Book Selections

"She was born in 1930 in El Paso and grew up on a cattle ranch in Arizona. At a time when women were expected to be homemakers, she set her sights on Stanford University. When she graduated near the top of her class at law school in 1952, no firm would even interview her. But Sandra Day O'Connor's story is that of a woman who repeatedly shattered glass ceilings -- doing so with a blend of grace, wisdom, humor, understatement, and cowgirl toughness. She became the first-ever female majority leader of a state senate. As a judge on the Arizona State Court of Appeals, she stood up to corrupt lawyers and humanized the law. When she arrived at the Supreme Court, appointed by Reagan in 1981, she began a quarter-century tenure on the court, hearing cases that ultimately shaped American law. Diagnosed with cancer at fifty-eight, and caring for a husband with Alzheimer's, O'Connor endured every difficulty with grit and poise. Women and men today will be inspired by how to be first in your own life, how to know when to fight and when to walk away, through O'Connor's example."--

Since 1980, the Canadian women's movement has been an active participant in constitutional politics and Charter litigation. This book, through its focus on the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF), presents a compelling examination of how Canadian feminists became key actors in developing the constitutional doctrine of equality, and how they mobilized that doctrine to support the movement's policy agenda.

On 10 May 2010, President Obama nominated Solicitor General Elena Kagan to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens. If confirmed, Elena Kagan would be the first Solicitor General to be appointed to the Court since the elevation of Thurgood Marshall in 1967. Given that Solicitor General Kagan has made few public statements on important legal and policy issues, some have looked to her record as Solicitor General for some indication of her views. Understanding the role and responsibilities of the Solicitor General can provide a useful backdrop against which to evaluate Elena Kagan's statements and official actions and assess her professional qualifications. This book examines the office of Solicitor General and its successes before the Court, and examines the career of Elena Kagan and her nomination to Supreme Court Justice.

Elena Kagan can be considered a "wild card" in terms of how she will vote and affect Supreme Court decisions. While largely considered a liberal, her lack of a judicial "track record" and previous work as Solicitor General lend an air of uncertainty as to how she will react to upcoming cases that have proven highly divisive and controversial. This full-length biography sheds light on Elena Kagan's life, covering her college years at Princeton and her experience in law school as well as her legal career, which eventually led her to a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. Appropriate for high school, college, and adult readers, the book not only documents Justice Kagan's life, achievements, and the possibilities for the future, but also how Kagan is an inspiring role model who demonstrated independence, determination, and high achievement throughout her career.

"The life and career of the fiercely principled Supreme Court Justice, now a popular icon, with dramatic accounts of her landmark cases that moved the needle on legal protection of human rights, illustrated with b/w archival photographs"--

"The trailblazing Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her own words. Her most essential writings on gender equality and women's rights, reproductive health care, and voting and civil rights"--

This is a remarkable and unique book, an informal portrait of Justice Ginsburg, drawing on a series of her conversations with Rosen, starting in the 1990s and continuing through the Trump era. Rosen, a veteran legal journalist, scholar, and president of the National Constitution Center, shares with readers the justice's observations on a variety of topics, and her intellect, compassion, sense of humor, and humanity shine through.

"Sonia Sotomayor is the highest ranking Latino/a in the United States. Her story of accomplishment and rise to the pinnacle of American public life seemed to herald a profound cultural and historical shift. Latinos are America's largest minority and also its most disenfranchised. For many, Sotomayor's ascent represented the elusive fulfillment of an American dream. A chronological narrative of her extraordinary life, Being Brown juxtaposes Sotomayor's phenomenal successes with the twists and turns of minority inclusion in American democracy. Lazaro Lima also shows how Sotomayor's own self-making as a Puerto Rican model of possibility allows us to understand not only the appeal but also the limits of representation. Culling through Sotomayor's own writings, her Supreme Court dissents, and speeches, Lima questions what it means to have a powerful Latina in the Supreme Court. What does her ascent say about social mobility and inclusion? While Sotomayor's story inspires hope, it also reveals much about the general lack of equality of Latinos and other disenfranchised communities"--Provided by publisher.

