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Brenda Smith
INTRODUCTION:
Dothard v. Rawlinson is among the most important early cases applying Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to gender. It was the first case that considered whether a seemingly neutral job requirement like height and weight could violate Title VII if it had a disparate impact on women in the workplace. It was also the first case to address Title VII's bona fide occupational qualification (“BFOQ”), which allows employers to use sex in employment decisions if it is “reasonabl[y] necessary … to the normal operation of that business or enterprise.”
Dothard involved employment in Alabama's state correctional facilities. The female plaintiffs in Dothard argued that the prison's height and weight requirements created a disparate impact by excluding 41 percent of women and only 1 percent of men. They also challenged the prison's categorical exclusion of women from contact positions, arguing that maleness was not a BFOQ for employment in Alabama's male prisons.
The U.S. Supreme Court found that Alabama's height and weight requirements violated Title VII because the state offered no evidence that the requirements were necessary to the job. The Court found, however, that sex was a BFOQ permitting Alabama to exclude women from contact positions in its maximum-security prisons. Acknowledging that its reasoning echoed the “romantic paternalism” that it explicitly forbade in Frontiero v. Richardson, the Court nonetheless balked at permitting women to act as prison guards. Describing the men's maximum security prison as a “jungle atmosphere,” the Court reasoned that female staff's “very womanhood” would undermine security in the prison and might incite sexual assault by prisoners “deprived of a normal heterosexual environment.”
The feminist judgment by Professor Maria Ontiveros, writing as Justice Ontiveros, challenges the legal and logical underpinnings of the Court's opinion. She criticizes the Court's disparate impact analysis for not providing adequate guidance when a challenged job requirement, like height and weight, is a proxy for sex. She is even more critical of the Court's BFOQ analysis, finding that it enshrines sexist stereotypes of women as the cause of sexual assault, permits de facto sex segregation in the workplace, and limits the self-determination of female workers. Ontiveros's opinion illuminates the sexism that is codified in Title VII's BFOQ and reified in U.S.
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David Snyder
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David Snyder
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Lindsay Wiley, Manel Kappagoda, and Anne Pearson
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Richard Wilson
No region of the world has been more vocal and persistent in its opposition to U.S. death penalty practice than Europe, which has itself become a death penalty-free zone. The chapter will examine the actions taken by European legislative and judicial bodies against U.S. practice of the death penalty, as well as those of the other regional treaty bodies, with particular attention to the Inter-American human rights system, in which the U.S. reluctantly participates. It then will examine U.S. interactions with its treaty partners in the area of extradition, where death penalty policy is acted out in the exchanges of prisoners, both accused and convicted, between countries. Finally, the chapter will conclude with an analysis of the impacts on the capital sentencing of foreign nationals in the U.S. courts, particularly as a result of the U.S. executive branch and courts’ efforts at compliance with the judgment of the International Court of Justice in the Avena case, involving 51 Mexican nationals on death row in the U.S.
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Christine Farley
Since 1967, Pro-Football has registered six marks that include the term “redskins,” a derogatory racial epithet that refers to Native Americans. The use of disparaging marks dates back to the 19th century when brands commercialized racial stereotypes, such as Aunt Jemima. Today, offensive marks, including those that ridicule race, ethnicity, gender and religion are proliferating prompting the question of what role trademark law plays in protecting the interests of diverse communities. Section 2(a) of the Lanham Act prohibits the registration of marks that consist of matter that may disparage or bring into contempt or disrepute any person, institution, or belief. In this chapter, I review the policy goals and challenges in barring the registration of offensive marks and conclude that trademark law can play an important, albeit limited role in fostering diversity. U.S. trademark law only seeks to regulate the registration and not the use of offensive trademarks. Nevertheless, the symbolic gesture of the federal government cancelling the registration of a mark on the basis that it disparages people is significant and may affect the way society views the mark. Thus the government can perform important signaling for civility without abridging the freedom of speech.
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Christine Haight Farley
Since 1967, Pro-Football has registered six marks that include the term “redskins,” a derogatory racial epithet that refers to Native Americans. The use of disparaging marks dates back to the 19th century when brands commercialized racial stereotypes, such as Aunt Jemima. Today, offensive marks, including those that ridicule race, ethnicity, gender and religion are proliferating prompting the question of what role trademark law plays in protecting the interests of diverse communities. Section 2(a) of the Lanham Act prohibits the registration of marks that consist of matter that may disparage or bring into contempt or disrepute any person, institution, or belief. In this chapter, I review the policy goals and challenges in barring the registration of offensive marks and conclude that trademark law can play an important, albeit limited role in fostering diversity. U.S. trademark law only seeks to regulate the registration and not the use of offensive trademarks. Nevertheless, the symbolic gesture of the federal government cancelling the registration of a mark on the basis that it disparages people is significant and may affect the way society views the mark. Thus the government can perform important signaling for civility without abridging the freedom of speech.
