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Meeting the Moment: Legal Frameworks for Feminist Futures
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Meeting the Moment
Legal Frameworks for Feminist Futures
The panels will take place at Yale Law School's Baker Hall in Room 116 (Address: 100 Tower Pkwy.)
The keynote address will take place in the Sterling Law Building Auditorium (Address: 127 Wall St.).
Non-Yale affiliates must register to ensure their access to the building.
8:30 a.m. – 9:00 a.m.
Registration & Breakfast
(Registration will be open all day.)
Morning Panels
9:00 a.m. – 10:10 a.m.
We, the Feminists
The Symposium’s opening panel will reflect on how the field of feminist legal thought emerged and grapple with the question of which groups of people have been integral, or marginal, to its development.
Sarah Deer
University Distinguished Professor at the University of Kansas and Chief Justice for the Prairie Island Indian Community Court of Appeals
Justice Sarah Deer’s legal scholarship focuses on the challenges facing Tribal Nation in the United States, particularly criminal justice. Her 2015 book, The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America is the culmination of over 25 years of working with survivors and criminal justice personnel. As a tribal jurist and scholar, Justice Deer’s scholarship focuses on the intersection of federal Indian law and victims’ rights, using indigenous principles as a framework. She currently teaches at the University of Kansas, where she holds a joint appointment in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the School of Public Affairs and Administration and a Courtesy Appointment at the School of Law.
Deborah Dinner
Professor of Law at Cornell School of LawDeborah Dinner is a legal historian whose research examines work, gender, capitalism, and the welfare state in the twentieth-century United States. Dinner is the author of The Sex Equality Dilemma: Work, Family, and Legal Change in Neoliberal America (forthcoming 2023). Dinner’s published articles explore feminist legal activism respecting childcare and pregnancy discrimination, gender in public accommodations, masculinity and divorce law, and the relationship between sex discrimination law and retrenchment in labor regulation.
Joanna L. Grossman
Ellen K. Solender Endowed Chair in Women and the Law and Professor of Law at SMU Dedman School of Law
Joanna L. Grossman is the Ellen K. Solender Endowed Chair in Women and Law and Professor of Law at SMU Dedman School of Law. This spring, she is the Herman Phleger Visiting Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. Her research focuses on gender equality and family law, with a special focus on sexual harassment and pregnancy discrimination. She is the author or editor of nine books, including Nine to Five: How Gender, Sex, and Sexuality Continue to Define the American Workplace (2016) and The Walled Garden: Law and Privacy in Modern Society (2022). She is a regular columnist for Justia’s Verdict, serves as an expert witness in sex discrimination cases, and lectures across the country on women’s rights.
Serena Mayeri
Professor of Law & History at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School
Serena Mayeri’s scholarship focuses on the historical impact of progressive and conservative social movements on legal and constitutional change. She is the author of Reasoning from Race: Feminism, Law, and the Civil Rights Revolution, and her current book project, tentatively titled The Status of Marriage: Marital Supremacy Challenged and Remade, 1960-2000, examines the history of challenges to marriage’s primacy as a legal institution and a source of public and private benefits. She holds a secondary appointment in the Department of History and is a Core Faculty member in the Program on Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies.
10:20 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.
Meeting the Moment: Why Feminist Legal Thought Matters
This panel will frame the Symposium and address why feminist legal thought matters—and why it matters now.
Alexandra Brodsky (moderator)
Staff Attorney at Public Justice & Visiting Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School
Elizabeth F. Emens
Thomas M. Macioce Professor of Law at Columbia Law School
Elizabeth Emens writes and teaches on disability law, family law, anti-discrimination law, contracts law, and law and sexuality. Emens is the author of The Art of Life Admin: How to Do Less, Do It Better, and Live More (2019), which explores how unseen and unpaid work is a universal problem but a particular burden for disadvantaged and disabled people. She is also co-editor, with Professor Michael Ashley Stein, of Disability and Equality Law (2013).
