Interviewing mothers: reflections on closeness and reflexivity in research encounters

Taking as a starting point the idea that a researcher's subjectivity is data and a resource for interpretation, I write about my own experience of combining motherhood and paid work, undertaking a psychosocial study of first time motherhood. I reflect on the emotional work involved in undertaking fieldwork and engaging with different texts about the maternal, when the research topic is close to the stuff of one's life. I then set this writing and the feelings it evokes alongside a case study from the research project, in order to explore how a researcher can notice herself, in research encounters with others, and with texts, in ways which make the reflexive self visible. The data I use are drawn from a project entitled Becoming Bangladeshi, African Caribbean and White mothers: identities in process, part of the Economic and Social Research Council's Identities and Social Action programme

Talking about breastfeeding - emotion, context and 'good' mothering

The benefits of breastfeeding are now recognised and promoted by governments and healthcare services internationally (WHO 2007),with feeding regarded as a significant part of the maternal role: in the words of the World Health Organization: ‘no gift is more precious than breastfeeding’. The idea that breastfeeding can be a ‘gift’ signifies the increasing, heavy cultural and emotional load of feeding for mothers. Feeding practices can be used to differentiate ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mothers, ‘high’ or ‘low’ social status and can also be associated with feelings of intimacy, estrangement, guilt, joy, failure or success. In this article we discuss the findings from the Open University's ‘Becoming aMother’ study (www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/ identities/findings/Hollway.pdf) in the light of these wider issues and current policy initiatives

Alabama’s resistance to marriage equality will be short lived

On Monday, the United States Supreme Court denied a request to stay the ruling of a federal district judge which had invalidated Alabama’s constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Despite the ruling, many of the state’s probate judges have refused to provide marriage licenses, and were also instructed not to do so by the state Supreme Court’s Chief Justice. Heather Elliott writes that the judges’ resistance is in part due to the fact that they face elections in a state where only 32 percent of the population favor same-sex marriage. She argues that Alabama is on the wrong side of states’ rights and marriage equality, and that the Supreme Court’s coming ruling on same-sex marriage will remove all doubt in Alabama, and across the country

Alabama\u27s Water Crisis Essay: Alabama Legal Issues Series

Alabama faces a major and expanding water crisis. Population growth and economic development are putting more pressure on water resources already strained by recent droughts, and such droughts are likely to become more frequent and more severe in the future. Disputes with neighboring states over shared water resources threaten Alabama\u27s use of interstate waters to meet future needs. And Alabama\u27s current legal regime is wholly inadequate to meet these challenges. The failures of Alabama\u27s state water law could be corrected with one statute. The State Legislature should act swiftly to adopt a comprehensive water management statute based on the Regulated Riparian Model Water Code; the resulting statute should regulate the state\u27s surface and groundwater as one unified resource and should coordinate water quality regulation with water quantity regulation. Adopting such a statute will prepare the state for future water shortages, as well as putting it on a better footing for future negotiations with neighboring states

Further Standing Lessons

Professor Elliott wrote a piece for the Indiana Law Journal in 2012 (available here). In this article, she updates her analysis and explores the implications of both the health-care and marriage equality cases on the Court’s standing doctrine

Standing, Politics, and Exhaustion: A Response to Legislative Exhaustion

Professor Michael Sant’Ambrogio’s article, Legislative Exhaustion, usefully approaches the problem of “legislative standing” by abandoning the typical Article III standing analysis and making instead a separation-of-powers argument. His theory—that Congress may sue the President only when it has no legislative avenue for addressing its problems—provides both a workable account of and a limiting principle for suits by the legislative branch against the executive. His analysis, however, raises questions regarding the effect of legislative lawsuits on the constitutional balance of powers. This Essay suggests that these questions should be more fully explored before Professor Sant’Ambrogio’s approach can be adopted. It concludes by noting that the exhaustion principle, while helpful in the fraught context of legislative standing, should not be expanded to standing more generally (as a few courts appear to have suggested)

Original Discrimination: How the Supreme Court Disadvantages Plaintiff States

The U.S. Supreme Court is famously the nation\u27s top appellate court, but Article III also makes the Court a trial court, giving it original jurisdiction over several categories of cases. One of those categories suits by states against other states-remains exclusive. Thus, when Texas sought to overturn the 202o presidential election by suing four swing states, it had only one court in which to sue. The Court properly rebuffed Texas\u27s claim for lack of standing, but the Justices give even meritorious claims by state plaintiffs short shrift. They have made clear that these suits detract from the Court\u27s appellate role and are better resolved elsewhere, including in the political realm. The Court uses several discretionary doctrines to avoid hearing these claims. Plaintiff states must seek leave even tofile suit, which the Court usually denies without explanation; must meet an injury-in-fact test more demanding than that imposed on ordinary federal plaintiffs; and, in many cases, must show that a proposed judgment will not be too harmful for the defendant state to satisfy. The Court implements this discretion aggressively. A plaintiff state may thus be denied aforum even when the prospective defendant state has caused significant, but not significant-enough, injury; a plaintiff state may be denied all relief even if it has proven its case on the merits. No other plaintiff in federal court is required to clear such high hurdles. As many have suggested, the Court\u27s use of discretion in the context of its exclusive jurisdiction potentially violates Article III and the relevant federal jurisdictional statute. But few have noticed the disconcertingly ad hoc nature of the Court\u27s discretionary decisions. Even more troubling no one has seen that these doctrines systematically disadvantage state plaintifs to the benefit of state defendants, and that these disadvantages fall more heavily on certain groups of states, such as downstream states who seek to sue upstream states over crucial water supplies. The Court has stressed that the states must be treated equally as litigants before it, yet its discretionary approach to interstate disputes treats states unequally. The Court\u27s discrimination against state plaintiffs may also make political solutions less likely by creating disincentives for negotiation and by undercutting enforcement of agreements. The Court has good reasons for avoiding these cases, however. Instead of suggesting doctrinal change to address this original discrimination, I recommend that Congress give the lower courts concurrent jurisdiction over these disputes. Making the lower courts open to these suits gives the Court a principled reason to decline jurisdiction, provides a more accessible forum for state plaintiffs, and, as a result, restores incentives for the political resolution of at least some state-versus-state disputes