"From one of America's most inspiring political leaders, a book about the core truths that unite us, and the long struggle to discern what those truths are and how best to act upon them, in her own life and across the life of our country. By reckoning with the big challenges we face together, drawing on the hard-won wisdom and insight from her own career and the work of those who have most inspired her, Kamala Harris offers in The Truths We Hold a master class in problem solving, in crisis management, and leadership in challenging times. Through the arc of her own life, on into the great work of our day, she communicates a vision of shared struggle, shared purpose, and shared values. In a book rich in many home truths, not least is that a relatively small number of people work very hard to convince a great many of us that we have less in common than we actually do, but it falls to us to look past them and get on with the good work of living our common truth. When we do, our shared effort will continue to sustain us and this great nation, now and in the years to come"--;"From one of America's most inspiring political leaders, a book about the core truths that unite us, and the long struggle to discern what those truths are and how best to act upon them, in her own life and across the life of our country. Senator Kamala Harris's commitment to speaking truth is informed by her upbringing. The daughter of immigrants, she was raised in an Oakland, California community that cared deeply about social justice; her parents--an esteemed economist from Jamaica and an admired cancer researcher from India--met as activists in the civil rights movement when they were graduate students at Berkeley. Growing up, Harris herself never hid her passion for justice, and when she became a prosecutor out of law school, a deputy district attorney, she quickly established herself as one of the most innovative change agents in American law enforcement. She progressed rapidly to become the elected District Attorney for San Francisco, and then the chief law enforcement officer of the state of California as a whole. Known for bringing a voice to the voiceless, she took on the big banks during the foreclosure crisis, winning a historic settlement for California's working families. Her hallmarks were applying a holistic, data-driven approach to many of California's thorniest issues, always eschewing stale "tough on crime" rhetoric as presenting a series of false choices. Neither "tough" nor "soft" but smart on crime became her mantra. Being smart means learning the truths that can make us better as a community, and supporting those truths with all our might. That has been the pole star that guided Harris to a transformational career as the top law enforcement official in California, and it is guiding her now as a transformational United States Senator, grappling with an array of complex issues that affect her state, our country, and the world, from health care and the new economy to immigration, national security, the opioid crisis, and accelerating inequality. By reckoning with the big challenges we face together, drawing on the hard-won wisdom and insight from her own career and the work of those who have most inspired her, Kamala Harris offers in [this book] a master class in problem solving, in crisis management, and leadership in challenging times. Through the arc of her own life, on into the great work of our day, she communicates a vision of shared struggle, shared purpose, and shared values. In a book rich in many home truths, not least is that a relatively small number of people work very hard to convince a great many of us that we have less in common than we actually do, but it falls to us to look past them and get on with the good work of living our common truth. When we do, our shared effort will continue to sustain us and this great nation, now and in the years to come."--Dust jacket.

Kamala Harris was born in California to a Tamil mother from India and a black father from Jamaica. She grew up singing in the choir at a Baptist church and attending a Hindu temple with her mother. She is now happily married to a Jewish lawyer. As the District Attorney of San Francisco and as the Attorney General of California she gained a "tough on crime" reputation while opposing the death penalty. Much to the chagrin of her critics, Harris has been defying stereotypes since the very beginning.--Amazon

In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As First Lady of the United States of America, she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive White House in history. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private. A deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily defied expectations.

"This book explores how women from diverse backgrounds interact with the law in response to intimate partner violence, over time. Every year, millions of women globally turn to law to help them live lives free and safe from violence. Women engage with child protection services and police. They apply for civil protection orders and family court orders to help them manage their children's contact with a violent father, and take special visa pathways to avoid deportation following separation from an abuser. Women are often compelled to interact with law, through their abuser's myriad legal applications against them. While separation may seem like a solution, it often accelerates legal engagement providing new opportunities for continued abuse. Countless women who have experienced Intimate Partner Violence are enmeshed in overlapping, complex and often inconsistent legal processes. They have both fleeting and longer-term connections with legal system actors. Their stories demonstrate how abusers harness multiple aspects of the legal process, and its actors, to continue their abuse. They highlight the regular failure of legal processes and actors to comprehend the significance of non-physical abuse. Women show how legal system actors' common expectation that separation is a single event, rather than a process, has implications for their connections with law and the outcomes they achieve. From time to time, the women in this study attained the safety and closure they sought from law, sometimes in circular and unexpected ways, but their narratives demonstrate the level of endurance, tenacity and time this often required."