Catharine A. MacKinnon
Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan and the James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School (since 2009)
Catharine A. MacKinnon is a lawyer, teacher, writer, scholar, and activist for equality. Her theoretical and practical work centers on recognizing that sex crimes are crimes of inequality. Among her other work, Professor MacKinnon pioneered the legal claim for sexual harassment as a form of sex discrimination. With Andrea Dworkin, she created the equality approach to pornography and racist hate speech, which were largely accepted by the Supreme Court of Canada. With Bosnian and Croatian survivors of the Serbian-led genocide, she conceived rape as an act of genocide and with co-counsel established it in law and secured a damage award at trial for survivors. She drafted language that became part of the Palermo Protocol on international trafficking and anti-trafficking legislation that was passed by Congress in the United States. She and Andrea Dworkin conceived, and she proposed, the Nordic/Equality Model for abolishing prostitution, decriminalizing prostituted people and penalizing their buyers and sellers. Passed in Sweden in 1999, this approach has since become law in Norway, Iceland, Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, Canada, France, and Israel. From 2008-2012, Professor MacKinnon was the Special Gender Advisor to the first Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), where she implemented her concept “gender crime” under the Rome Statute. In 2022, she was selected for the Henry Phillips Prize in Jurisprudence, only awarded 29 times since 1895. She has written many articles and over a dozen books, translated into many languages, including Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination (1979), Feminism Unmodified (1987), Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989), Only Words (1993), Sex Equality (the casebook) (2001, 2006, 2016), Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws (2006), Are Women Human? (2007) and Butterfly Politics (2017). She has taught law, worked with survivors, spoken publicly, and made legal change around the United States and the world for over 45 years. According to empirical studies, she has often been the most frequently-cited woman scholar writing on law in English and among the top most-cited legal scholars over time.
Keina Yoshida
Barrister Ass. at Doughty Street Chambers, Legal Adviser at Center for Reproductive Rights & Visiting Fellow at the Center for Women, Peace & Security
KeinaYoshida is an international human rights lawyer. Yoshida acted in groundbreaking cases before international bodies on women’s rights, environmental rights, and LGBTI rights. Yoshida has acted in counsel in cases before the CEDAW Committee, European Court of Human Rights, Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and in high profile domestic public law challenges. Yoshida is the co-author of the book, Feminist Conversations on Peace, with Dr. Sarah Smith.
11:40 a.m. – 12:40 p.m.
Keynote Address
Welcome Remarks: Jelani Hayes (J.D. ’23 & Ph.D. candidate in History at Harvard University)
Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Journal of Law & Feminism
Moderator: Mindy Jane Roseman
Director of International Law Programs and Director of the Gruber Program for Global Justice and Women's Rights at Yale Law School
Keynote Address: Fatima Goss Graves
President & CEO of the National Women's Law Center
Fatima Goss Graves, who has served in numerous roles at NWLC for more than a decade, has spent her career fighting to advance opportunities for women and girls. She has a distinguished track record working across a broad set of issues central to women’s lives, including income security, health and reproductive rights, education access, and workplace fairness. Goss Graves is among the co-founders of the TIME’S UP Legal Defense Fund. Prior to becoming President, Goss Graves served as the Center’s Senior Vice President for Program, where she led the organization’s broad program agenda to advance progress and eliminate barriers in employment, education, health and reproductive rights and lift women and families out of poverty. Prior to that, as the Center’s Vice President for Education and Employment, she led the Center’s anti-discrimination initiatives, including work to promote equal pay, combat harassment and sexual assault at work and at school, and advance equal access to education programs, with a particular focus on outcomes for women and girls of color.
12:40 p.m. – 1:40 p.m.
Lunch
(Lunch will be provided to the first 150 attendees.)
