Gender Equality Law

This survey course provides an overview of the law concerning gender discrimination and gender equality. It will provide students with a foundation for understanding and evaluating how gender shapes and informs the law and how legal doctrine in a number of specific areas responds to problems of sex or gender discrimination. The course will address both the historical role of law in creating and maintaining forms of gender discrimination in basic social institutions and the efforts of activists, lawyers, and legal scholars to challenge such discrimination and secure equality through law. The course will introduce a variety of theoretical approaches to the study of gender and equality, as well as many substantive areas of law that implicate sex and gender. The course uses legal cases across a wide variety of subject matter areas in order to develop those theoretical frameworks, including constitutional law, employment discrimination law, family law, criminal law, education law, reproductive rights and justice, poverty law, and immigration. Those cases will include classic sex discrimination cases challenging the unequal treatment of women as well as newer cases challenging discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation as discrimination based on "sex." Through a series of "Putting Theory into Practice" problems, students will be able to test the application of such theoretical frameworks about gender and the law in numerous real-life situations, ranging from sports, the military, schools and campus life, television programming, assisted reproductive technology, parenting, the Affordable Care Act, and legal practice. Students will gain understanding of how the study of gender discrimination and equality enriches the study of law more generally. The course will also be a helpful building block for a variety of legal career paths. Student evaluation will be based on a final examination, short written responses to several "Putting Theory into Practice" problems, and class participation.