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Unmasking AALL’s IDEA Special Committee: A Closer Look at the Committee’s Process for Creating AALL’s New Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Policy
Get PDFThe goal of this column is to describe the process used by the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity Awareness (IDEA) Special Committee, which provided the foundation and resources for AALL to create the new Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Policy. The committee, initially appointed and charged by the 2020 AALL President Emily R. Florio, began meeting in 2020, and started its work with discussions aimed at defining and narrowing the scope of its charge and finding consensus on what we were setting out to accomplish. During this initial stage, our discussions helped us find commonality to understand the points of view within the committee, and to build both understanding and trust within it. These facets were essential given the difficult and often personal nature of our future discussions. If we were to function effectively and proceed in a productive way, we had to have trust. All the committee members brought their passion for equity and inclusion, their desire to do good for our Association, their unflinching honesty, and their respect for difference to their work on the committee. From the very beginning of our work, differences of opinion emerged, yet these differences never became divisive or problematic due to the members’ commitment to respectfulness and professionalism, and their sustained focus on the task at hand
Sexual and Gender Minority University Students Report Distress Due to Discriminatory Health Care Policies
No full text“Religious conscience” or “health care denial” policies allow health care providers and institutions to refuse to provide services in the name of religious freedom. Denial policies are a form of structural stigma that could impede access to health care for sexual and gender minority (SGM) populations, particularly SGM young adults. This study describes SGM university students’ response to policies permitting health care providers to deny care based on their religious beliefs. Data were obtained from 8,322 SGM students at 38 colleges and universities who participated in the Spring 2020 Healthy Minds Study. Descriptive statistics are reported for the level of distress due to the denial policies and likelihood to avoid identity disclosure. Over 90% of SGM students report distress knowing about denial policies (sexual minority: 6.95/10; gender minority: 8.05/10). Students also reported similarly high distress imagining that they had been denied care (sexual minority: 8.05/ 10; gender minority: 8.57/10). The majority of sexual (69.2%) and gender minority (82.2%) students agreed the policy would make them less likely to disclose their identity to a new provider. Experiencing, or even anticipating, discrimination in health care settings through denial policies has negative impacts on the health of SGM populations and has the potential to exacerbate existing mental health disparities for SGM young adults
Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health: Undermining Public Health, Facilitating Reproductive Coercion
Get PDFDobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health continues a trajectory of U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence that undermines the normative foundation of public health — the idea that the state is obligated to provide a robust set of supports for healthcare services and the underlying social determinants of health. Dobbs furthers a longstanding ideology of individual responsibility in public health, neglecting collective responsibility for better health outcomes. Such an ideology on individual responsibility not only enables a shrinking of public health infrastructure for reproductive health, it facilitates the rise of reproductive coercion and a criminal legal response to pregnancy and abortion. This commentary situates Dobbs in the context of a long historical shift in public health that increasingly places burdens on individuals for their own reproductive health care, moving away from the possibility of a robust state public health infrastructure
Review of Real Americans: National Identity, Violence, and the Constitution by Jared A. Goldstein
No full textIn Real Americans, Jared Goldstein offers a bracing examination of the role played by the U.S. Constitution in the country\u27s political consciousness. Goldstein\u27s aim is to pierce the narrative of constitutional nationalism to show how citizens have invoked America\u27s founding text to express “deeply conflicting conceptions of national identity” (2) and “justify hatred, violence, and exclusion” (4). He does so by exploring the beliefs of various right-wing movements that have resisted mainstream developments in basic law, as well as more diffuse social changes. Among the subjects covered: the Know Nothings, the Ku Klux Klan, the Tea Party, the ascendance of Judeo-Christian nationalism, and the modern militia movement
The New Pornography Wars