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Lewis Grossman
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Diane Orentlicher
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Diane Orentlicher
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Macarena Sáez
This book explores the tension between same-sex marriage and traditional structures of family law. It moves from countries that have recognized same-sex marriage and are now adjusting to a new family law structure, to countries where same-sex marriage is viewed as a foreign institution, only possible as an academic theoretical conversation,. The book covers analyses of countries as diverse as Turkey, Israel, Jamaica, Colombia, Mexico, Spain, and the United States. It is divided in chapters that look at each country’s individual experience in recognizing same-sex couples in general, and same-sex marriage in particular. From systems that still deny the existence of same-sex emotional relations, to systems that have reinforced marriage through the recognition of same-sex marriage, we see countries in transition, dealing with a tension between rigid concepts of family and flexible family structures that allow for protection of families outside the realm of the heterosexual married family. There are some common elements among countries that have recognized same-sex marriage or that are in the process of recognition. At the same time, countries that deny the legal existence of same-sex couples and their families also share common elements.
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Macarena Sáez
This Chapter gives a brief analysis of the status of same-sex marriage in the United States prior to the US Supreme Court decisions of 2013 and the current status of litigation and political reforms triggered, in part by the court decisions. It shows that marriage is a central institution in the country’s rationale of family law in ways that separate it from other Western countries that have allowed same-sex marriage.
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Robert Tsai
This contribution explores the development of legal language in nineteenth-century America as a species of political discourse. In particular, I sketch the broad, competing trends in legal language. On the one hand, legal rhetoric became more popular and fragmented, as the sources of law multiplied. On the other hand, the law also became increasingly sophisticated and specialized with the rise of institutions. These features on the surface of legal rhetoric hinted at deeper changes in the imperatives of political development and efforts at cultural resistance.
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Padideh Ala'i and Matthew D'Orsi
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Jonathan Baker
This essay was written for a festschrift in honor of Professor William E. Kovacic. It discusses Prof. Kovacic’s work on the design of antitrust enforcement institutions, the interplay between the Chicago and Harvard schools in the transformation of antitrust that took place a generation ago, and the extent to which antitrust norms exhibit continuity over time. It will published in "William E. Kovacic - Liber Amicorum: An Antitrust Tribute - Vol. II," which is scheduled to be released in February 2014 by the Institute of Competition Law.
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Mary L. Clark
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Robert Dinerstein and E. Milstein
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Christine Farley
This chapter argues that the 1929 General Inter-American Convention for Trade Mark and Commercial Protection ("Pan-American Convention") should be remembered, and will explain why it has been forgotten. The chapter recounts the history of the convention and shows how that history fits into the development of a practice in the U.S. of requiring implementing legislation in order for treaty provisions to become directly operative. Foreign caselaw demonstrates that the convention has not been forgotten in member states (Colombia, Cuba, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay and Peru) and therefore has played a very different role abroad. Finally, the chapter reveals how the convention makes at least two important contributions to international trademark law. First, it provides a novel approach to the protection of well-known marks by limiting their availability in cases where the mark was known to have been previously used in the region. Second, the convention goes well beyond the Paris Convention to provide a detailed set of protections against unfair competition. Given these substantive provisions, the fact that the convention is still in force in the U.S., and that is self-executing, it is a wonder that there have been so few U.S. cases to date that have invoked this convention.
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Christine Haight Farley
Currently, U.S. trademark and copyright law both adopt employ a regime of international exhaustion of rights with respect to parallel importation after the Supreme Court ruled in Kirtsaeng last term. This agreement belies the fact that these two areas of law have developed in nearly divergent directions and have resulted in faltering intellectual property and trade policies. Currently, interpretation of the first sale doctrine hinges on the particular legal characteristics of both trademarks and copyrights. When dealing with trademarks, courts ultimately focus on the source of origin, taking into account consumer expectations or, instead, focusing on the business relationship, if any, between the two parties. With copyrights, courts’ decisions build upon how extensive authors’ rights were intended to be and where an author’s actions can be regulated. In addition to these considerations, however, I propose that U.S. law’s treatment of parallel imports should be informed by the policy concerns at stake. In doing so, courts can and legislators can strike a balance between a national and international exhaustion regime; create compatibility between trademark and copyright law; and effectively eliminate abuse of these discrepancies by parties who can easily disguise their trademark disputes as copyright disputes to bar such imports.
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Amanda Leiter
This chapter from The Year in Review, published by the ABA Section on Environment, Energy and Resources, covers developments during 2013 in the areas of standing, Commerce Clause, political question doctrine, preemption, takings, due process, First Amendment, Tenth Amendment, and state constitutional law.
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Jeffrey Lubbers
In the last two decades transparency has become a ubiquitous and stubbornly ambiguous term. Typically understood to promote rule of law, democratic participation, anti-corruption initiatives, human rights, and economic efficiency, transparency can also legitimate bureaucratic power, advance undemocratic forms of governance, and aid in global centralization of power. This path-breaking volume, comprising original contributions on a range of countries and environments, exposes the many faces of transparency by allowing readers to see the uncertainties, inconsistencies and surprises contained within the current conceptions and applications of the term.
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Adeen Postar and Khelani Clay
This chapter is intended to cover Maryland Law in its entire complexity and for the most part is intended for current use by practitioners. Whenever possible, it includes references to online sources of material, including LexisNexis, Westlaw, and authoritative sites available on the Internet. We have not included references to WestlawNext as many Maryland specific materials have not been included there as this project was concluding in November 2011.
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