This article presents a critical reading of the Brazilian Supreme Court decision in Arguição de Descumprimento de Preceito Fundamental (“ADPF”) 324—the case in which the prohibition of outsourcing was declared unconstitutional. In this decision, the majority opinion is underpinned by a neoliberal logic and relies on an argument that abuses that might occur in outsourcing are mere distortions. The minority opinion would allow the outsourcing of only “non-core” activities (which, in Brazil, correspond mostly to care-related work). Building on fem/race and class crit methods—that is, reflecting about the law by looking to the bottom, centering black female outsourced workers (“terceirizadas”)—the paper claims that both the majority and the dissenting opinions pose serious problems. Regarding the majority opinion, first, I use terceirizadas as a focal point to challenge the court’s neoliberal logic. Using terceirizadas as a point of departure shows that the neoliberal adoption of a universal individual is an abstraction that conceals how power relations operate on the ground and, in doing so, legitimates and perpetuates oppression. Second, the decision adopts a formal equality approach, which obscures how outsourcing is a fruit of, permeated by, and perpetuated by subordination. Regarding the dissenting position, the maintenance of the distinction between core and non-core activities derives from a non-intersectional look at the problem. It assumes a universal “worker,” missing the gender and racial aspects that create the possibility of different treatment in the first place. The paper then advances a possible path for the future, proposing a provisional antisubordination-based argument to argue for the unconstitutionality of outsourcing in Brazil.

Law reform advocates should be strategic in deploying tax tropes. This Article examines five common tax phrases—the “nanny tax,” “death tax,” “soda tax,” “Black tax,” and “pink tax”—and demonstrates that tax rhetoric is more likely to influence law when used to describe specific economic injustices resulting from actual government duties, as opposed to figurative “taxes” in the form of other real-life burdens or differences. Slogans referring to figurative taxes have descriptive force in both popular and academic literature as a shorthand for group-based disparities, but they have limited impact on law and human behavior. This Article catalogues and evaluates what makes for effective tax talk, in terms of impact on the law generally as well as day-to-day actions on the ground. With this roadmap, lawyers, policymakers and others will be able make more forceful and precise arguments aimed at reforming the law and changing human behavior. This Article makes three principal claims—one descriptive, one empirical, and one normative. The Article first develops a taxonomy of tax phrases based on the object of critique. The classification distinguishes between criticisms of compulsory formal levies, on the one hand, and burdens or oppressions that are akin to taxes, on the other. The taxonomy also accounts for differences among tax tropes based on their linguistic form. Some phrases deploy a single-word modifier for “tax” (“nanny,” “death,” or “soda”) to signify a larger relationship, event, or transaction that is subject to taxation. Other phrases use a single-word modifier for “tax” (“Black” or “pink”) that is strongly associated with the persons subject to taxation.

On January 20, 2021, Kamala Harris was sworn in by Justice Sonia Sotomayor as the nation’s first woman Vice President. This occasion, marked by women of color holding two of the most crucial roles in the federal government, would have been unthinkable to many for most of United States history. While the political efforts necessary to reach this moment have been studied in great depth, the legal challenges to women’s officeholding have been overlooked and even denied. Relying on extensive historical research, this Article is the first to examine how women advocated for more than a century for the legal right to hold public office through state-level litigation, constitutional amendments, legislative lobbying, and public commentary. From the 1840s through the 1940s, women in many states were excluded from holding even minor public offices because of state constitutional language and judicial holdings. Opponents of women’s officeholding feared that permitting women to assume posts would deprive men of their rightful opportunities, radically alter gender norms, and fuel the fire of the women’s suffrage movement. The nation’s first women lawyers were particularly active in challenging officeholding restrictions, with results varying by region and reflecting distinct legal, political, and social cultures. In some states disenfranchised women could assume only a narrow range of offices related to education, children, and charity, while in other locations they could hold a wide array of appointed posts and even elected positions for which they could not vote. After women were enfranchised through either state constitutional provisions or the Nineteenth Amendment, their officeholding eligibility remained contested in jurisdictions that did not expressly authorize it. Recovering the history of women’s legal right to hold public office challenges three major conventional wisdoms. First, it undermines the commonplace claim in scholarship on women’s legal and political history that officeholding was not a meaningful part of women’s advocacy or experiences until after ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. This Article’s account instead shows that proponents of women’s rights have long demanded women’s access to public posts, and women held positions for more than a half century prior to the federal suffrage amendment. Second, this Article challenges prominent scholarship—mostly focused on interpreting the Reconstruction Amendments—that treats officeholding and suffrage as inevitably paired. Foregrounding women’s history and state-level advocacy emphasizes the legal possibility and practical reality of severing these rights. Third, and relatedly, the Article calls for more attention to state constitutional law and regional variation. The women’s officeholding story clearly demonstrates how focusing on one geographical area, providing a single national account, or limiting analysis to the federal level obscures essential developments in securing rights.

Dignity is a famously contested concept, suggesting its deployment as a legal principle should be closely scrutinized. This Article sets out a functional and contextual analysis of dignity as an organizing principle underpinning rape law, which I term “sexual dignity.” Based on sexual violence theory, I trace the “democratization” of sexual dignity over time, as dignity and attendant rights of autonomy and equality have gradually extended from man to the (qualified) woman to women as a group, and identify an emerging contemporary feminist consensus on the meaning of sexual dignity. This framework is then applied to a critical review of how judges across common law jurisdictions understand and use dignity in decisions on rape. The caselaw of sexual dignity illustrates that dignity is a usefully capacious concept for exploring and condemning the multiplicity of rape’s harms and wrongs. However, uncritical engagement with sexual dignity can be harmful, with implications both for rape law and for the regulation of sexual behaviour generally. As such, I argue that robust and reflective engagement with sexual dignity is both necessary and productive.