"Fragmented Protection of Women's Rights in Conflict: an Introduction The regulation of women's rights in conflict has travelled a great distance since initial feminist interventions into international law, which identified a 'masculine world' of international law with reinforcing organisational and normative structural factors that excluded women from its practice and women's lives from its areas of concern.1 States have agreed to limit the lawful conduct of armed conflict - including against female combatants and civilians - under international humanitarian law (IHL),2 and provided for international criminal jurisdiction over individuals bearing greatest responsibility for the most serious violations of these laws perpetrated against women.3 The extent to which states can limit the human rights of women, even in times of violent conflict, has been negotiated, litigated and interpreted in various instruments, consensus and interpretative documents grouped under international human rights law (IHRL)"--

Woman Lawyer tells the story of Clara Foltz, the first woman admitted to the California Bar. Famous in her time as a public intellectual, leader of the women's movement, and legal reformer, Foltz faced terrific prejudice and well-organized opposition to women lawyers as she tried cases in front of all-male juries, raised five children as a single mother, and stumped for political candidates. She was the first to propose the creation of a public defender to balance the public prosecutor. Woman Lawyer uncovers the legal reforms and societal contributions of a woman celebrated in her day, but lost to history until now. It casts new light on the turbulent history and politics of California in a period of phenomenal growth and highlights the interconnection of the suffragists and other movements for civil rights and legal reforms.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg believed that the equal rights of women belonged in the Constitution. She stood on the shoulders of brilliant women who persisted across generations to change the Constitution. We the Women tells their stories, showing what's at stake in the current battle for the Equal Rights Amendment.The year 2020 marks the centennial the Nineteenth Amendment, guaranteeing women's constitutional right to vote. But have we come far enough?

"I read these stories of the first generation of women lawyers with awe and gratitude. We are all in their debt - and in Jill Norgren's, too, for recovering this forgotten history." - Linda Greenhouse, Knight Distinguished Journalist in Residence and Joseph M. Goldstein Senior Fellow, Yale Law School In Rebels at the Bar, prize-winning legal historian Jill Norgren recounts the life stories of a small group of nineteenth century women who were among the first female attorneys in the United States. Beginning in the late 1860s, these determined rebels pursued the radical ambition of entering the then all-male profession of law. They were motivated by a love of learning. They believed in fair play and equal opportunity. They desired recognition as professionals and the ability to earn a good living. Through a biographical approach, Norgren presents the common struggles of eight women first to train and to qualify as attorneys, then to practice their hard-won professional privilege. Their story is one of nerve, frustration, and courage. This first generation practiced civil and criminal law, solo and in partnership. The women wrote extensively and lobbied on the major issues of the day, but the professional opportunities open to them had limits. They never had the opportunity to wear the black robes of a judge. They were refused entry into the lucrative practices of corporate and railroad law.Although male lawyers filled legislatures and the Foreign Service, presidents refused to appoint these early women lawyers to diplomatic offices and the public refused to elect them to legislatures. Rebels at the Bar expands our understanding of both women's rights and the history of the legal profession in the nineteenth century. It focuses on the female renegades who trained in law and then, like men, fought considerable odds to create successful professional lives. In this engaging and beautifully written book, Norgren shares her subjects' faith in the art of the possible. In so doing, she ensures their place in history.Jill Norgrenis Professor Emerita of Political Science at John Jay College, and the Graduate Center of The City University of New York. She is the award winning author of many articles and books, includingBelva Lockwood: The Woman Who Would Be President( NYU Press, 2007);The Cherokee Cases; and American Cultural Pluralism and Law(with Serena Nanda).

"When it comes to breaking down barriers for women in the workplace, Ruth Bader Ginsburg's name speaks volumes for itself-but, as she clarifies in the foreword to this long-awaited book, there are too many trailblazing names we do not know. Herma Hill Kay, former Dean of UC Berkeley School of Law and Ginsburg's closest professional colleague, wrote Paving the Way to tell the stories of the first fourteen female law professors at ABA- and AALS-accredited law schools in the United States. Kay, who became the fifteenth such professor, labored over the stories of these women in order to provide an essential history of their path for the more than 2,000 women working as law professors today and all of their feminist colleagues. Because Herma Hill Kay, who died in 2017, was able to obtain so much first-hand information about the fourteen women who preceded her, Paving the Way is filled with details, quiet and loud, of each of their lives and careers from their own perspectives. Kay wraps each story in rich historical context, lest we forget the extraordinarily difficult times in which these women lived. Paving the Way is not just a collection of individual stories of remarkable women but also a well-crafted interweaving of law and society during a historical period when women's voices were often not heard and sometimes actively muted. The final chapter connects these first fourteen women to the "second wave" of women law professors who achieved tenure-track appointments in the 1960s and 1970s, carrying on the torch and analogous challenges. This is a decidedly feminist project, one that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg advocated for tirelessly and admired publicly in the years before her death"--

This book provides a deep dive into various aspects of voice and presentation including breath, resonance, articulation, inflection and shaping openings and closing for maximum impact on the jury. It is divided into five primary sections, Tuning Your Instrument, Catching Their Interest, Catching Their Heart, Amplifying Through Body Language and Gesture, and Applying Voice to Everyday Legal Situations. The pedagogical goal is to provide a training model that yields actual and lasting results for litigators and attorneys who want a wider range of story-telling skills to strengthen their success in and out of the courtroom. This book's contribution is the depth into which the authors go into the subject of voice and its relation to story-telling, providing a clear and tangible pathway to skill development and lasting transformation.

