines the law's transformative potential and its ability to succeed in enhancing the sports experiences of all women.

Title IX, sports, race, gender, discrimination, civil rights, education