"[Flor the sake of the noble men and women who have stood by me through all revilings... and for his [sake] who lost his life in my behalf, I wish to tell the whole story of my life," Abby Sage Richardson wrote in the New York Daily Tribune on May 11, 1870. "When I was once advised to do so and hesitated," Abby explained, "a good woman said to me, 'Do not be afraid to tell your story once to all the world. Tell it once exactly as you would tell it to your Maker, and then keep silence forever after.' Abby listened to the woman's advice, penning a statement that spanned more than eight columns in the newspaper, six of which filled the entire front page. Abby's story began with her marriage to Daniel McFarland in 1857. Nearly twice her age, McFarland dazzled her with boasts of a flourishing law practice and brilliant political prospects, only to reveal a few weeks into their honeymoon that he had long given up the practice of law in favor of an unsuccessful career speculating in land. Less than three months after their wedding, McFarland pawned Abby's jewelry to pay their bills and sent Abby to live with her father in New Hampshire.

The simultaneous expansion of employer-sponsored "fringe benefits" and of government welfare programs in the post-World War II period created what might be termed a "public-private welfare state" in the United States. These developments were continuous with the public-private partnership that had characterized American welfare provision since the nineteenth century. But the increased range and scope of benefits, both public and private, in the postwar period made them an intrinsic part of Americans' way of life and their sense of well-being-that is, of their social citizenship. Feminist political theorists often point out that social citizenship is highly inflected by gender; citizens usually gain entitlements and benefits based on sex or on types of status that are gender-related, such as employment, military service, and motherhood. This paper seeks to explore how differences in social citizenship play out in a public-private welfare state, where benefits are predicated, at least in part, upon private employment. I do this by analyzing the treatment of motherhood (the benefits accruing to women as mothers) in such a dual state during its formative period, using the provision of childcare as a marker of women's status and entitlements within the public and private spheres. In modem industrial societies, childcare is an essential element of social citizenship for women, for it allows them to participate in the labor force on an equal footing with men. (I should note that it is a necessary but not sufficient condition for economic gender equality; equal access to education and training, non-discriminatory hiring and employment conditions, and wage equity are also essential.) Thus this article will examine and compare childcare provisions in the public and private sectors of the postwar American welfare state.

I saw the woman's eye first, even before the breast, which is the focal point for many observers. She stands almost squarely to the viewer's gaze in the New York Times Magazine, only partly contained by the page. The top of her tilted head is lost from the frame as well as the body beneath the crotch. Her hands open a dark jacket, revealing the middle half of the chest above a belt with a shining metal buckle - CK in a circle. The right breast bears a round dark mark. The model's left eye has been blackened, probably both by makeup and shadow. While the breast mark is ambiguous, for me it signified a wound. For all these reasons, the ad for Calvin Klein belts first troubled, then offended me. It seemed to suggest that one pleasure of owning the striking belt would be to strike a woman with it. I tore the page out, meaning to object. I rarely notice fashion or advertising, but I believe some boundaries are breached at a society's peril. By seeming to tolerate the battering of women or the sexualization of violence, we damage our culture and countless individuals. I thought the Times, a cultural bastion, had crossed a dangerous line. I might not have written, though, except for a front page story in the Times three days later, describing the aftermath in Togo of Fauziya Kassindja's flight to avoid genital mutilation. The story recounts the exile and homelessness Ms. Kassindja's mother endured as a result of aiding the escape, which led her eventually to apologize to the patriarch who ordered her daughter's marriage and mutilation. The contrast between the Times' treatment of women in its news coverage and advertising was too great to ignore.

In 1956 Harry Holt was in Korea tenaciously working to save the lives of Korean children. Children who were abandoned. Orphans. Many of them were of mixed race. One day an orphanage director from In Chon called Mr. Holt. "I have more babies than I have beds. Can you help me?" Mr. Holt replied, "I can take five." He drove to In Chon to bring the five children back with him to Seoul. One of the children Mr. Holt took back with him to his orphanage was a little girl about four years old. That little girl was Hong Soon Keum, she became Susan Gourley, and today I am Susan Cox. When I first arrived at the orphanage I would wake up in the night from bad dreams. It was Mr. Holt who personally came in and comforted me. He rocked me, sang songs to me, and when I wasn't frightened anymore, he took me into the kitchen and made us jelly sandwiches. He was my "grandfather," even before I had a mother and father of my own. I left Korea for my new life on October 9, 1956. I remember little about that trip. I do remember looking out a small round window, sitting next to a woman I could not understand, and feeling very, very scared. I was the 167th child to be adopted from Korea. More than 60,000 Korean children in the last forty years have made the same journey. That trip across the ocean is much more than a journey of several thousand miles. For those of us who have been adopted, it is the birth into our family.

In these two works, Susan Harris gives voice to the realities of her experiences as a transracial adoptee and the experiences of other persons of color adopted into white families. "Can You Imagine?" is a narrative of stories pieced together and drawn from the stories of transracial adoptees whom Harris has met, counseled, and known. It unmasks the unique complexities of race and racism, so often ignored, in the lives of transracial adoptees, and challenges adoptive families and adoption professionals to honestly confront the role of race in the adoption process. In "Come Celebrate My First Birthday," Harris discusses the painful and joyous revelations of her search for information regarding the first fourteen months of her life-when her "baby-self' spent this "holding period" in foster care. During this search for her baby-self, Harris discovers that her baby-self was very likely the victim of some of the many types of racial assault depicted in "Can You Imagine?" In her telling of her story, Harris points out the need for increased attention to adoptive searches which target the holding period, an area of exploration crucial to an adoptee's understanding of herself.