Get PDFThe world’s largest online pornography conglomerate, MindGeek, has come under fire for the publishing of “rape videos,” child pornography, and nonconsensual pornography on its website, Pornhub. As in the “pornography wars” of the 1970s and 1980s, lawyers and activists have now turned to civil remedies and filed creative anti-trafficking lawsuits against MindGeek and third parties, like payment processing company, Visa. These lawsuits seek not only to achieve legal accountability for online sex trafficking but also to reframe a broader array of online harms as sex trafficking.This Article explores what these new trafficking lawsuits mean for the future regulation of the online pornography industry and the broader fight against sex trafficking. Redolent of venerable feminist debates, these emerging cases raise new questions about the scope of the First Amendment, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act—which has shielded online platforms from civil liability for content uploaded by third parties—and direct and third-party liability. They open up new avenues for civil damages against online pornography websites and entities that profit from online harms. However, this Article also posits that invoking trafficking statutes can also have harmful implications for civil liberties, internet freedom, and sexual expression. Thus, it offers suggestions for the judicious evolution of trafficking frames in these realms
Command and Control: Operationalizing the Unitary Executive
Get PDFThe concept of the unitary executive is written into the Constitution by virtue of Article II’s vesting of the “executive Power” in the President and not in executive officers created by Congress. Defenders and opponents alike of the “unitary executive” often equate the idea of presidential control of executive action with the power to remove executive personnel. But an unlimitable presidential removal power cannot be derived from the vesting of executive power in the President for the simple reason that it would not actually result in full presidential control of executive action, as the actions of now-fired subordinates would still exist as law until repealed. Rather, the cleanest implication from the Article II Vesting Clause is a presidential power to nullify or veto actions by subordinates, even if those subordinates can continue to hold their congressionally created offices and draw their congressionally created salaries and benefits. The President likely also has the ability directly to make executive decisions, even when Congress tries to vest power in subordinates to the exclusion of the President. The Constitution’s unitary executive controls actions, not personnel.
This view does not completely foreclose arguments for a presidential removal power, though it makes them considerably more difficult to develop. It is consistent with some, but not all, of the views expressed by Attorneys General in the first half or so of the nineteenth century, when those actors expressly thought about the President’s ability to control executive decisionmaking
Justice Roberts Chose Colorblindness Over the Constitution | Opinion
No full textGeorge Floyd\u27s murder unleashed global calls for racial justice. In the United States, millions marched with a modest plea: We must reckon with racism in America. Today, six rightwing Justices made it harder to do so. And yet, I am not surprised.
After all, the decision was predictable. Since the eve of the Civil War, the Supreme Court has consistently obstructed efforts to deliver equality for Black Americans. A decade after Emancipation, the Court defanged the Fourteenth Amendment and its antiracist aspirations. A decade later, the Court struck down Congress\u27s first attempt to ban racial discrimination in public accommodations. These cases marked a supreme retreat from the still-nascent promise of multiracial democracy. They also sewed a powerful narrative that recast civil rights remedies as a threat to civil rights. Those seeds bore full fruit today
Family Needs, Family Leave in 2023
Get PDFInstituting support for women and children is a difficult task to imagine in a world that is removing reproductive freedom and healthcare. In this hypothetical, do we treat the removal of abortion care as a force majeure, natural disaster, or an earthquake? If so, after the earthquake, the community bands together and works tirelessly to compensate for what has happened. But the removal of abortion care was not a natural disaster-it was planned, and it is embedded in background conditions that are pushing further away from support for women and children.
The primary task of this Article is to respond to the reality that Dobbs v. Jackson Women\u27s Health reflects a legal and social movement seeking to diminish support for those at risk of pregnancy. Given this reality, the Article focuses on realistic incremental changes that can be made to existing leave policies that can shift the frame of the relationship between employment and parenting. An improved frame would see that childbirth and unusual health crises are only a few of the events that employers need to accommodate to support parents. While the primary task of this Article is to explore the promising dynamics of incremental change to leave policy, this Article also acknowledges the range of support a state could provide if we were not in this era-if indeed Dobbs were a force majeure and the community were completely committed to mitigating its impact.
Part II of this Article considers the meaning of forced parenting and its financial impact on parents. Part III enumerates a broad list of reforms that could form a supportive fabric for parents raising children, but that would first require a far more parent-friendly social conception than the Dobbs world indicates. Part IV focuses in on parental leave laws and highlights existing examples of particular reforms that could improve the welfare of people forced to parent. The focus on existing reforms is intended to highlight the achievability of these reforms, focusing on what can be done for parents in the political conditions of 2023
Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America
Get PDFWhile Dahlia Lithwick was working on this book, a “prominent constitutional law professor” asked why Lithwick “would waste time and credibility writing a ‘pink book about the law.’” Clearly this unnamed professor assumed that the growing and highly visible presence of women in the profession hadn’t changed anything