Reviving the Public/Private Distinction in Feminist Theorizing Symposium on Unfinished Feminist Business

The public/private distinction has been a target of thoroughgoing feminist critique for quite some time now. Indeed, attacking the public/private line has been one of the primary concerns (if not the primary concern) of feminist legal theorizing for over two decades. If Carole Pateman is correct, one would think that this particular problem might be assigned to the category of finished business by this time. In this Essay, I do argue that the critique is, in certain ways, finished business in that it is no longer particularly useful in its most common forms. More importantly, however, I suggest several ways in which various critiques of the public/private line have left much business unfinished

Straying from the Path of the Law after One Hundred Years, The

What common ground can be found between modern feminist legal theory and a century-old essay advocating understanding the law from the perspective of the bad man ? The question admits of no simple answer. Feminists, including myself, might agree with some irony that [i]f you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man but would add that this is precisely the problem. Of course, Holmes does not use the concept of the bad man in a feminist sense to suggest that the law empowers the bad man at the expense of women. Indeed, except for a passing reference to Mrs. Quickly\u27s misplaced interest in headwear, he does not mention women at all. Nonetheless this essay reveals common ground between Holmes\u27s thought and feminist legal theory that is both wide and significant. Feminism\u27s departures from The Path - and there are many - reveal just as readily our different destination

Promise Unfulfilled: Law, Culture, and Women\u27s Inheritance Rights in Ghana

This Report presents the findings of a Fordham delegation. It consists of three parts. Part I sets out Ghana\u27s obligations under international law as they relate to issues of women\u27s equality generally and inheritance rights specifically. Part II describes the sources of Ghanaian law relevant to the issue. Part II begins with a very general description of the Ghanaian family. It then proceeds to analyze in some detail customary law governing marriage and property, including the customary law of intestate succession, which governed estates prior to 1985. Part II then describes both constitutional and statutory law relevant to intestate succession, particularly Law 111 which created for the first time a right for spouses to inherit from the estate. Finally, Part III presents the delegation\u27s findings with respect to a range of problems women face in claiming their rights under the statutory regime. Part III describes and documents the problems and then offers recommendations designed to address them

Reviving the Public/Private Distinction in Feminist Theorizing

In this Essay, Higgins explores the various uses of the public/private distinction in feminist theorizing. She suggests that feminist attacks on the public/private line tend to overstate the threat that the concept poses to women\u27s equality and to understate the potential value of the distinction in feminist theory. Acknowledging that, despite thoroughgoing theoretical critiques, the public/private line persists in practice, Higgins offers a qualified revival of the distinction in feminist theory and suggests ways of refocusing and refining it to respond to existing critiques

By Reason of Their Sex: Feminist Theory Postmodernism and Justice

Both the Supreme Court\u27s jurisprudence of gender and feminist legal theory have generally assumed that some identifiable and describable category of woman exists prior to the construction of legal categories. For the Court, this woman-whose characteristics admittedly have changed over time-serves as the standard against which gendered legal classifications are measured. For feminism, her existence has served a different but equally important purpose as the subject for whom political goals are pursued. To the extent that the definitions of the category diverge, the differences among definitions are played out in feminist critiques of the Court\u27s gender jurisprudence, and, occasionally, in the Court\u27s response to those critiques. To the extent that these legal accounts of gender, both mainstream and feminist, endeavor to assess the accuracy of gender categories, they represent a mode of argument that tracks foundationalist or objectivist assumptions about knowledge. That is, their authority or persuasiveness rests upon their perceived correspondence to a reality that exists independent of legal discourse. These accounts depend therefore upon the identification of secure foundations for (gender) knowledge that are in some sense free of historical, political, or social contingency. Such modernist or objectivist assumptions have been under attack for decades within the academy. More recently, leftist legal critics have borrowed the insights and tools of antifoundationalist philosophy to call into question law\u27s claim to rationality and legitimacy. Even more recently, some scholars have begun to question whether the postmodern or antifoundationalist view of knowledge as contingent promotes or threatens progressive social movements such as feminism, whatever its usefulness in challenging the validity of existing legal norms. Rather than addressing the abstract critique of reason that is at the heart of the postmodernist project, this Article attempts to link the critique of epistemology implicit in that argument to the more immediate issue of the utility of the postmodern position to feminist legal theory