Afternoon Panels
1:50 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
Beyond “Choice”
Contributing to the post-Dobbs reproductive justice dialogue, this panel is designed to move the discussion beyond the question of “choice” and give weight to the ways in which discourses around the right to have an abortion have shaped law and public opinion.
Reva Siegel (moderator)
Nicholas deB. Katzenback Professor of Law at Yale Law School
Aziza Ahmed
Professor of Law and R. Gordon Butler Scholar in International Law at Boston University School of Law
Aziza Ahmed’s scholarship examines the intersection of law, politics, and science in the fields of constitutional law, criminal law, health law, and family law. Ahmed is the author of the forthcoming book, Feminism’s Medicine: Law, Science, and Social Movements in the AIDS Response, and coeditor of the forthcoming handbook, Race, Racism, and the Law. Ahmed earned a J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law and an M.S. in Population and International Health from the Harvard School of Public Health.
Michele Goodwin
Chancellor’s Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law
Professor Goodwin’s constitutional law scholarship addresses legal questions related to freedom of speech; religious exercise; equal protection; due process; race and sex discrimination; reproductive rights; slavery; and LGBTQ equality. She directed the first ABA accredited health law program in the nation and established the first law center focused on race and bioethics. Trained in sociology and anthropology, Goodwin has conducted field research in Asia, Africa, Europe and North America, focusing on human trafficking (marriage, sex, organs, and other biologics). Her books include Policing The Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood (2020); Biotechnology, Bioethics, and The Law (2015); Baby Markets: Money and the Politics of Creating Families (2010); and Black Markets: The Supply and Demand of Body Parts (2006).
Patrice D. Douglass
Assistant Professor in Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley
Patrice D. Douglass is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Previously she was an Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. Her current research interests include Black feminist theory, transatlantic slavery, gender and sexual violence, and political philosophy. In 2021, she was the recipient of the Institute for Citizens and Scholars’ Career Enhancement Fellowship. Her current book manuscript, Engendering Blackness: The Ontology of Sexual Violence is under contract with Stanford University Press. In this book, she examines the relationship between sexual violence and modern racial slavery and finds it not only inseverable but also fundamental to the structural predicaments facing Blackness in the present.
3:10 p.m. – 4:20 p.m.
Challenging Carceral Feminism
This panel engages with the critique of carceral feminism--and the critique of the challenge to the feminist reliance on the criminal legal system.
Monica C. Bell (moderator)
Professor of Law and Associate Professor of Sociology at Yale Law School
Kate D’Adamo
Policy & Advocacy Advisor at Reframe Health & Justice Consulting
Kate D'Adamo (they/she) is a partner at Reframe Health and Justice, a collective of queer people of color working at the intersections of harm reduction, systems change and healing justice. D’Adamo’s background is rooted in community organizing, programming, direct support and advocacy for people in the sex trades and employing other forms of criminalized survival. Their current focus in this work is training and technical assistance for service providers, direct political advocacy, and capacity building for community-led initiatives seeking to impact policy change.
Aya Gruber
Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Law School
Aya Gruber’s scholarship focuses primarily on feminist efforts to strengthen criminal law responses to crimes against women. Her widely taught and frequently cited articles combine insights from practicing as a public defender with extensive research to articulate a feminist critique of punitive and authoritarian laws on violence against women. In addition to her writing on gender and crime, Gruber has written a book on comparative criminal procedure, articles on treaty law and human rights, and articles on criminal procedure and privacy. Her book, The Feminist War on Crime: The Unexpected Role of Women's Liberation in Mass Incarceration (2020), tells the story how feminists, in their quest to secure women's protection from domestic violence and rape, became soldiers in the war on crime and contributors to mass incarceration It sketches a path forward for young women, activists, and lawmakers to oppose violence against women without reinforcing the American prison state.
