Women, Mothers, and the Law of Fright: A History

This article presents a gendered history of the law\u27s treatment of fright-based physical injuries. Our goal is to connect the law of fright to the changing cultural and intellectual forces of the twentieth century. Through a feminist lens, we reexamine the accounts of the legal treatment of fright-based injuries offered by Victorian-erajurists, traditionalist legal scholars of the first two decades of the twentieth century, a legal realist in the 1930s, and a Freudian medical-legal commentator from the 1940s, all of whom helped to shape present-day tort doctrine. We conclude with an account of Dillon v. Legg, in which the California Supreme Court recognized Margery Dillon\u27s right to recover for the harm she suffered from seeing her daughter killed by a negligent driver. This examination of the history of the law of fright shows that gendered thinking has influenced the law, but has remained unexamined. We make three basic observations. First, we claim that the legal categories of physical and emotional harm are not unrelated to the gender of the victims. Women who have suffered fright-induced physical injuries have been disadvantaged by the legal classification of their injuries as emotional harm. Second, we demonstrate how the legal system has placed women\u27s fright-based injuries at the margins of the law by describing women\u27s suffering for the injury and death of their unborn and born children as remote, unforeseeable, and unreasonable. Finally, we raise the possibility that the claims of female plaintiffs in these fright cases - plaintiffs such as Margery Dillon should be viewed as women\u27s rights claims, as attempts to pressure the legal system to recognize and value the interests of women. By constructing a gendered history of this legal claim, we aspire to reclaim Dillon for women and to contribute to a feminist reconstruction of tort law

Gerda Lerner (1920-2013)

L’historienne Gerda Lerner était remarquable par son éloquence, sa perspicacité et son courage. Toujours prête à défendre l’importance de l’histoire dans sa quête de justice sociale, elle a consacré sa vie à démontrer que les femmes ont une histoire et que le fait de s’en rendre compte avait un impact sur la conscience collective. « Écrire l’histoire en pensant aux femmes », écrivait-elle dans l’un des essais qui composent le recueil intitulé Why History Matters: Life and Thought (1998), « po..

Gerda Lerner (1920–2013). Pioneering Historian and Feminist

Gerda Lerner was a historian of remarkable eloquence, insight, and courage, an advocate of the importance of history to the pursuit of social justice. She devoted her academic lifetime to showing that women had a history, and that knowing it could alter human consciousness. “Writing history and thinking about women,” she wrote in her collected essays, Why History Matters: Life and Thought (1998), “could lead to transformative politics rooted in both thought and experience.”(xv) She was the si..

Momentos Subversivos: desafiando as tradições da história constitucional

O texto explora os desdobramentos teóricos e metodológicos do curso “Gênero e História Constitucional”, ministrado e criado pelas professoras Patricia A. Cain e Linda K. Kerber. Há dois momentos, um sobre levantamento histórico dos cursos de Gênero e o Direito e similares; o outro, com análise de casos utilizados no próprio curso ministrado, tendo sempre como pano de fundo as interseções entre a história, o Direito Constitucional e as lutas feministas. O primeiro, Coger vs North West Union Packet Co; o segundo, Coggeshall vs Cidade de Des Moin; por fim, Green vs Shama. Ao revisitar a história do movimento feminista, tendo como objeto o Direito e suas matizes, as autoras encontraram achados sobre a ocultação de elementos da história feminista. Além disso, o texto possui um caráter pedagógico acentuado por estar sempre cruzando os achados teóricos com os feedbacks dos alunos e da experiência em sala de aula com o curso. Ele serve, também, como incentivo para que mais cursos nesse estilo sejam ministrados. Uma vez que, explorar a história constitucional do feminismo se mostrou uma forma muito eficaz (e reprodutível) de ser subversivo. O trabalho foi publicado em 2002, mas continua extremamente atual

The Complexity of the Hausdorff Distance

We investigate the computational complexity of computing the Hausdorff distance. Specifically, we show that the decision problem of whether the Hausdorff distance of two semi-algebraic sets is bounded by a given threshold is complete for the complexity class ∀∃

Kangaroo mother care: a multi-country analysis of health system bottlenecks and potential solutions.

BACKGROUND: Preterm birth is now the leading cause of under-five child deaths worldwide with one million direct deaths plus approximately another million where preterm is a risk factor for neonatal deaths due to other causes. There is strong evidence that kangaroo mother care (KMC) reduces mortality among babies with birth weight <2000 g (mostly preterm). KMC involves continuous skin-to-skin contact, breastfeeding support, and promotion of early hospital discharge with follow-up. The World Health Organization has endorsed KMC for stabilised newborns in health facilities in both high-income and low-resource settings. The objectives of this paper are to: (1) use a 12-country analysis to explore health system bottlenecks affecting the scale-up of KMC; (2) propose solutions to the most significant bottlenecks; and (3) outline priority actions for scale-up. METHODS: The bottleneck analysis tool was applied in 12 countries in Africa and Asia as part of the Every Newborn Action Plan process. Country workshops involved technical experts to complete the survey tool, which is designed to synthesise and grade health system "bottlenecks", factors that hinder the scale-up, of maternal-newborn intervention packages. We used quantitative and qualitative methods to analyse the bottleneck data, combined with literature review, to present priority bottlenecks and actions relevant to different health system building blocks for KMC. RESULTS: Marked differences were found in the perceived severity of health system bottlenecks between Asian and African countries, with the former reporting more significant or very major bottlenecks for KMC with respect to all the health system building blocks. Community ownership and health financing bottlenecks were significant or very major bottlenecks for KMC in both low and high mortality contexts, particularly in South Asia. Significant bottlenecks were also reported for leadership and governance and health workforce building blocks. CONCLUSIONS: There are at least a dozen countries worldwide with national KMC programmes, and we identify three pathways to scale: (1) champion-led; (2) project-initiated; and (3) health systems designed. The combination of all three pathways may lead to more rapid scale-up. KMC has the potential to save lives, and change the face of facility-based newborn care, whilst empowering women to care for their preterm newborns