Agency, Equality, and Antidiscrimination Law

The Supreme Court increasingly has interpreted the Equal Protection Clause as a mandate for the state to treat citizens as if they were equal-as a limitation on the state\u27s ability to draw distinctions on the basis of characteristics such as race and, to a lesser extent, gender. In the context of race, the Court has struck down not only race-specific policies designed to harm the historically oppressed, but race conscious policies designed to foster racial equality. Although in theory the Court has left open the possibility that benign uses of race may be constitutional under some set of facts, in practice it has yet to identify such a policy since it adopted strict scrutiny across the board. In its equal protection analysis of gender, the Court has also moved toward a stricter level of scrutiny, calling into question the possibility of benign uses of gender as well. As the Supreme Court narrowed the scope of benign race-based categories permitted by the Constitution, political forces have launched attacks on affirmative action policies at both the state and federal levels. Some commentators, perhaps a minority, have argued that the Equal Protection Clause should be read to require the use of race-conscious policies when necessary to eradicate or remedy the most serious consequences of racial inequality. Others have argued that such policies, though not required, should be permitted when duly adopted by the majority of the populace to promote the interests of an historically oppressed minority. Still others, including now a majority of the Supreme Court, take the view that the Constitution forbids virtually all explicit uses of race by the state. In this Essay, we do not enter this debate directly. Rather, we attempt to explore the reasons behind the increasing acceptance of a norm of color-blindness-both politically and legally-and locate those reasons within a particular liberal conception of the limited, neutral state. We then attempt to demonstrate that the movement toward an increasingly strict view of discrimination as simply color consciousness has not been limited to the equal protection context

THE BEAMING STRUCTURES OF JUPITER’S DECAMETRIC COMMON S-BURSTS OBSERVED FROM THE LWA1, NDA, AND URAN2 RADIO TELESCOPES

On 2015 February 21, simultaneous observations of Jupiter's decametric radio emission between 10 and 33 MHz were carried out using three powerful low-frequency radio telescopes: the Long Wavelength Array Station One in the USA, the Nançay Decameter Array in France, and the URAN2 telescope in Ukraine. We measured the lag times of short-bursts (S-bursts) for 105 minutes of data over effective baselines of up to 8460 km by using cross-correlation analysis of the spectrograms from each instrument. Of particular interest is the measurement of the beaming thickness of S-bursts, testing if either flashlight- or beacon-like beaming is emanating from Jupiter. We find that the lag times for all pairs drift slightly as time elapses, in agreement with expectations from the flashlight-like beaming model. This leads to a new constraint of the minimum beaming thickness of 2farcs66. Also, we find that most of the analyzed data abound with S-bursts, whose occurrence probability peaks at 17–18 MHz

Fine-mapping of the HNF1B multicancer locus identifies candidate variants that mediate endometrial cancer risk.

Common variants in the hepatocyte nuclear factor 1 homeobox B (HNF1B) gene are associated with the risk of Type II diabetes and multiple cancers. Evidence to date indicates that cancer risk may be mediated via genetic or epigenetic effects on HNF1B gene expression. We previously found single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) at the HNF1B locus to be associated with endometrial cancer, and now report extensive fine-mapping and in silico and laboratory analyses of this locus. Analysis of 1184 genotyped and imputed SNPs in 6608 Caucasian cases and 37 925 controls, and 895 Asian cases and 1968 controls, revealed the best signal of association for SNP rs11263763 (P = 8.4 × 10(-14), odds ratio = 0.86, 95% confidence interval = 0.82-0.89), located within HNF1B intron 1. Haplotype analysis and conditional analyses provide no evidence of further independent endometrial cancer risk variants at this locus. SNP rs11263763 genotype was associated with HNF1B mRNA expression but not with HNF1B methylation in endometrial tumor samples from The Cancer Genome Atlas. Genetic analyses prioritized rs11263763 and four other SNPs in high-to-moderate linkage disequilibrium as the most likely causal SNPs. Three of these SNPs map to the extended HNF1B promoter based on chromatin marks extending from the minimal promoter region. Reporter assays demonstrated that this extended region reduces activity in combination with the minimal HNF1B promoter, and that the minor alleles of rs11263763 or rs8064454 are associated with decreased HNF1B promoter activity. Our findings provide evidence for a single signal associated with endometrial cancer risk at the HNF1B locus, and that risk is likely mediated via altered HNF1B gene expression