Daphna Hacker and Orna Cohen. “The Shelters in Israel for Survivors of Human Trafficking.” US Department of State (2012).
Shelters are an important part of the slim segment of the anti-trafficking industrial complex that can be deemed a human rights project. They present the opportunity to give genuine aid to victims. But what is genuine aid? A recent report to the U.S. State Department by law professor Daphna Hacker and social work professor Orna Cohen provides a rich account of how difficult it can be to answer that question in theory and in practice. Hacker and Cohen were commissioned to study the two...
Read MoreThe Politics of Injury: A Review of Robin West’s Caring for Justice by Janet Halley
From online journal Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left In Caring for Justice, Robin West argues that patriarchy operates by harming women on every conceivable dimension but especially in sexuality and reproduction; that women nevertheless gain access in both domains to an ethic of care that is redemptive for the world; and that bringing that ethic fully to bear as the sublime mode of justice will turn law to the remedy of harm and the promotion of care. West’s aim is to redeploy...
Read MoreSplit Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism by Janet Halley
Is it time to take a break from feminism? In this pathbreaking book, Janet Halley reassesses the place of feminism in the law and politics of sexuality. She argues that sexuality involves deeply contested and clashing realities and interests, and that feminism helps us understand only some of them. To see crucial dimensions of sexuality that feminism does not reveal–the interests of gays and lesbians to be sure, but also those of men, and of constituencies and values beyond the realm of...
Read MoreAfter Gender: Tools for Progressives in a Shift from Sexual Domination to the Economic Family by Janet Halley
When transnational law looks at sex, gender, and sexuality today, what does it identify as “the problem”? I think it is safe to say that the answer is “male domination, in, through, and as sexuality”—that is, the core idea of Catherine A. MacKinnon’s structuralist sexual-subordination feminism (“SSSF” for purposes of this Essay)—complexified somewhat by some cultural feminist inputs, such as the idea that women’s maternal role gives them access to redemptive strategies that...
Read MoreRape in Berlin: Reconsidering the Criminalisation of Rape in the International Law of Armed Conflict by Janet Halley
The specific criminalisation of sexual violence in war has made immense strides in recent years and feminists engaged with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Rwanda and the Rome Statute processes have proposed– and often won– a wide range of new legal rules and prosecutorial practices. This essay briefly describes some of these feminist achievements, in particular the reframing of rape and other sexual...
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