Author Archive for jaya-ramji-nogales
An Anecdotal Survey on the Mommyprof Track
posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales
A couple of weeks ago, I invited readers to participate in a survey on maternity leave policies at various law schools. This effort was aimed at provoking open dialogue on the topic rather than providing a scientifically defensible sample or survey of law school practices (a worthy endeavor but not one that this mommyprof can fit into her schedule!). I received 22 responses to the survey, which could include some overlap from the same law school, so the results are not even close to representative of the 193 ABA-accredited law schools in the U.S. Nonetheless, I think the findings are interesting.
It was striking that all but one of the respondents said that their law school did not expect women to wait until tenure to have children. The other respondent was not sure how her school would view pre-tenure childbearing, but worried that a leave might attract stigma from male colleagues. On the brighter side, one commenter noted that at her school, all of the junior women in relationships had children before tenure in recent years. While I know from conversations with friends at other law schools that this norm is not universal, it’s nice to see that it may be more widespread than I had expected.
October 14, 2009 at 3:03 pm
Posted in: Feminism and Gender, Law School (Teaching)
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The Mommyprof Track
posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales
In many ways, law teaching is an ideal job for ambitious women who value a balance between work and family. Many (though by no means all) law schools have generous maternity leaves — a semester paid, and if you can time your baby at the beginning of the calendar year or the end of the academic year, you can tack on a summer and win nine months at home with your newborn. Once you’re back to teaching full time, the flexible schedule makes it possible to spend quality time with children during the hours they are available and to get your work done after the little ones have gone to bed. And, at least in an ideal world, your colleagues view you as a lifetime investment rather than a disposable worker, so they will be flexible and supportive at this particularly challenging stage of your life.
That has been my experience and that of several of my friends, but I have heard significantly more negative stories from other women, ranging from law schools that refuse to provide more than six weeks paid leave to schools that expect female professors to wait until they have tenure to bear children. I’ve heard of other schools that require women to “make up” the classes they miss while on leave; I can only imagine what a 2-2 or 2-3 teaching load while juggling a toddler (or nursing!) does to one’s research agenda. And of course, for all of us, there’s no “part-time” option as a law professor; while working moms in many other fields can opt to work only two or three days a week for less pay, there’s no “mommy track” to tenure. So while law prof moms often have the flexibility to work from home two or three days a week, those days must be productive and can’t be spent playing with little ones. (To be sure, that’s just fine with many of us, including yours truly, but may not be ideal for all law prof moms.) Read the rest of this post »
September 30, 2009 at 4:03 pm
Tags: gender
Posted in: Feminism and Gender, Law School (Teaching)
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Teaching Sexual Violence
posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales
I’m into week two of Evidence, which is one of my favorite classes to teach — full of vivid examples and fun hypotheticals, which make it relatively easy to keep students engaged. Each year, however, I hit the tricky problem of how to deal with the sections of the course that cover crimes of sexual violence while maintaining the pedagogical goals of maximizing participation in class discussion and encouraging thorough and comprehensive study habits. There are two main parts to this question — how to approach cold-call questioning in this area of the course and how to test these issues. I’m sure others who teach evidence, criminal law, international criminal law, and similar courses have faced these problems, and I’m eager to hear how you’ve addressed them. Read the rest of this post »
September 4, 2009 at 12:06 pm
Posted in: Criminal Law, Evidence Law, Feminism and Gender
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Re-reading Iqbal (a new take on the 12(b)(6) wars)
posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales
My friend and law school classmate Adam Steinman tempted the civ pro geek in me with his thoughtful and thorough discussion of the recent Iqbal decision, which has caused more excitement in proceduralist circles than I’ve seen in quite some time! His thoughts should prove most helpful to those of you figuring out how to teach the case in your Civil Procedure class this fall . . .
