Download or read book Battered Women and Feminist Lawmaking written by Elizabeth M. Schneider and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women’s rights advocates in the United States have long argued that violence against women denies women equality and citizenship, but it took a movement of feminist activists and lawyers, beginning in the late 1960s, to set about realizing this vision and transforming domestic violence from a private problem into a public harm. This important book examines the pathbreaking legal process that has brought the pervasiveness and severity of domestic violence to public attention and has led the United States Congress, the Supreme Court, and the United Nations to address the problem. Elizabeth Schneider has played a pioneering role in this process. From an insider’s perspective she explores how claims of rights for battered women have emerged from feminist activism, and she assesses the possibilities and limitations of feminist legal advocacy to improve battered women’s lives and transform law and culture. The book chronicles the struggle to incorporate feminist arguments into law, particularly in cases of battered women who kill their assailants and battered women who are mothers. With a broad perspective on feminist lawmaking as a vehicle of social change, Schneider examines subjects as wide-ranging as criminal prosecution of batterers, the civil rights remedy of the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, the O. J. Simpson trials, and a class on battered women and the law that she taught at Harvard Law School. Feminist lawmaking on woman abuse, Schneider argues, should reaffirm the historic vision of violence and gender equality that originally animated activist and legal work.
Download or read book Feminist Engagement with the Law written by Elizabeth Comack and published by Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women = Institut canadien de recherches sur les femmes. This book was released on 1993 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph analyzes the decision by the Supreme Court of Canada in Lavallee [R. v. Lavallee (1990)] to recognize the Battered Woman Syndrome as relevant in cases involving women defendants who kill their abusive partners. The author suggests that, while there is much in the decision which would lead feminists to consider 'Lavalee' to be a benefit, the decision also legitimates the power of the 'psy' professions to interpret an abused woman's experiences. Accordingly, the Battered Woman Syndrome is criticized as offering an account which individualizes, medicalizes and depoliticizes the abuse. The discussion concludes with a consideration of the implications of the recognition for feminists.
Download or read book Nobody Passes written by Matt Bernstein Sycamore and published by Seal Press. This book was released on 2010-01-08 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nobody Passes is a collection of essays that confronts and challenges the very notion of belonging. By examining the perilous intersections of identity, categorization, and community, contributors challenge societal mores and countercultural norms. Nobody Passes explores and critiques the various systems of power seen (or not seen) in the act of “passing.” In a pass-fail situation, standards for acceptance may vary, but somebody always gets trampled on. This anthology seeks to eliminate the pressure to pass and thereby unearth the delicious and devastating opportunities for transformation that might create. Mattilda, aka Matt Bernstein Sycamore, has a history of editing anthologies based on brazen nonconformity and gender defiance. Mattilda sets out to ask the question, “What lies are people forced to tell in order to gain acceptance as 'real'.” The answers are as varied as the life experiences of the writers who tackle this urgent and essential topic.
Download or read book Defending Battered Women on Trial written by Elizabeth A. Sheehy and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2013-12-15 with total page 493 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the landmark Lavallee decision of 1990, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that evidence of "battered woman syndrome" was admissible in establishing self-defence for women accused of killing their abusive partners. This book looks at the trials of eleven battered women, ten of whom killed their partners, in the fifteen years since Lavallee. Drawing extensively on trial transcripts and a rich expanse of interdisciplinary sources, the author looks at the evidence produced at trial and at how self-defence was argued. By illuminating these cases, this book uncovers the practical and legal dilemmas faced by battered women on trial for murder.
Download or read book Listening to Battered Women written by Lisa A. Goodman and published by Psychology of Women. This book was released on 2008 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An in-depth, multidisciplinary look at the approaches of society to domestic abuse.
Download or read book Shades of Grey Domestic and Sexual Violence Against Women written by Anna Carline and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-09-19 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arguing that law must be looked at holistically, this book investigates the ‘hidden gender’ of the so-called neutral or objective legal principles that structure the law addressing violence against women. Adopting an explicitly feminist perspective, it investigates how legal responses to violence against women presuppose, maintain and perpetuate a certain context that may not in fact reflect women’s experiences. Carline and Easteal draw upon relevant legislation, case law and secondary studies from a range of territories, including Australia, England and Wales, the United States, Canada and Europe, to contextualize and critique different policy responses. They go on to examine the potential and limits of law, making recommendations for best practice models of policymaking and law reform. Aiming to help improve government, community and legal responses to women who experience violence, Shades of Grey – Domestic and Sexual Violence Against Women: Law Reform and Society will assist law-makers, academics, policymakers and a wider audience in understanding the complexities of violence against women.
