December 10-12, 2004

Gender and Legal Education in India

The Women and International Law Program and the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law convened a meeting of the Gender and Law Association in Bangalore, India in December 2004.  The meeting was one component of the Gender and Legal Education in India Project took place at the National Law School of India University in Bangalore from December 10-12, 2004. 

Profs. Brenda Smith and Muneer Ahmad, and Hadar Harris, Executive Director of the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law and April Fehling, Women and International Law Program Coordinator, traveled to India for the meeting. While in Bangalore, members of the nascent Gender and Law Association (GALA), a group of professors and practitioners from law schools, universities, and non-governmental organizations throughout India collaboratively created a Feminist Jurisprudence course.  Participants piloted the syllabus in their institutions in the following months. GALA also developed proposals for panels on gender and legal education for the annual meeting of the Indian Association of Women’s Studies, held in Goa, India in May 2005.

WCL faculty and staff presented lectures to students and faculty at the National Law School and the University of Delhi Law Faculty.  Topics presented included:

• Professor Brenda Smith: Legal Ethics;

• Professor Muneer Ahmad: Clinical Methodology, Post 9/11 Policy in the United States;
• Hadar Harris, Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law: Anti-Terrorism Policy Globally

Funded by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, US State Department of State, this meeting was the second phase of a project which promotes gender mainstreaming in law reform and legal education in India. The project also supports the development of the Gender and Law Association of India (GALA), a burgeoning Indian network committed to mainstreaming gender and women’s rights into legal education, which WCL helped to establish in June 2003.  The project is a joint project of the Women and International Law Program and the Center for Human Right and Humanitarian Law, with the active involvement and guidance of Prof. Ann Shalleck.

May 27-30, 2004

Gender and Legal Education Collaborative Research Network

The Women and International Law Program hosted the fifth consecutive Gender and Legal Education Collaborative Research Network (CRN) at the Law and Society Annual Meeting in Chicago in May. As the CRN sponsor, the Women and International Law Program provides an ongoing forum for feminist legal educators from the United States and around the world to share strategies for mainstreaming gender into legal education, culminating in a roundtable discussion at the Law and Society Annual Meeting. This year’s roundtable included professors from Temple University, Southern Methodist University, University of Notre Dame de Namur, Ecole Normale Superieure de Cachan (France), and WCL.  Program Coordinator April Fehling chaired the panel and Professor Pamela Bridgewater participated.  Participants explored techniques and pedagogical strategies for introducing feminist legal theory into law school courses and helping students understand gender, class, and racial stereotypes, and explored how these stereotypes influence classroom interaction.

April 1-2, 2004

IP/Gender:  The Unmapped Connections

Expanding feminist inquiry into new areas, the Women and the Law Program joined with WCL’s Program on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest in April 2004 to stimulate gender analysis of intellectual property law and practice through an intensive two day working conference of scholars from multiple disciplines entitled IP/Gender: The Unmapped Connections.  Based on initial conceptual abstracts of proposed or ongoing work, the working meeting brought together noted scholars of gender and/or intellectual property to address a series of questions including the reasons for mapping the connections between IP and gender, the major work shaping the participants’ approach to the connections, the participants’ theoretical approaches to their projects, the “hot spots” for gender questions within intellectual property controversies and the identification of areas for future inquiry.  Faculty members Peter Jaszi, Christine Haight Farley, Victoria Phillips and Ann Shalleck, joined by Visiting Professor Ann Bartow, a leader in this new area of study, planned the program and facilitated the discussion.  In addition to the working meeting, the Women and the Law Program and the Program on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest sponsored a public forum during which the participants in the working meeting either presented or commented upon a  proposed paper.  The issues addressed included the impact on intellectual property law and policy of imbalances in wealth, cultural access, political power and social control; creative production and gender; the effects of stereotyping and the feminization and masculinization of participant roles in intellectual property; the gendered development of IP doctrine; and feminist jurisprudential insights about intellectual property law.

March 19, 2004

The Feminism and Legal Theory Project:  Celebrating 20 Years of Feminist Pedagogy, Praxis, and Prisms

The Women and the Law Program sponsored in March 2004, in conjunction with the WCL Journal of Gender, Social Policy & Law and the Women’s Law Association, a daylong Founders’ event, “The Feminism and Legal Theory Project: Celebrating 20 Years of Feminist Pedagogy, Praxis and Prisms.” The program brought together feminist scholars, teachers, students, activists and practitioners to reflect on how feminist institutions within the legal academy, in particular the Feminism and Legal Theory Project founded and nurtured for more than 20 years by Professor Martha Fineman, have influenced the development of feminist legal thought and the work of feminist legal scholars. The event had many components, including panels, a keynote address by Professor Patricia Williams, a noted feminist scholar, essayist, and teacher, a book signing by Fineman of her new work The Autonomy Myth: The Theory of Dependency, a student essay contest, and a production of “The Vagina Monologues.” The panels explored the founding principles of feminist legal theory, the successes and challenges that feminist legal theory has faced during its evolution, the treatment of concepts of identity and autonomy within feminist legal theory, and emerging directions in feminist theory. Led by Professor Pamela Bridgewater, faculty members Darren Hutchinson, Nancy Polikoff, Leti Volpp, Robert Dinerstein, Ann Shalleck, Teemu Ruskola, and Margaret Johnson and Visiting Professor Mary Clark all contributed in making this event a success. The Journal of Gender, Social Policy and the Law published several of the papers from the panels, as well as a tribute to Fineman and the Feminism and Legal Theory Project, in a symposium issue of the law review.