Thanks to the folks at Concurring Opinions for giving me the opportunity to share some thoughts on last Term’s decision in Ashcroft v. Iqbal, which dismissed a civil-rights complaint filed against John Ashcroft and Robert Mueller by Arab Muslim men detained in the weeks following 9/11. I realize my comments are glacially slow-in-coming by blogosphere standards (Iqbal came down over two whole months ago). But it’s been back in the news lately, including Adam Liptak’s NYT article and Senator Specter’s introduction of the Notice Pleading Restoration Act (which would legislatively overrule Iqbal, although even Iqbal’s critics concede that the bill may have little chance of becoming law).
Iqbal has been of immense interest to litigators and civil-procedure scholars, because it embraces the 2007 decision in Bell Atlantic v. Twombly as reflecting the generally applicable pleading standard in federal court. Twombly had dismissed an antitrust conspiracy claim for lacking sufficient “factual enhancement” to make it “plausible.” Twombly was quite controversial in its own right, but some had speculated it might be narrowly confined to complex antitrust cases.
The response to Iqbal reveals a sharp divide between those who “are lovin’ Iqbal” (in the words of a recent WSJ headline) and those who are, well, not lovin’ Iqbal. But there has been very little disagreement about how to read Iqbal—everyone seems to agree that Iqbal imposes significant new obstacles on plaintiffs at the pleadings phase and, thereby, discards the liberal, notice-pleading paradigm that most lawyers, judges, and law professors alive today learned in law school. The focus of the debate has been whether this result is proper or desirable. I want to challenge the premise that this is the correct reading of Iqbal. In fact, if read carefully, Iqbal can be fully reconciled with the pre-Twombly view of pleading. (If readers are interested, this argument is explored in more detail in my article “The Pleading Problem“, which is available on SSRN.)
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August 4, 2009 at 8:28 am
Posted in: Civil Procedure
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Measuring Gender Discrimination
posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales
I’m normally a fan of the statistical reports produced by the OECD, so was surprised to find myself in disagreement with the methodology of their recently-created Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI). The idea behind SIGI is a good one — to get at the root of gender discrimination by examining traditions and social norms that impede women’s empowerment. To this end, SIGI assesses twelve variables in 102 non-OECD countries and then ranks these countries based on their “performance in social institutions.” The selection and evaluation problems with their study highlight the difficulty of empirically measuring and ranking intangible phenomena such as social norms.
May 22, 2009 at 7:38 am
Posted in: Empirical Analysis of Law, Feminism and Gender
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Judging Motherhood
posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales
Sarah Waldeck’s recent post on the consequentialist rationale for publicizing breast-feeding’s benefits for mothers was right on the mark; breast-feeding can be challenging in the best of circumstances, so those who believe that “breast is best” should appeal to women’s self-interest rather than or as well as their noble sense of self-sacrifice. In addition to the argument she lays out, there’s also expressivist value in changing the way we speak about, and thus perceive, breast-feeding.
The discourse of breast-feeding has long been about everything but the mother; women who wanted to breast-feed were once told that they shouldn’t do so because formula was better for their child, now mothers are told that they must breast-feed because of all of the benefits for their child — higher IQ, less risk of obesity, diabetes, ear infections — you name it. Inundated by these questionable claims during my pre-natal classes, I wondered how studies could possibly control for factors such as the socio-economic background of the mother. It turns out they can’t, as Hanna Rosin explained in The Atlantic last month (in an article Sarah posted on here). As Toto pulls open the curtain on its lack of empirical grounding, the breastfeeding orthodoxy is revealed as a stunningly paternalistic judgment on motherhood and women’s agency.
May 8, 2009 at 1:03 pm
Posted in: Feminism and Gender
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What’s Wrong with Teen Sexting?
posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales
The teen pastime of “sexting” has taken a serious tangle with the law of late in our fair state of Pennsylvania. For those who haven’t heard of the phenomenon, “sexting” is the practice of sending nude or semi-nude pictures of oneself (or of one’s closest friends or enemies) via cell phone to a love interest, a friend, or as many classmates as possible. A recent study by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy found that 20% of teens surveyed had electronically sent or posted online nude or semi-nude photos or videos of themselves — so this appears to be a sizeable and quite serious problem. Even worse is the jaw-dropping response from local law enforcement.
