Last night, a group of current HLS women met with one of the original founders of the WLA, Cheryl Conner, of the HLS class of 1982. It was a night of great conversations, funny stories, and inspiring words.

The evening started with Cheryl talking a little bit about how and why the WLA started at HLS. It started modestly – women’s potlucks at Cheryl’s double-decker house on Broadway. “It was that simple,” she said, “cool women who wanted to get to know each other. I don’t think we had any officers or a board like you do today . . . I don’t even know if we had an agenda!” Cheryl noted that at that time, the school was only about sixteen percent women and therefore the women who were there, were a distinct minority and felt the need tor bonding, friendship, and specifically, a community. Another reason Cheryl mentioned for the beginning of the WLA was the women’s desire to unite over a shared experience and aligned interest. All the women in her class had grown up with a civil rights mentality and the increasing possibility of real equality but all the women had also grown up with numerous encounters with sexual harassment and sexual discrimination. This second reason for the founding of the WLA leads into the third – the fact, says Cheryl, that “all the pictures on the walls of HLS were white men, which drove us creepy!” At that time, she told us, Professors Elizabeth Bartholet and Martha Field were the only female professors at HLS and so the women wanted to organize to bring more women faculty to HLS. And, in what can be called one of the first official acts (and victories!) of the WLA, the women received permission to have conversations with faculty candidates before hiring. The first person Cheryl and the women met with? Dean Martha Minow. So, it was the need for community, the shared experience, aligned interests, and push for women’s equality that brought Cheryl and the co-founders together in 1982 – similar reasons, it should be noted, that the WLA continues to exist today.

Cheryl then began to tell us a little bit about her career, and specifically, how being a woman “great affected and shaped my career.” Before HLS, she received a B.A. in Economics from Mount Holyoke College and an M.A. in Applied Economics from U. of Michigan. After graduating, as a result of a need to collaborate and compromise with her spouse, she stayed in Boston and went to work at Goodwin Procter. After Goodwin, Sheryl went to the AG’s office to do utilities work, where she was “often the only girl in the room” and needed her husband to “coach her on what happened in the baseball and football games” so that she would be able to chat with the men. Her need for a more flexible schedule after having her first child, then led her to a counsel job at the Massachusetts Senate and a position on a gubernatorial campaign. After taking a break to have her second child, Cheryl then moved to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Boston, where she worked in a female-dominated civil division, with “powerful women in a powerful office,” that she said, “was so much fun.” Cheryl’s career then moved to a “teaching and reflecting” period. She taught law at Boston, Northeastern and Suffolk law schools, and was on the economic research faculty at the Kennedy School of Government. An important part of that time was also spent in meditation and reflection, where Cheryl became very interested in music and the American Revolution, and is currently working on a historical musical. She currently teaches New Business Forms and Governance at the MBA in Sustainability Program at Marlboro College in Vermont. She is also a social entrepreneur and founded two organizations: New Prospects Collaborative and Holistic Health Opportunities. Cheryl thus used her varied jobs and diverse career path as an example to us, encouraging us to be open to the same. In the end she said, “we compose lives . . . we’re more like a quilt” and we should embrace and use that.

Cheryl put out an invitation to us “to explore both the role of the lawyer and ourselves within our institutions . . . to fulfill our role as a lawyer and be a steward for the whole.” She believes that this is now the time of democracy in our of all organizations, and specifically, the time of female leadership in our institutions. Inspired by Cheryl’s career path and the call for female leadership, we all engaged in a discussion of women in power. What would that look like? What do females bring to the table? What about the problem of labeling? Of socialization? What does female leadership look like at HLS? What can we do here in our classes? Outside of our classes? We grabbled with these questions with Cheryl and each other last night. And as the WLA has done for close to thirty years, the WLA will continue to organize and unite to answer these and other questions critical to women at HLS.

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By Amy Sennett, WLA VP

On Monday, March 7th, the WLA hosted a panel discussion, “Feminist Perspectives on the 1L Curriculum.” Panelists included Professor Jon Hanson, Visiting Professor Katherine Porter, and Lecturer Diane Rosenfeld of HLS and Professor Jenny Wriggins of the University of Maine.

The diversity of attendees at the event proved that a feminist analysis of the 1L curriculum is relevant to more than just the women in a law school classroom. A broader conception of a feminist analysis can highlight the ways in which the law, on paper but more often in practice, contains prejudices against a number of minority groups.

Fortunately, scholars like Hanson and Wriggins have begun to explore the sources of this prejudice in their academic writings in the tort law field. Wriggins’ recently published book, “Measure of Injury: Race, Gender and Tort Law” with Professor Martha Chamallas, demonstrates how attitudes about race and gender run through the harms recognized – and left unrecognized – in the history of American tort law. During the panel, Wriggins offered an example of a reduced punishment given to a white man in Florida in the 1960s who had become enraged by the sight of a black man and white woman sitting together in the front of a commuter bus. Much of Hanson’s effort to bring a “situationist” perspective to his 1L torts class, including the incorporation of recent findings from the field of behavioral psychology, reflects a belief that standing in the shoes of a case protagonist can help to reveal the systemic biases in an area of law often crafted without the perspective of women and minorities.

