American Courts and the Sex Blind Spot: Legitimacy and Representation

We argue the legacy of explicit sex bias and discrimination with relation to political rights and social status begins within government, hewn from state and federal lawmaking. As such, male lawmakers and judges conscribed a woman’s role to her home and defined the scope of her independence in the local community and broader society. Politically and legally, women were legal appendages to men—objects of male power (visà-vis their husbands and fathers). In law, women’s roles included sexual chattel to their spouses, care of the home, and producing offspring. Accordingly, women were essential in the home, as law would have it, but unnecessary, and even harmful and sabotaging, to a participatory democracy. Building from two years of empirical research and examining each federal appeals court’s record on abortion and each judge’s vote on a particular case, this project studies whether women are more likely than their male counterparts to affirm reproductive health rights. We examined 302 cases across each federal appellate circuit, including the District of Columbia and the Federal Circuit. Our findings have both normative and sociological implications. This project tells an important story about the composition of the federal appellate judiciary and the slow climb for women, including women of color, within the elite branches of the courts. This is a story expressed in numbers and it reflects the historical marginalization of women within the law and the problem of homogeneity in the courts

Where the Twain Shall Meet: Standing and Remedy in Alaska Center for the Environment v. Browner

In 1994, the Ninth Circuit affirmed standing for citizens to sue to compel the EPA Administrator to undertake a statewide TMDL program. Although the citizens had standing for only some of the water-quality-limited waters in Alaska, the court held that the underlying cause of action was the EPA\u27s failure to initiate the TMDL process for Alaska. This Note proposes that the court improperly reasoned its way to the correct holding. Like the EPA, the court confused standing to sue with the ultimate scope of the remedy. This Note proposes a three-step analysis to consider issues of standing and remedy. The first step is to determine the scope of the underlying action by analyzing the legal duty that forms the basis for the claim. This scoping action is critical since it serves as the referent for the next two steps. The second step is to determine whether the plaintiff has standing with respect to the underlying action. If the court decides on the merits of the case that the plaintiff should prevail, the third step is to determine the appropriate remedy. In this step, the court starts with the underlying cause of action and incorporates other factors as appropriate. This three-step analysis decouples the standing and remedy analyses and should lead to better reasoned opinions. I. INTRODUCTION In Alaska Center for the Environment v. Browner (ACE III), 1 the Ninth Circuit distinguished between standing to sue and the ultimate scope of the remedy. The court affirmed standing for a group ..

Money Laundering: The Anti-Structuring Laws

Several money laundering laws do not apply until the amount of money involved exceeds $10,000. The laws include three reporting requirements and one substantive crime. Launderers have responded to these laws in part by structuring their transactions--breaking them up so the amound involved in each transaction is less than$10,000. This Article collects and analyzes the laws that make structuring a crime. I have discussed one such law, the cash transaction report (CTR) anti-structuring statute, in a previous article. This Article analyzes the anti-structuring provisions of the three other money laundering laws that use numerical thresholds. It also examines how the CTR anti-structuring statute is developing, both for its own sake and because it anticipates issues for the other anti-structuring laws