In one example, last fall, school officials from the Tunkhannock School District in Wyoming County, Pennsylvania, seized several cell phones from high school students. The officials searched the phones and discovered that male students had been using them to trade photos of semi-nude and nude female students. The local district attorney threatened to charge three girls — two photographed in white bras and one with a towel covering her from the waist down — with child pornography or open lewdness unless they agreed to participate in probation in the form of a five-week re-education program. He did not threaten to bring charges against any of the boys trading photographs on their cell phones. The concerns raised by this approach abound: privacy, free speech, proportional punishment (if found guilty of child pornography, the teens would be subject to Megan’s Laws disclosure requirements and other sex offender laws), and, of most interest to yours truly, the gendered nature of this particular bit of legal discourse.
March 30, 2009 at 9:45 pm
Posted in: Feminism and Gender
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Bring on the Deans!
posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales
With Yale Law Dean Harold Koh’s nomination as State Department Legal Adviser, the Obama administration has tapped the deans of the country’s top two law schools, and is populated by numerous law professors, including, of course, the president himself. There’s nothing new in that observation, but it was still of interest to a European law professor who was visiting Temple Law School yesterday. In his country, there’s no such intermingling between academia and government — the executive bureaucracy remains in place regardless of electoral outcomes; a new political party in power leads to change at the very top but otherwise few shifts occur. Though there may be some efficiency benefits to a permanent bureaucracy, I can’t say that I see much more to recommend it, and nor could our guest. While permanent executive officers would develop significant expertise in the subject area relevant to their post, I can’t imagine that luminaries such as Koh and Kagan, with not only deep knowledge but also serious candle-power, would migrate in large numbers to such positions. A permanent bureaucracy might result in increased ideological stability, without the migration between the left and the right that we see in the U.S., but I query whether this outcome is possible (can permanency eliminate political inclinations or does it simply entrench them?) or even desirable. At least in our system of government, the executive branch should be responsive to the will of the people, and the cyclical shifts in ideological inclinations help to moderate extreme influences on both sides of the political spectrum. As long as excellence and experience, rather than ideology, are the central rationales for selection of political appointees, these swings should improve governance in the long run, by bringing in fresh ideas and new perspectives every four to eight years. So bring on the deans, I say — our government will be a richer place for it.
March 25, 2009 at 3:06 pm
Posted in: International & Comparative Law
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The Supremes Speak
posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales
This week, the Supreme Court took the rare step of deciding an asylum case, Negusie v. Holder, which examines the availability of a duress exception to the persecutor bar. The Court has decided very few asylum cases in its history, and when it does so, the result is often messy. The Negusie decision is no exception– while Justice Kennedy commands a majority of six, the proliferation of concurrences and dissents doesn’t inspire confidence in the unity of the court. It does, however, make for a fun read for immigration law junkies as well as for aficionados of administrative law and moral philosophers.
First, for the admin law types, this case continues and amplifies recent tussles in the immigration field over who has the authority to interpret the Immigration and Nationality Act — the federal courts or the Board of Immigration Appeals (the administrative entity charged with reviewing immigration court decisions and establishing national uniformity in immigration law). Kennedy’s majority opinion gives some deference to the administrative agency (deference that, in my opinion, is misplaced, given the dysfunctional nature of the Board, which I’ve discussed in more detail here), finding that while the Board misapplied precedent in interpreting the statute to preclude a duress exception to the persecutor bar, it should be allowed to reinterpret the statute free from this error. But as Scalia notes in his concurrence, the tone of the opinion indicates that Kennedy thinks the Board should come down in favor of a duress exception. Scalia disagrees with this approach, arguing that the Board “deserve[s] to be told clearly whether we are serious about allowing them to exercise . . . discretion, or are rather firing a warning shot across the bow.”
