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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:
This article presents a case study of the feminist jurisprudence performed by three early birth control advocates: Annie Besant, Jane Hume Clapperton, and Marie Stopes. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the subject of birth control was so taboo that serious efforts were made to keep John Stuart Mill from being buried in Westminster Abbey because of his sympathies with the idea of family limitation. The threat of being charged with obscenity and immorality, whether in a legal indictment, in a literary review, or in the court of public opinion, effectively silenced much public discourse on this important social issue. Besant, Clapperton and Stopes, however, dared to speak out.

Annie Besant published a tract on birth control and defended herself in court against charges of obscene libel in a highly publicized 1877 trial. The writer Jane Hume Clapperton took the unprecedented step of advocating for the use of artificial birth control in a novel, Margaret Dunmore; or, A Socialist Home (1888). Marie Stopes wrote two runaway bestsellers on the topic, Married Love (1918) and Wise Parenthood (1918), and opened the first birth control clinic in England in 1921.

These three women used legal and literary public forums to foreground women's experiences and to expose the devastating real-life effects of denying women access to knowledge about family limitation. An analysis of their work and the myriad attempts to keep them quiet illumines the ways in which indirect control of access to information on birth control served to regulate women's bodies and maintain traditionally-held cultural beliefs about "good" mothering and female sexuality.

The stories of Besant, Clapperton and Stopes impress on the historical record that, despite all legal, extralegal, and illegal efforts to censor and censure those who were publicizing contraceptive information, word was getting out. As the regulation of motherhood, reproductive health, rights, and access continue to be pressing twenty-first-century concerns, there is much to be learned from the revisionary strategies of these early advocates.

Legal History, Women & The Law, Feminist Jurisprudence, Law & Literature

Abstract:
After eight years of heated controversy, the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 was signed into law by president Bush on April 20, 2005. Proponents of the Act claimed that it would cure the bankruptcy crisis and that the wealthy would no longer be allowed to abuse the system at the expense of hard-working American families. Opponents cast the legislation as a dream come true for the credit card companies, claiming that it would serve only to enrich the rich at the expense of the poorest of the poor. One of the key issues that emerged from what became a battle of catchy sound bites was the impact that the legislation would have on women and this Article takes as its starting premise that all of this attention on the effects on women of bankruptcy reform and other economic issues is a very good thing. As this Article demonstrates, however, it is imperative to foreground the ways in which issues of gender, race, and class matter in considering financial concerns as women's issues. Otherwise, reform efforts made on behalf of women will, in fact, harm women. Specifically in the context of bankruptcy reform, this Article performs an intersectional analysis of the Congressional debates that reveals the privileging of certain women over others, as well as the construction of an ideal and unreal image of women that works to perpetuate economic insecurity for all women. The Article then proposes a re-envisioned reform agenda that takes into account how intersectionality matters in money matters and moves toward a goal of financial well-being for all.

Bankruptcy, commercial law, critical feminism, critical race, women, intersectionality, class

Abstract:
Recent Supreme Court decisions such as Atkins v. Virginia and Lawrence v. Texas specifically address the linkages between shifting cultural attitudes and the evolution of law. In this Article, I examine the mutually constitutive relationship between legal and cultural developments from a historical perspective and illustrate the necessity of looking to sources that I define as outlaw texts in order to access invaluable information about the process of legal change.

To demonstrate how a study of outlaw texts can enrich our understanding and critical consideration of law and legal history, this Article presents detailed analyses of specific examples of nineteenth-century women's narrative advocacy. The outlaw texts examined in the Article include narratives of nonfiction and fiction. While critical race, feminist, and cultural study of law scholars have emphasized the importance of looking beyond official legal texts such as statutes, judicial opinions, and legislative histories, this Article breaks new ground by arguing that this expanded inquiry also should include a heretofore unacknowledged source of legal history - the novel. The novel was the most popular form of women's writing in the nineteenth century and, as this Article shows, an important public legal forum for women. By providing a space where women's stories could be told and read, calling into question the law's claim to truth, and creating new knowledge through the shared tellings of women's experiences, nineteenth-century novels performed what today we would call feminist jurisprudence.

Outlaw texts, whether real-life or fictional narratives, document the everyday effects and negotiations of law that ultimately influence how the law is revised and refined. With respect to the nineteenth century, these texts are records of experiences and perspectives that clearly were driving the significant legal reforms that took place at this time in the areas of married women's property, divorce, child custody, and domestic abuse.

Through its specific study of the historical performance of feminist jurisprudence and early women's advocacy, this Article contributes to our knowledge of women's important but often overlooked roles in legal history. With its cross-disciplinary approach to what constitutes a legal text, as well as its analyses of the legal work performed in novels such as Wuthering Heights, this Article also suggests new and invigorating directions for the law and literature movement. But, most significantly, this Article concludes that the study of outlaw texts has broader implications for the study of law and legal education than its potential impacts on certain specialized fields. Outlaw texts bring into sharp focus the omissions of certain views, arguments, and experiences from traditional legal texts; they also illuminate the ways in which legal outsiders have produced, contested, and transformed law and legal meanings.

Keywords: Law and Literature, Feminism

Women and Law, Legal History, Cultural Study of Law, Law and Narrative

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:
Lewis Carroll's 1865 scene of a recalcitrant Alice in the courtroom, defying the court's authority as she grows (literally) into a large and threatening presence, dramatizes what was becoming an increasingly common Victorian spectacle: a woman questioning and critiquing the law and claiming a place for herself within its institutions. Women have played a significant (but much overlooked) role in legal history and, in this paper, I argue for the importance of examining various narratives of the past (including literary accounts) that explored women's relationship to the law.

Against the backdrop of several legal cases in which women sought entry into law and politics, I focus on representations of two surprising nineteenth-century characters - female judges, one fictional and one real: She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, or Ayesha, from Rider Haggard's 1887 novel She; and the real-life missionary Mary Slessor, who was the first woman appointed as a magistrate in the British Empire. Employing a theoretical approach I term cross-examination, I analyze representations of these women in sources of direct testimony, including fictional descriptions of Ayesha in her capacity as judge and written accounts of Slessor's courtroom persona by the Chief Magistrate of Calabar. These texts, like the legal cases, reveal cultural anxieties about women in the public and powerful realm of law. In my analysis, I discuss the negotiations at the level of narrative to keep these nineteenth-century Portias within their proper womanly roles. Also, both Ayesha and Slessor exercised legal power in Africa, a place where, in the context of Empire, traditional ideas about gender were complicated and disrupted by racial politics. In reading these texts that cross continents, I explore intersections of gender and race, illuminating the differences in the perceptions of women and power when those women were white women judging indigenous people in Africa.

Gender, race