Download or read book Feminist Perspectives on Evidence written by Mary Childs and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2000-12-19 with total page 531 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Questions of evidence and proof are fundamental to the operation of substantive law and to our understanding of law as a social practice. The study of evidence involves issues of central concern to feminist scholars,including matters of epistemology, psychology, allocation of risk and responsibility. Debates about evidence, like debates about feminism, involve questioning ideas of rationality and truth, as well as claims to knowledge both by and about men and women. Social constructions of gender are reflected both explicitly and implicitly in evidential rules and in the way in which evidence is received and understood by judges, jurors and magistrates. Feminist evidence scholarship is a relatively new but rapidly developing field. This collection brings together previously unpublished work by feminist legal scholars from different jurisdictions. In these essays, they explore the contributions of feminist theory and methodology to the understanding of the law of evidence.
Download or read book Feminist Perspectives on Criminal Law written by Lois Bibbings and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-03-04 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Criminal law has traditionally been taught and analysed as if the gender of criminals and their victims is irrelevant. It has also been taught and analysed as if criminal law doctrine has no connection with questions of criminalisation,crime detection, decisions to charge and prosecute, lawyers trial tactics, decisions as to guilt and sentencing policy and practice, all of which are significantly affected by gender.This book seeks to fill these gaps by looking at the major areas in which gender affects the way that suspected criminals and their victims are treated by the criminal justice system. However, this book is not just a supplement to traditional criminal law discourse. It is a dangerous supplement, in that the focus on gender challenges laws claim to neutrality and even-handed justice.The essays in this book establish that, not only does the law frequently fail to offer women the sort of protection from male violence and sexual invasion that they need, but it continues to discriminate on grounds of gender. Even when discriminating in favour of women, it does so in ways that reinforce dangerous gender stereotypes. More specifically, both criminal law doctrine and criminal justice personnel apply and reinforce ideas, on the one hand, of female passivity, irrationality and proneness to illness, and, on the other, of natural male aggression - both physical and sexual.
Download or read book Women and the Law written by Judith G. Greenberg and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 1142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Frug's Women and the Law integrates cases with theoretical readings by feminists, social scientists, historians, and legal scholars. Organized around three central topics of work, family, and body, the book reflects a multiplicity of feminist stances and critiques. Highlights of the 3rd edition: * Treatment of Same-Sex Marriage Developments * Sustained treatment of perspectives and problems affecting women of color * Contemporary assessments of sexual harassment law * Expanded treatment of women and the labor market, the economics of divorce, pornography and prostitution * Federal civil rights and state tort law responses to domestic violence * Current regulation of women's reproductive decisions and critiques of reproductive technologies.
Download or read book More Than Victims written by Donald Alexander Downs and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1998-10 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Donald Downs offers an analysis of the injustices behind the logic of battered woman syndrome, concluding that this very logic harms those it is trying to protect. This work seeks to rethink the criminal justice system.
Download or read book Women and Justice written by Sheryl J. Grana and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2010 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rev. ed. of : Women and (in)justice / Sheryl J. Grana. 2002.
Download or read book Contesting Femicide written by Adrian Howe and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-09-03 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on femicide, this book provides a contemporary re-evaluation of Carol Smart’s innovative approach to the law question as first outlined in her ground-breaking book, Feminism and the Power of Law (Routledge 1989). Smart advocated turning to the legal domain not so much for demanding law reforms as construing it as a site on which to contest gender and more particularly, gendered constructions of women’s experiences. Over the last 30 to 40 years, feminist law scholars and activists have launched scathing trans-jurisdictional critiques of the operation of provocation defences in hundreds of femicide cases. The evidence unearthed by feminist scholars that these defences operate in profoundly sexed ways is unequivocal. Accordingly, femicide cases have become critically important sites for feminist engagement and intervention across numerous jurisdictions. Exploring an area of criminal law that was not one of Smart’s own focal concerns, this book both honours and extends Smart’s work by approaching femicide as a site of engagement and counter-discourse that calls into question hegemonic representations of gendered relationships. Femicide cases thus provide a way to continue the endlessly valuable discursive work Smart advocated and practised in other fields of law: both in articulating alternative accounts of gendered relationships and in challenging law’s power to disqualify women’s experiences of violence while privileging men’s feelings and rights.
