Taking the Home

This essay juxtaposes two Supreme Court cases, Kelo v. City of New London, and Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales. Both reflect on the meanings of home as simultaneously the source of security against the focal point of anxieties about crossing between the categories of the private and the public. This essay traces the specter of doubleness that haunts the home in the law: the uncanny ways in which the home emerges as the exemplary private institution and the exemplary public concern in our society

The True Woman: Scenes From the Law of Self-Defense

Self-defense is undergoing an epochal transformation. In the last few years, dozens of states have passed or proposed new Castle Doctrine legislation intended to expand the right to use deadly force in self-defense. These bills derive their informal name from the traditional common law castle doctrine, which grants a person attacked in his own home the right to use deadly force without trying to retreat to safety. But the new Castle Doctrine statutes, conceived and advocated by the National Rifle Association, extend beyond the home to self-defense more broadly. This Article sets out to explicate, contextualize, and theorize this remarkable development in self-defense law. To do so, the Article investigates the ideas that shape these new Castle Doctrine laws. It offers an interpretive genealogy focused on three crucial turning points in the development of self-defense, and argues that each has left a defining ideological trace on the new laws. The central claim is that in each phase, self-defense law drew importantly but differently on the idea of the home; and, in each, the operative idea of the home was constituted specifically by gender roles therein. The Article shows that modern self-defense law exemplified by the new Castle Doctrine powerfully embeds these distinctive meanings of gender, home, and crime

Ability Tracking and Social Capital in China's Rural Secondary School System

The goal of this paper is describe and analyze the relationship between ability tracking and student social capital, in the context of poor students in developing countries. Drawing on the results from a longitudinal study among 1,436 poor students across 132 schools in rural China, we find a significant lack of interpersonal trust and confidence in public institutions among poor rural young adults. We also find that there is a strong correlation between ability tracking during junior high school and levels of social capital. The disparities might serve to further widen the gap between the relatively privileged students who are staying in school and the less privileged students who are dropping out of school. This result suggests that making high school accessible to more students would improve social capital in the general population

Job Satisfaction of Women Faculty at Universities in Seoul, Republic of Korea

The purpose of this study was to determine the job satisfaction levels of full-time women faculty at the 25 universities in Seoul. The findings of this study reveal that (a) women faculty are a diverse group; (b) women faculty are satisfied overall with such components of their jobs as their work, pay, supervision, co-workers, and job in general, but not with opportunities for promotion; and (c) the predictors of job satisfaction for women faculty are private or public institutional type, field of specialization in highest academic degree, origin of academic degrees, and academic rank

Is Privacy a Woman?

This essay is about the representation of privacy. Focusing on several of the Supreme Court's Fourth Amendment cases regarding the police and the home, I explore judicial articulations of the meaning of private space. Several striking figures of women appear in the Justices' opinions in Kyllo v. United States, and Georgia v. Randolph, for example, and represent different conceptions of privacy that are in dialogue and conflict. To theorize privacy in the home is to imagine a woman, and the way she is imagined is bound up with the idea of the home and stakes of privacy articulated. From the lady of the house in the bath, to the lady at home receiving callers, to the battered woman, distinctive figures of women reveal peculiar fault lines in the modern meaning of privacy in an era of judicial commitment to gender equality. Even long after the gradual demise of the particular marital privacy associated with the common law of coverture, the idea of protecting women from men remains central and appears today in new and different guises that evince both change and continuity in the legal meaning of the home

Redistributing Rape

This article examines the theory posited in the article Strategic Segregation in the Modern Prison regarding the problem of prison sexual violence and what can be done to correct it. The previous article describes the use of the K6G program by the Los Angeles County Jail to protect vulnerable inmates, gay men and transgendered women, from sexual victimization in all-male correctional institutions. This author explores the issue of gender and masculinity in exclusively male environments, and the use of sexual subordination as a form of gender performance and notes that the K6G program appears to be designed to redistribute prison rape from sexual minorities to some undefined set of heterosexual men. The author speculates on why sexual victimization does not occur in the K6G program and explores the role played by sexual desire in prison environments