On March 16, 1970, the day Newsweek published a cover story on the fledgling feminist movement, forty-six Newsweek women charged the magazine with discrimination in hiring and promotion. It was the first female class action lawsuit, and it inspired other women in the media to follow suit. Povich was one of the ringleaders. She tells the story of this dramatic turning point through the lives of several participants, and shows how personal experiences and cultural shifts led a group of well-mannered, largely apolitical women to challenge their bosses-- and what happened after they did.

In 1998, an Asian woman first joined the ranks of federal judges with lifetime appointments. It took ten years for the second Asian woman to be appointed. Since then, however, over a dozen more Asian women have received lifetime federal judicial appointments.   This book tells the stories of the first fifteen. In the process, it recounts remarkable tales of Asian women overcoming adversity and achieving the American dream, despite being the daughters of a Chinese garment worker, Japanese Americans held in internment camps during World War II, Vietnamese refugees, and penniless Indian immigrants. Yet The First Fifteen also explores how far Asian Americans and women still have to go before the federal judiciary reflects America as a whole.    In a candid series of interviews, these judges reflect upon the personal and professional experiences that led them to this distinguished position, as well as the nerve-wracking political process of being nominated and confirmed for an Article III judgeship. By sharing their diverse stories, The First Fifteen paints a nuanced portrait of how Asian American women are beginning to have a voice in determining American justice.

This book provides new, feminist perspectives on famous family law cases that span generations. The chapters take court decisions and rewrite them with feminist ideas in mind. Each rewritten opinion is penned by a leading scholar who relied only on materials available at the time of the original decision. The decisions address topics such as the criminalization of polygamy, intimate partner violence as a ground for asylum, the legality of gestational surrogacy, the rights of cohabitants, discrimination against transgender parents, immigration rules governing non-citizen parents, and child welfare and child support systems, among others. Each opinion is accompanied by a commentary that explains the original opinion as well as its contemporary relevance, and each commentary also is authored by a respected scholar. The combination of a rewritten opinion and its commentary provides an in-depth examination of the most important topics in family law.

Could a feminist perspective change the shape of tax laws? Feminist reasoning and analysis are recognized as having tremendous potential to affect employment discrimination, sexual harassment, and reproductive rights laws - but they can likewise transform tax law (as well as other statutory or code-based areas of the law). By highlighting the importance of perspective, background, and preconceptions on reading and interpreting statutes, this volume shows what a difference feminist analysis can make to statutory interpretation. Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Tax Opinions brings together a group of scholars and lawyers to rewrite tax decisions in which a feminist emphasis would have changed the outcome, the court's reasoning, or the future direction of the law. Featuring cases including medical expense deductions for fertility treatment, gender confirmation surgery, tax benefits for married individuals, the tax treatment of tribal lands, and business expense deductions, this volume opens the way for a discussion of how viewpoint is a key factor in statutory interpretation.

How could feminist perspectives and methods change the shape of property law? This volume assembles a group of diverse scholars to explore this question by presenting fundamental property law cases rewritten from a feminist perspective. The cases cover a broad range of property law topics, from landlord-tenant rights and obligations, patents, and zoning to publicity rights, land titles, concurrent ownership, and takings. These rewritten opinions and their accompanying commentaries demonstrate how incorporating feminist theories and methods could have made property law more just and equitable for women and marginalized groups. The book also shows how property law is not neutral but is shaped by the society that produces it and the judges who apply it.

This volume provides an alternate history of health law by rewriting key judicial opinions from a feminist perspective. Each chapter includes a rewritten opinion penned by a leading scholar relying exclusively on court precedents and scientific understanding available at the time of the original decision accompanied by commentary from an expert placing the case in historical context and explaining how the feminist judgment might have shaped a different path for subsequent developments. It provides a map of the health law field-where paternalism, individualism, gender stereotypes, and tensions over the public-private divide shape decisions about informed consent, medical and nursing malpractice, the relationships among health care professionals and the institutions where they work, end-of-life care, reproductive health care, biomedical research, ownership of human tissues and cells, the influence of religious directives on health care standards, health care discrimination, long-term care, private health insurance, Medicaid coverage, the Affordable Care Act, and more.