I. India Thusi
Professor of Law at the Maurer School of Law at the Indiana University Bloomington & Senior Scientist at the Kinsey Institute
I. India Thusi’s research adopts an anthropological methodology and examines racial and sexual hierarchies as they relate to policing and criminalization. Her articles and essays have been published in the Harvard Law Review, NYU Law Review, California Law Review, Northwestern Law Review, amongst others. Her book, Policing Bodies, examines the policing of sex workers in South Africa.
4:30 pm. – 5:40 p.m.
Rethinking Family Regulation
This panel will interrogate the structural harms imbedded in the family regulation system, including its roots in punitive public welfare regimes, disparate harms in Black and Indigenous communities, discrimination against parents with disabilities, and the system’s recent intramentalization in efforts to remove children from their homes who seek gender-affirming care.
Douglas NeJaime (moderator)
Anne Urowsky Professor of Law at Yale Law School
Jennifer Levi
Senior Director of Transgender and Queer Rights at GLAD
Jennifer L. Levi is a nationally recognized expert on transgender legal issues. Levi led the legal fight against President Trump’s transgender military ban in both Doe v. Trump and Stockman v. Trump. Levi has also been a leader in working on harm reduction for incarcerated transgender people. Other precedent-setting transgender rights cases Levi has worked on include: Rosa v. Park West Bank, a case brought on behalf of a transgender woman denied a bank loan under the federal Equal Credit Opportunity Act that laid the foundation for the recent Supreme Court decision in Bostock v. Clayton County; O’Donnabhain v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue (2010), which established that medical care relating to gender transition qualifies for a medical tax deduction; and Doe v. Clenchy (2014), in which the first state high court ruled that a transgender girl must be fully integrated into her public elementary school as a girl, including having full and equal access to restrooms. Levi was co-counsel in two landmark marriage equality cases and has led a number of key family law cases establishing important protections for families headed by LGBTQ parents. Levi is a law professor at Western New England University, co-editor of Transgender Family Law: A Guide to Effective Advocacy (2012) and serves on the Legal Committee of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.
Robyn M. Powell
Associate Professor at the University of Oklahoma College of Law
As a disabled woman, Powell has dedicated her career to advancing the rights of people with disabilities. For nearly five years, Powell served as an Attorney-Advisor at the National Council on Disability (NCD), an independent federal agency that advises the President and Congress on matters concerning people with disabilities. Previously, she served as a Research Associate at the Lurie Institute for Disability Policy at Brandeis University, Disability Rights Program Manager at the Equal Rights Center, Assistant Director for Policy and Advocacy at the Disability Policy Consortium, and Staff Attorney at Greater Boston Legal Services. In 2022, she published an article in the Yale Journal of Law & Feminism, “Achieving Justice for Disabled Parents and Their Children: An Abolitionist Approach.”
Lisa Sangoi
Co-Founder & Co-Director at Movement for Family Power
Sangoi is committed to working in service of growing a movement for child welfare and foster system reform and abolition. She has had the honor of working on a number of campaigns to roll back laws, policies and practices that punish women and mothers. She has also had the privilege of providing legal representation to women targeted by the child protection and criminal legal systems through trial and appellate advocacy. Given the intersection of the drug war and the child welfare system, Sangoi spends quite a bit of time learning about drug use, pregnancy, and parenting, and she regularly consults on related child welfare cases and legislation throughout the country.
BeKura Shabazz
President & Founder at Coalition for Families Against Child Separation
Minister BeKura W. Shabazz is a non-attorney legal advocate, human rights activist, and formerly incarcerated single mother of four. She is the founder and president of the Coalition for Families Against Child Separation and the founder and CEO of the Criminal Injustice Reform Network, as well as End Environmental Injustice Now. A Black non-degreed, self-taught legal feminist theorist and self-proclaimed legal scholar, her work embodies justice, liberation, and freedom. Shabazz’s work seeks to eradicate all forms of injustice through righteous collaborative efforts that encourage communities to solve their own problems. Her work centers and promotes the multi-dynamic village way of living, where families are the foundation of the community—a challenge to the nuclear family model.