Stevens and Breyer, on the other hand, think the warning shot isn’t clear enough, finding that the question of whether the duress exception exists is one for the courts, and that the role of the administrative agency should be to determine how to apply the standard to be used in deciding whether participation in persecution was voluntary or coerced. Thomas doesn’t explicitly address whether the authority to interpret this provision of the statute should lie with the courts or the administrative agency; he thinks that the Board’s underlying decision was correct because the language of the statute doesn’t contain a duress exception.
March 5, 2009 at 9:30 pm
Posted in: Immigration
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Layoffs, Layoffs Everywhere
posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales
Though news of law firm layoffs, not to mention offer rescission and complete dissolution, has been brewing for some time now, government and non-profit jobs, though harder to come by, have seemed relatively more secure. Not so, as I learned from a former colleague at the ACLU last month, where Madoff-related investments forced layoffs of ten percent of the workforce, including several staff attorneys. As a former staff attorney at the ACLU, those positions appeared to be some of the most secure in the legal profession — yours to keep for as many years as you wanted, until poof! they disappeared. And just last week, a former student of mine reported that the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office rescinded the thirteen offers it made this year (in contrast to the 25 it extends in a normal year) to third-year law students. As another student on the public interest job hunt noted today, “I thought that was why I became a professional!” Indeed — that was the deal we all signed up for; we’d put our noses to the books for three long years, incurring piles of debt, but we’d still have jobs in an economic downturn. Wouldn’t we? While job losses may be more severe outside the legal profession, a law degree is certainly no panacea, and some may begin to wonder exactly what is the value added from three years of expensive education. At the moment, I’m not sure I have an answer for my talented and hardworking students struggling to find permanent employment after graduation.
February 23, 2009 at 9:31 pm
Posted in: Law Talk
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Empiricizing Transitional Justice
posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales
The Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley released this month “a population-based survey on attitudes about social reconciliation and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia” entitled So We Will Never Forget. Of the several surveys of the Cambodian public on accountability for the Khmer Rouge that have been completed in the past decade (including one by yours truly), this is the most scientifically planned and executed, with rigorous methodology and a wide sampling of the Cambodian population.
There’s much of interest in this report for those participating in accountability efforts. First, the report underscores the need for a serious public education effort around the tribunal. Of the respondents who did not live under the Khmer Rouge regime, 81% described their knowledge of that period as poor or very poor. Given that 68% of Cambodia’s population has been born since the Khmer Rouge left power, that’s a very concerning statistic. Moreover, 39% of those surveyed had no knowledge of the Extraordinary Chambers and 46% had only limited knowledge. The court and non-governmental organizations have a great deal of headway to make in educating the Cambodian public about the ECCC and the Khmer Rouge era.
January 30, 2009 at 8:30 am
Posted in: International & Comparative Law
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Courting Genocide?
posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales
This week, Peter Spiro and I hosted Jide Nzelibe at Temple’s International Law Colloquium. Jide presented his work-in-progress, Courting Genocide: The Unintended Effects of Humanitarian Intervention, on which Kristen Boon provided commentary. While I had several smaller quibbles and a few larger criticisms of the paper, it moves the scholarship on humanitarian intervention a step forward, as Kristen noted, by examining the motivations of all of the actors involved and suggesting that the effects of humanitarian intervention may not always be benign. Jide’s basic thesis is as follows:
because humanitarian interventions tend to increase the chance that rebel or victim group leaders are going to achieve their preferred political objectives, such leaders might have an incentive to engage in the kinds of provocative actions that make atrocities against their followers more likely in the first place
January 23, 2009 at 7:00 am
Posted in: International & Comparative Law
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A Role for Law?
posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales
Lisa Belkin has a great article in this week’s NY Times Magazine about the need to redefine “experience” more broadly in order to ensure gender equity in career advancement. Using Caroline Kennedy’s non-traditional career path as an example, Belkin explains that women who step out of the workplace for several years in order to parent full-time are often viewed as lacking relevant and necessary experience to return to their prior careers or take up a new career. Belkin posits that we should instead view such women as having “a range of experiences, many shaped by motherhood.” She continues, “The only way work will become more flexible for everyone, for all of us, is if the untraditional begins to count.”