Porter suggested that her fields, business law and property law, are relatively behind tort law in incorporating feminist perspectives. Again many of the statutes and case law in this field reflect antiquated notions of legal personhood, harkening back to a time when women could not hold property and American-Americans themselves were considered property. Porter noted that the most common image of women in property law casebooks remains that of the helpless widow or divorcee who is unfamiliar adrift in the male-dominated financial world. (Hanson added that in the traditional corporate law textbooks, the only female case protagonist from the case Francis v. United Jersey Bank is infamous for violating both the duty of care and the duty of loyalty.) Regrettably, Porter suggested that the lack of progress could be explained in part by the lack of female students and female participation even today in courses in these fields.

Rosenfeld, who focuses her teaching and clinical supervision specifically on domestic violence and gender crimes, addresses feminist issues in the law every day. She praised her legal training at the University of Wisconsin Law School for instilling in her an understanding of the difference between the way the law should work in principle and the way the law does work in fact, as well as a desire to close that gap. Rosenfeld concluded that still today the law doesn’t work well for women. Although she felt that the strong attendance of the lunch panel was a sign that law students and future lawyers were more aware of these issues, she pointed to decisions like U.S. v. Morrison, in which the Supreme Court struck down key portions of the 1994 Violence Against Women Act, as evidence of the legal reforms still necessary.

Normally keep quiet in class? Today let your voice be heard! Speak Up in Class Day is happening on Tuesday, March 8, 2011, in honor of International Women’s Day and Feminist Coming Out Day.

On November 22, the WLA held the Pedagogy of Rape event. Rape is examined in a number of law school courses. In this panel discussion, Professors Dershowitz, Halley, and Steiker shared how they approach teaching rape in their classrooms, and focused on how the topic presents pedagogical challenges that are different from those raised by other criminal law issues.

Listen to that discussion: http://www.law.harvard.edu/media/2010/11/22_wla.mov

By: Camille Dautricourt
25 February, 2011

The affluence and diversity of the audience attending this panel discussion, composed of men and women, veiled and unveiled, is revealing of the passions and deep societal debate triggered by the Islamic veil issue. The panel, moderated by Prof. Janet Haley, brilliantly illustrated how the highly contentious issue of veil regulation divides feminists among themselves in the absence of any common understanding of gender equality. The four panelists, with their diverse backgrounds and perspectives, presented the veil issue under four different angles. This reflected the multifaceted character of the issue. No uniform meaning can be attributed to the Islamic veil: each type of veil (hidjab, niqab, burqa or tchador) carries out a different signification, and the reasons for a woman to veil herself can be manifold, ranging from deeply personal social or religious aspiration to violent compulsion.

Each panelist started by presenting legislative and judicial developments in four different geographic areas: Prof. Sayla Benhabib’s presentation focused on Germany, Dr. Jocelyne Cesari addressed the French “affaire du foulard”, Prof. Mary Ann Case examined the US and UK contexts, and Havva Guney-Rübenacker shed light on the Turkish side. After having presented an insightful overview of these divergent legal solutions, the guest speakers were invited to react to each other’s presentation. This led them to address more thoroughly the socio-political and historical context underlying the different approaches towards regulation of the veil, raising issues of gender discrimination, cultural identity as well as socio-economic and integration problems of immigrant communities in the West.

The divergences of views between the panelists became more apparent. Prof. Case advocated for veil regulation, which she considers to be necessary in some circumstances to safeguard the fragile gender equality and freedom achieved in the Western world. Havva Guney-Rübenacker offered a different story, emphasizing the cultural identity dimension of the veil and the double standards distinguishing the Islamic veil from other religious symbols. The two other panelists, Prof. Benhabib and Dr. Cesari, adopted more nuanced views and provided for additional insightful considerations. In my view, part of the richness of the panel – in addition to its diversity stimulating the debate – consisted in combining passionate discourses and nuanced counterfactuals. The discussion strikingly demonstrated that radically divergent approaches can be endorsed in the name of the same liberal and feminist values.

What I found particularly interesting in the discussion, was the debate on the meaning of gender equality: What is its specific content? To what extent does it require uniformity of treatment between the genders? Why should the veil be considered distinct from our Western gender dress codes for the purpose of gender equality? In addition to gender issues, I left this event with myriads of further questionings: Why should the headscarf be treated differently from other religious symbols? Does laïcity require the disappearance of all religious symbols in public places rather than the peaceful and secular coexistence of all religions? Is regulation of the veil a solution, or should we rather address the roots of integration problems?