[Philadelphia, 1993]


Gender and the Law
Tuesday and Thursday, 4-5pm
Undergraduate Science Building 2260
Allison Alexy
aalexy@umich.edu
Office hours: Wednesdays, 1 to 4pm, please sign up through google calendar. Meetings will be in my office 2128 Lane Hall.

Graduate Student Instructors:
Jennifer Frederick
Section 003 - Mondays, B134 MLB
Section 004 - Fridays, 1105 NQ
Office hours: Mondays, 2 to 4pm, and by appointment, in Lane Hall 2127.

Lisa Young Larance
lylaranc@umich.edu
Section 002 - Mondays, B116 MLB
Section 005 - Fridays, 1105 NQ
Office hours: Tuesdays, 1 to 3pm, and by appointment, in LSA Building 4247

This course explores contemporary intersections of law and gender in the U.S. and beyond. Understanding that law simultaneously reflects and creates social norms, we will investigate how gender is constructed, challenged, and refused through law and litigation. When and how can law be used to reject discrimination and shift social norms? When and how is law a tool of oppression and injustice? How do cultural expectations surrounding law and the legal system shape people's engagement with it? What can we do with law and what can law do to us? Rather than taking as given the hegemonic power that legal structures might hold over people’s lives and thought, this course questions how people use, abuse, subvert, and leverage the legal structures in which they find themselves, while paying attention to how law constructs power. Starting from an intersectional perspective - understanding that sex, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, and dis/ability wrap together in socially significant ways - this course examines law in theory and in practice, tracing how law is imagined and created, but also how it plays out in people's everyday lives. Course materials consider examples from the U.S., South Africa, Trinidad, Japan, and Australia. The course fulfills the Race and Ethnicity requirements because of its engagement with how race and ethnicity shape gendered laws, people's responses to it, and constructions of justice.