Having long subscribed to the view that we will see complete gender equity in the workplace only when working fathers take an equal role in parenting, which would require them to avail themselves of the same parental leaves and difficult career decisions that working mothers face, I find Belkin’s argument an interesting route to the same end. Rather than taking the larger step of ensuring that everyone who chooses to parent, male or female, shares equally in the career impact of that decision, Belkin’s approach takes baby steps towards that goal by trying minimize the career impact for those who temporarily step out of the workplace to parent. While there are promises and pitfalls to each approach, I’m more interested today in thinking about whether law can play a role in operationalizing these strategies.
January 6, 2009 at 11:28 am
Posted in: Feminism and Gender
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The Economy and Immigration
posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales
Following up on Frank’s excellent post on outward manifestations of the financial crisis, here are a couple of less obvious ways that the meltdown might affect immigrants. First, the counterintuitive: immigrants may end up with more money in their pockets. Second, the ugly: we may see an increase in hate crimes against immigrants.
The obvious answer to the question of how the economy will impact immigration is that it will decrease border crossings –fewer jobs across the board and particularly less disposable income in the hands of those who pay immigrants to work in their homes will mean less demand for labor. Combined with harsh workplace raids and tightening borders, we’d expect the financial crisis to result in a decrease in immigration. While that was the trend at the beginning of the meltdown, the recent strength of the dollar may end up reversing this expected outcome. As AP reports today, remittances to Mexico in October increased by 13% over October 2007, as a strengthened dollar bought more weakened pesos. Dilip Ratha of the World Bank predicts that this phenomenon might actually lead to an increase in immigration to the U.S., especially as inflation and unemployment climb in Mexico.
Particularly with an increase in immigration, the ugly side of the economic crisis may be an increase in hate crimes against immigrants. The FBI reports that hate crimes against Latinos have increased dramatically — by 40 percent — from 2003 to 2007 (while the Latino population grew by only 16 percent). Call it the “Lou Dobbs” effect; as xenophobic vitriol and resulting anti-immigrant sentiment has increased, so has violence against immigrants or those who appear to be immigrants. Add that to an economy in free-fall, and the result may be highly combustible. As we saw in Long Island last month and Pennsylvania earlier this year, horrifying pastimes such as “beaner hopping” may proliferate as hate-mongering politicians and journalists scapegoat immigrants for job losses and other woes. Vigilant enforcement of hate crime statutes may alleviate some of the simmering tensions, but effective change will require more flattering portraits of immigrants in the popular media and public eye.
December 1, 2008 at 4:50 pm
Posted in: Immigration
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What, Me, Politically Irrelevant?
posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales
Wait a minute, what’s that “whhhsshhht” sound I hear? No, it’s not the economy deflating, silly; it’s a law professor’s ego coming back down to earth. The NY Times reports today that “[t]hree sets of researchers recently concluded that professors have virtually no impact on the political views and ideology of their students.” Apparently the American Enterprise Institute’s fear of the “liberal thugocracy” of academia is overblown; parents and family are a much better predictor of an individual’s political predilections. Indeed, one study author goes on to assert that it’s difficult to change the political views of anyone over fifteen years of age. So much for inspiring social justice crusaders through Civil Procedure I or public defenders through Evidence. I’ll just crawl back into my little cave and watch some more YouTube videos mocking Sarah Palin.