Download or read book The Victimization of Women written by Michelle L. Meloy and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-12-24 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Victimization of Women, Michelle Meloy and Susan Miller present a balanced and comprehensive summary of the most significant research on the victimizations, violence, and victim politics that disproportionately affect women. They examine the history of violence against women, the surrounding debates, the legal reforms, the related media and social-service responses, and the current science on intimate-partner violence, stalking, sexual harassment, sexual assault, and rape. They augment these victimization findings with original research on women convicted of domestic battery and men convicted of sexual abuse and other sex-related offenses. In these new data, the authors explore the unanticipated consequences associated with changes to the laws governing domestic violence and the newer forms of sex-offender legislation. Based on qualitative data involving in-depth, offender-based interviews, and analyzing the circumstances surrounding arrests, victimizations, and experiences with the criminal justice system, The Victimization of Women makes great strides forward in understanding and ultimately combating violence against women.
Download or read book It Was Like a Fever written by Francesca Polletta and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-01-14 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Activists and politicians have long recognized the power of a good story to move people to action. In early 1960 four black college students sat down at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refused to leave. Within a month sit-ins spread to thirty cities in seven states. Student participants told stories of impulsive, spontaneous action—this despite all the planning that had gone into the sit-ins. “It was like a fever,” they said. Francesca Polletta’s It Was Like a Fever sets out to account for the power of storytelling in mobilizing political and social movements. Drawing on cases ranging from sixteenth-century tax revolts to contemporary debates about the future of the World Trade Center site, Polletta argues that stories are politically effective not when they have clear moral messages, but when they have complex, often ambiguous ones. The openness of stories to interpretation has allowed disadvantaged groups, in particular, to gain a hearing for new needs and to forge surprising political alliances. But popular beliefs in America about storytelling as a genre have also hurt those challenging the status quo. A rich analysis of storytelling in courtrooms, newsrooms, public forums, and the United States Congress, It Was Like a Fever offers provocative new insights into the dynamics of culture and contention.
Download or read book Law and Violence Against Women written by Beverly Balos and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 728 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To access the 2004 Supplement, click here. "This book gives a fascinating historical view of how women have been perceived in the western world, and how those notions are changing, if not quickly enough. Balos and Fellows show how all of the forms of violence against women are interrelated, whether the oppression is woman battering, sexual harassment, rape, prostitution or pornography. In addition, each particular form of oppression is shown not only to support the other forms of violence, but to operate in unison to inflict much greater harm against and control of women, and be a product of classism, racism, sexism, abilism, and heterosexualism. This book is excellent for any course on women and the law, gender and the law, or how society and laws control us." -- Domestic Violence Report "The uses of this text are not limited to a course on law and violence against women. It deserves serious consideration as the primary text for any class on women and the law or feminist theory... The book is also a rich resource for teachers of courses on constitutional, criminal, employment, or family law. The bibliography is an excellent source for anyone seeking to supplement the law school curriculum (which is usually impoverished in the areas covered by the text)." -- Clinical Law Review: A Journal of Lawyering and Legal Education
Download or read book Feminist Advocacy Family Law and Violence against Women written by Mahnaz Akhami and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-09-20 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Around the world, discriminatory legislation prevents women from accessing their human rights. It can affect almost every aspect of a woman's life, including the right to choose a partner, inherit property, hold a job, and obtain child custody. Often referred to as family law, these laws have contributed to discrimination and to the justification of gender-based violence globally. This book demonstrates how women across the world are contributing to legal reform, helping to shape non-discriminatory policies and to counter current legal and social justifications for gender-based violence. The book takes case studies from Brazil, India, Iran, Lebanon, Nigeria, Palestine, Senegal, and Turkey, using them to demosntrate in each case the varied history of family law and the wide variety of issues impacting women’s equality in legislation. Interviews with prominent women's rights activists in three additional countries are also included, giving personal accounts of the successes and failures of past reform efforts. Overall, the book provides a complex global picture of current trends and strategies in the fight for a more egalitarian society. These findings come at a critical moment for change. Across the globe, family law issues are contentious. We are simultaneously witnessing an increased demand for women’s equality and the resurgence of fundamentalist forces that impede reform, invoking rules rooted in tradition, culture, and interpretations of religious texts. The outcome of these disputes has enormous ramifications for women’s roles in the family and society. This book tackles these complexities head on, and will interest activists, practitioners, students, and scholars working on women's rights and gender-based violence.
Download or read book Equal Protection of the Law written by Mary Welek Atwell and published by Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 2002 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, grounded in American women's history, explores the ongoing process of taking gender into account in the U.S. justice system. Women came late to the making, applying, and enforcing of the law. How has the creation of the law by and for men affected women? How has increased participation of women in the justice system made a difference? Equal Protection of the Law? Gender and Justice in the United States provides a readable account of the evolution of women's constitutional status, as well as stories of their participation in the criminal justice system as workers, victims, and offenders. It focuses on how the experiences of prior generations can illuminate the continued challenges of gender and inequality.
