Books : Nonfiction : Law : Perspectives on Law : Gender & the Law

The author, whose disclosures in the press became a rallying cry against sexual hazing at branch offices across America, takes the reader directly into a red-hot tangle of shocking allegations -- unprintable here -- and strenuous, across-the-board denials by firms and men accused. This drama's repercussions continue today, as new accusations are brought and longstanding complaints move toward the first-ever public hearings that the Boom-Boom Room case brought about.

View the Table of Contents.   Read the Introduction.

“Brings together some of America’s brightest legal minds to make the best arguments available for and against the constitutional right to abortion. An exceptional volume and essential for anyone who wants to understand the constitutional debate about Roe.”
—Nadine Strossen, President, American Civil Liberties Union, and Professor of Law, New York Law School

"The interest of the whole lies precisely in its depiction within a single volume of where the debate stands."
—Federal Lawyer

"Reading Jack Balkin's edited book, What Roe v. Wade Should Have Said, conjures up thoughts in the reader, like 'darn, I wish I had thought of that.'"
—The Law and Politics Book Review

“This array of intelligent and serious alternatives to the Court's stunningly inadequate opinion in Roe v. Wade —some reaching the same, some the opposite conclusion, some in between —is the most convincing argument against any litmus test on this subject either way for future Supreme Court Justices.”
—Charles Fried, Harvard Law School

"Whatever beliefs you may hold concerning these issues, you will find those beliefs subjected to thoughtful--even passionate--challenge in at least one of these opinions."
—Kenneth L. Karst, UCLA School of Law

"What Roe v. Wade Should Have Said provides vigorous and diverse substitute opinions by leading scholars that broaden, deepen, and improve the current debates while sharpening what a supreme court can and cannot do on such a highly disputed matter."
—Martha Minow, Harvard Law School

"In an era in which it's entirely possible that someone else is actually going to get to reimagine what Roe v. Wade should have said, this book is an interesting fantasy excercise."
—Bitch

In January 1973, the Supreme Court's opinion in Roe v. Wade struck down most of the country's abortion laws, and held for the first time that women had a constitutional right to safe and legal abortions. Three decades later, Roe v. Wade remains one of the Supreme Court's most controversial decisions, and political struggles over abortion rights still divide American politics. Roe has emerged as a central issue in federal judicial nominations, becoming a powerful symbol in debates about judicial restraint, judicial activism, and the proper role of courts in a democratic society.

In What Roe v. Wade Should Have Said, eleven distinguished constitutional scholars rewrite the opinions in this landmark case in light of thirty years of experience but making use only of sources available at the time of the original decision. Taking positions both for and against the constitutional right to abortion, the contributors offer novel and illuminating arguments that get to the heart of this fascinating case. In addition, Jack Balkin gives a detailed introduction to Roe v. Wade,chronicling the history of the Roe litigation, the constitutional and political clashes that followed it, and the state of abortion rights in the U.S. today.

Contributing their versions of Roe are: Anita Allen, Akhil Amar, Jack M. Balkin, Teresa Stanton Collett, Michael Stokes Paulsen, Jeffrey Rosen, Jed Rubenfeld, Reva Siegel, Cass Sunstein, Mark Tushnet, and Robin West.

Salmon shows that the law assumes women would remain dependent and subservient after marriage. She documents the legal rights of women prior to the Revolution and traces a gradual but steady extension of the ability of wives to own and control property during the decades following the Revolution. The forces of change in colonial and early national law were various, but Salmon believes ideological considerations were just as important as economic ones.

Women did not all fare equally under the law. In this illuminating survey of the jurisdictions of Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina, Salmon shows regional variations in the law that affected women's autonomous control over property. She demonstrates the importance of understanding the effects of formal law on women' s lives in order to analyze the wider social context of women's experience.

"A fascinating social history of women's rights, centered on a lengthy and discouraging series of constitutional confrontations .... a remarkably complete accounting of a historical trail that shape us all .... Law, Gender, and Injustice is an elegant example of the very best in feminist theorizing."
—Patricia J. Williams, Women's Review of Books

"Requisite for establishing women's legal history as a field. . . . Hoff's work is pivotal for both its conceptualization of the issues and its periodization of the field. . . . In contending with law as it was as well as with law as it is and ought to be, Hoff not only synthesizes recent scholarship, but she also charts new territory especially with regard to a chronological framework."
—Norma Basch, The Journal of Women's History

"Joan Hoff's legal history of U.S. women is a provocative, comprehensive, and realistic reinterpretation of women's legal status during the entire period of U.S. history. The book is sure to stimulate controversial reassessments of women's experience with the legal system."
—Mary Frances Berry, Geraldine R. Segal Professor of History- University of Pennsylvania

"A brilliant, original, and thought-provoking book must reading for anyone interested in the full emancipation of women."
—Ms. Magazine

"In this widely acclaimed landmark study, Joan Hoff illustrates how women remain second- class citizens under the current legal system and questions whether the continued pursuit of equality based on a one-size-fits-all vision of traditional individual rights is really what will most improve conditions for women in America as they prepare for the twenty-first century. Concluding that equality based on liberal male ideology is no longer an adequate framework for improving women's legal status, Hoff's highly original and incisive volume calls for a demystification of legal doctrine and a reinterpretation of legal texts (including the Constitution) to create a feminist jurisprudence.

Whatever your political beliefs, if you are a woman, you must know what the law says about you.

The Boundaries of Her Body is the definitive history of the cycle of advances and setbacks that characterizes women's rights in America. Author Debran Rowland covers emotionally charged issues with thoughtful detail, offering insight into the strategies used by politicians and lobbyists to defeat long-standing law.

The defeat for women's rights is an emotional and often polarized debate:

• A debate over what a woman is
  
• What a woman ought to be
  
• And what a woman should, therefore, be allowed to do

Today, the future of women's rights is in jeopardy.

"If I had to guess at the future for women, I would say we stand to lose many more significant battles-and the rights that go with them-if we don't begin to abandon the niceties of a comfortable life with educated opinions and start waging the kind of aggressive, no-holds-barred guerrilla war that our opponents have been riding to victory."
-from the Epilogue to The Boundaries of Her Body

Rowland combines provocative arguments with exhaustive research and affirms that, in spite of advancements, the boundaries of women's bodies will continue to be a source of bitter contention in the law.

"Debran Rowland brilliantly argues the continuing inequality of women's rights in America with the most meticulous and comprehensive research in our times."
-Betty Friedan author of The Feminine Mystique

Catharine A. MacKinnon, noted feminist and legal scholar, explores and develops her original theories and practical proposals on sexual politics and law. These discourses, originally delivered as speeches, have been brilliantly woven into a book that retains all the spontaneity and accessibility of a live presentation. MacKinnon offers a unique retrospective on the law of sexual harassment, which she designed and has worked for a decade to establish, and a prospectus on the law of pornography, which she proposes to change in the next ten years. Authentic in voice, sweeping in scope, startling in clarity, urgent, never compromised and often visionary, these discourses advance a new theory of sex inequality and imagine new possibilities for social change.

Through these engaged works on issues such as rape, abortion, athletics, sexual harassment, and pornography, MacKinnon seeks feminism on its own terms, unconstrained by the limits of prior traditions. She argues that viewing gender as a matter of sameness and difference--as virtually all existing theory and law have done--covers up the reality of gender, which is a system of social hierarchy, an imposed inequality of power. She reveals a political system of male dominance and female subordination that sexualizes power for men and powerlessness for women. She analyzes the failure of organized feminism, particularly legal feminism, to alter this condition, exposing the way male supremacy gives women a survival stake in the system that destroys them.