Seriously, while I would hope that most law professors would agree that it’s not our mission or even our intention to change the political views of our students, I was surprised that college professors didn’t have more influence over their students’ ideology. Perhaps it’s because I attended that bastion of left-wing thuggery, UC Berkeley, but I suspect that my college professors had far more influence over my understanding of the world and thereby my political views than anyone before or after, including my parents and my law school professors. Certainly, I chose a particularly liberal school because of my pre-existing political leanings, but I do think there’s something to the idea that the person who provides the framework through which one views the world has a tremendous influence over one’s ideology, and that college professors are the most likely candidates to provide such frames — both because creating analytic frames is what they do for a living and because college students’ minds are relatively spongy and thus open to such frames. Were others as surprised by the outcomes of these studies as I was?
November 3, 2008 at 4:01 pm
Posted in: Law School (Teaching)
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Proposition 8’s Moral Dilemma
posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales
Most readers are likely familiar with California’s Proposition 8 — a ballot initiative to eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry by amending California’s state constitution (and thus overriding the California Supreme Court’s In re Marriage Cases decision this spring that found a right to same-sex marriage under the California constitution). In short, a “yes” vote on Proposition 8 ends gay marriage in California; a “no” vote protects the right to gay marriage.
Imagine that you are participating in a phone bank placing calls to encourage Californians to vote against Proposition 8 (in other words, you favor gay marriage). You place a call, and the voter on the other end tells you that she is opposed to same sex marriage and that’s why she’s voting no on Proposition 8. Your response? Do you say “Thanks for your time — make sure you get to the polls!” or do you correct her error, and explain that a no vote on Proposition 8 is actually a vote in favor of gay marriage?
After a friend recounted this real-life scenario this weekend, we presented the question to several (opposite sex) couples, and found that a fault line ran straight down the middle of each pair — most frequently (but not always), the women thought that there was no need to correct this voter’s error. There were two arguments made on this front; first, that there’s no obligation on the caller’s part to remedy the voter’s misperception, which was not, after all, created by the caller. Second, getting into the means-ends debate, the greater moral good of allowing gay marriage justifies the perhaps less moral stance of allowing this confused individual to vote against her true preferences. On the other side, most (but not all!) of the men argued that the ends don’t justify the means, and that the caller had a moral obligation to correct the voter’s misconception of Proposition 8. Their argument went something like this — you’re out canvassing for Obama on election day and someone you stop on the street says, “I’m not interested because I’m heading into that voting booth right now to vote for McCain!” If this voter is actually walking into the wrong polling place (assume, for argument’s sake, that you know where they should be voting) and will not be allowed to vote, are you justified in failing to correct their error? I omit the obvious and interesting counter-arguments here, but am intrigued to hear how readers in the caller’s shoes would have responded.
October 27, 2008 at 11:50 am
Posted in: Current Events
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Of International Crimes and Memory Sticks
posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales
Perhaps my favorite news story of late (apart from the Somali pirates and their spokesperson) is the Colombian government’s seizure of a memory stick belonging to the rebel group FARC, containing the names, identities, aliases, and even some photos of over 9,000 guerrillas. One can almost imagine the guerrilla-in-chief stomping around muttering to himself, “I KNOW I had that memory stick around here somewhere.” And you felt bad about that memory stick you lost! In all seriousness, the FARC is notorious for its human rights abuses, and its entry into the digital age may benefit not only the group itself.
While genocidaires and other perpetrators of grave crimes often keep painstaking records of their crimes, it has been in the past an enormous task to track down, authenticate, and preserve this documentary record. In just one example, the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) has worked for over a decade to collect and store documentary evidence of the crimes of the Khmer Rouge, whose surviving leaders are soon to be tried before the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). I flew all the way to Cambodia last summer to meet with ECCC officials on behalf of the DC-Cam to discuss document transfer, storage, and preservation protocols. Imagine if we could have just handed over a memory stick full of information to the court! What if Pol Pot had a laptop we could get our hands on? The possibilities are endless in the digital age; the ease with which we can now transfer information may be helpful not only for perpetrators but also for prosecutors of international crimes.
