1,720,975 research outputs found
‘What Does Mattress Girl Have that We Didn’t Have?’ Narratives of sexual violence and social change on US university campuses
No full textIn 2014, activism around sexual violence on US university campuses had become highly visible in popular culture, resulting in numerous policy changes at universities and wider legal changes, such as California’s ‘Yes Means Yes’ law on affirmative consent in higher education. Using a reflective piece published by a campus activist from the 1990s this article argues that the period from the 1990s to 2010s was one of complex and contradictory changes around sexual violence, with the issue of rape on campus becoming an increasing public concern, but one framed by racialised and classed narratives of the vulnerable student, increasingly carceral responses to sexual violence, and incorporation of student activism within the logics of the neoliberal university. The article suggests that unpacking these historic shifts might allow different ways of understanding sexual violence on campus
Tort Law and Feminist Strategy: Lessons from Social Movement and Community Lawyering
Full text linkTort law can be considered antithetical to radical politics for transformative social change. Predicated on incremental reforms and intertwined with a market-based insurance system, tort law commodifies and (re)produces hierarchies of harms along the lines of gender, race, class and other social relations. Nevertheless, feminists have explored whether it can be harnessed to address social and gendered harms, while recognising that improving the current system can entrench it and the underpinning structural injustices. As such, the critical question is about knowing how and when it is worth mobilising tort law. Drawing on law and social movement scholarship and abolitionist conceptions of non-reformist reforms, I set out a taxonomy of indirect impacts of law and alternative political goals to legal change. This taxonomy should guide decision-making as to when, in relation to a specific issue at a particular time, it is strategically useful to mobilise tort law for intersectional feminist struggles
Portraits of women of the law: re-envisioning gender, law and the legal profession in law schools
Full text linkThis article explores the role of law school portraits of women in law in challenging the over-representation of men in law. Portraiture is a long-standing means by which professions celebrate worthy individuals and reproduce institutional values. In relation to law and the legal profession, portraits are predominantly of men and link law with masculine attributes, contributing to the visual and actual marginalisation of women in law’s past and present. The article begins by setting out why portraits of women exhibited in UK law schools are an important way to challenge gender inequalities in law. It then provides a snapshot of the gender dimensions of university and law school portraiture in the UK, before analysing the Inspirational Women of the Law exhibition at Newcastle Law School as a method of disrupting the dominant gendered visual order in law, and bringing into focus women in legal history
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