"By rewriting both canonical and lesser-known tort cases from a feminist perspective, this volume exposes gender and racial bias in how courts have categorized and evaluated harm stemming from prenatal malpractice, pregnancy loss, domestic violence, sexual assault and harassment, invasion of privacy, and the award of economic and non-economic damages. The rewritten opinions demonstrate that when confronted with gendered harm to women, courts have often distorted or misapplied conventional legal doctrine to diminish the harm or deny recovery. Bringing this implicit bias to the surface can make law students, and lawyers and judges who craft arguments and apply tort doctrines, more aware of inequalities of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation or identity. This volume shows the way forward to make the basic doctrines of tort law more responsive to the needs and perspectives of traditionally marginalized people, in ways that give greater value to harms that they disproportionately experience"--Back cover.

"Could feminist perspectives and methods change the shape of employment discrimination law? To answer this question, we assembled a group of scholars and lawyers to use feminist perspectives and methodology to rewrite significant employment discrimination cases from the United States Courts of Appeals and the United States Supreme Court. This volume, like all of the books in Cambridge University Press's Feminist Judgments Series, demonstrates that judges with feminist viewpoints could have changed the law as well as the reasoning underlying the law, based on the precedent and other legal sources in effect at the time of the original decision. It demonstrates that use of feminist approaches can assure a more accurate and fair resolution of employment discrimination disputes, a resolution that more closely mirrors the purposes of the employment discrimination statutes. In essence, employment discrimination laws were enacted to protect the most vulnerable workers-those who are less powerful because of their age, race, color, sex, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, and religion-from discriminatory hiring, working conditions, promotions, and discharges. But unfortunately, the law has developed in ways that make it difficult for vulnerable workers who have suffered discrimination to prevail in their claims. Some of these reasons entail the complexity and difficulty of proving employment discrimination"--

During her lifetime, Myra Bradwell (1831-1894) - America's "first" woman lawyer as well as publisher and editor-in-chief of a prestigious legal newspaper - did more to establish and aid the rights of women and other legally handicapped people than any other woman of her day. Her female contemporaries - Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone - are known to all. Now it is time for Myra Bradwell to assume her rightful place among women's rights leaders of the nineteenth century. With author Jane Friedman's discovery of previously unpublished letters and valuable documents, Bradwell's fascinating story can at last be told.

"She was brilliant, ambitious, and unafraid to break barriers. As the only member of a squad of twenty high-powered lawyers who was not a white male, she devised the strategy that in the 1930s sent Mafia chieftain Lucky Luciano to prison. She achieved so much--but what could she have accomplished if not for barriers of race and gender? ..."--Back cover.;"She was black and a woman and a prosecutor, a graduate of Smith College and the granddaughter of slaves, as dazzlingly unlikely a combination as one could imagine in the New York of the 1930s--and without the strategy she devised, Lucky Luciano, the most powerful Mafia boss in history, would never have been convicted. When special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey selected twenty lawyers to help him clean up the city's underworld, she was the only member of his team who was not a white male. Eunice Hunton Carter, Stephen Carter's grandmother, was raised in a world of stultifying expectations about race and gender, yet by the 1940s her professional and political successes had made her one of the most famous black women in America. But her triumphs were shadowed by prejudice and tragedy. Greatly complicating her rise was her difficult relationship with her younger brother, Alphaeus, an avowed Communist who--together with his friend Dashiell Hammett--would go to prison during the McCarthy era. Yet she remained unbowed. Moving, haunting, and as fast paced as a novel, [this book] tells the true story of a woman who often found her path blocked by the social and political expectations of her time. But Eunice Carter never accepted defeat, and thanks to her grandson's remarkable book, her long-forgotten story is once again visible."--Jacket.

"[T]his book is an indispensable tool for stimulating a serious analysis of the financial and economic penalties imposed on women who must navigate between the modern Scylla and Charybdis of work and family life. This book poses substantive questions about the family, the market, the state, and the gender order, and provides a variety of analytic tools for thinking about them. The American gender order has changed in dramatic ways since the turn of the twentieth century, and to a great extent, it was the marketplace that gave rise to these changes. The family wage associated with union jobs in the industrial has largely disappeared. In the new economy, high-paying careers demand steep investments of education and training, while jobs accessible to those without college and post-graduate training increasingly tend to be McJobs that offer flexibility, but little in the way of high wages, good benefits, stability, or access to a progressive career ladder. In order to pursue the good life, women as well as men now expect to be in the marketplace for much of their adult lives"--Publ. web site.