October 3, 2008 at 7:00 am
Posted in: Evidence Law, International & Comparative Law
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Fear Not the Inadvertent Waiver
posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales
For those junior law firm serfs toiling away in the dungeons of document discovery drudgery, some good news is coming your way. Apart from thanking your lucky stars that you chose to be a lawyer rather than an investment banker, you can be happy about the recent promulgation of Federal Rule of Evidence 502. This new rule ensures that the unintentional disclosure of a privileged document does not result in automatic waiver of the attorney-client and work product privileges on all documents concerning the same subject matter. Rather than the current standard that allows for no human error, under the new rule, as long as you take “reasonable steps” to prevent disclosure and to rectify the error once discovered, the privilege will not be waived on related documents. Moreover, the rule applies not only to proceedings in federal court, but also to disclosures made to a “federal office or agency” — thus encouraging corporations to comply with federal investigations without needing to worry about broad waiver of privileges.
September 30, 2008 at 3:44 pm
Posted in: Evidence Law
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Barack Obama, meet . . . Barack Obama
posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales
After two weeks of watching our economy implode, taking your retirement plan, your bonus, and the value of your home down the toilet, you people need a little comic relief. That’s what I’m here for. For those who haven’t been listening closely to their NPR, it turns out that there are at least eight Barack Obamas running for election in Brazil this year. Yes, you heard that right. Under Brazilian law, it turns out, candidates are allowed to run for office under any name, as long as it’s not offensive. So eight aspiring politicos, including a former air conditioner salesman and a man claiming a resemblance to Obama (but not actually bearing one), have officially changed their names in hope that it will bring them victory in October’s municipal elections. According to a very fun but very unscientific poll by The Economist, Brazilian voters would hand victory to Obama over McCain, and one re-named candidate saw his popularity rise (from third place to a tie for first) after changing his name. What’s that you were saying about lipstick on a pig?
September 25, 2008 at 4:43 pm
Posted in: Humor
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Sharia Courts in the UK
posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales
According to this week’s Sunday Times, the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal has set up five Sharia courts throughout the United Kingdom. These courts hear solely civil cases, including divorce, domestic violence, and inheritance cases. The Sharia courts have been classified as arbitration tribunals under the same provision of the 1996 Arbitration Act used by Jewish Beth Din courts, which have resolved civil cases in Britain for over 100 years. As long as both parties in the dispute agree to give it the power to rule on their case, a decision of an arbitration tribunal is legally binding and enforceable through British county courts or the High Court.
While Muslim women who choose to use these Sharia courts for family law disputes are surely capable adults entitled to make their own decisions, the track record of the courts on women’s rights thus far is concerning. For example, in a recent inheritance case, the court divided a man’s estate by giving twice as much to his two sons as it did to his three daughters. And in six recent domestic violence cases, the court ordered the husbands to take anger management classes and participate in mentoring with community elders; the women withdrew their complaints from the police, who stopped investigations.
Can these courts be reconciled with British and European laws protecting gender equality? Given that participation requires consent of both parties, it will be difficult to find a plaintiff to challenge the courts’ unequal treatment of women. Perhaps a more fruitful course is suggested by Zareen Roohi Ahmed, the chief executive of the British Muslim Forum, an umbrella organization for mosques in the UK. Noting that sharia courts in Britain are still poorly organised, she proposes that the government support professionalization of the courts, including “female involvement . . . on the decision-making panels . . . and a wider range of scholars and academics involved to put more thought into making the rules and regulations applicable to today’s society.” It’s a thorny problem, to be sure, but by engaging with these courts rather than shutting them down, the British government might, in the end, protect the rights of more women.
Cross-posted on IntLawGrrls
September 19, 2008 at 7:00 am
Posted in: Uncategorized
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