Why Now? Women, Equality, and the Legal Academy
In 2012, the prior chairs of WLE – 22 in number, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Herma Hill Kay – wrote individually to generate collaboratively a history of the Section of Women in Legal Education. Reflections of Women in Legal Education: Stories from Four Decades of Section Chairs, 80 UMKC L. Rev. 659 (2012), https://irlaw.umkc.edu/lawreview/vol80/iss3/. Now, more than a decade later, we see a world made by their innovations as well as efforts to limit the deployment of categories of identity in higher education. The UMKC Law Review has agreed to host another symposium on these issues.
The volume will focus on a subset of the many substantive issues in 2025 women face, as does higher education that has for decades deepened its understanding of its own roles in affecting equal treatment inside education and in the body politic. The aim is to reflect on and engage with contemporary challenges to the integrity and legitimacy of institutions of higher education and to their efforts to welcome a rich scholarly and educational involvement with the complex concept and practices of equality, intersectionality, and of mitigation of inequalities. We hope that commentary can center around themes of bodily integrity and reproductive freedom, economic inequalities, institutional mechanisms to open new avenues of research and opportunities that respond to individual and community needs, gender as a theory and a practice, and the role of higher education in generating and altering understandings of gender.
The coordinators of the symposium are Laura Rothstein, Professor and Distinguished University Scholar Emerita and former Dean, Louis D. Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville; Judith Resnik, Arthur Liman Professor of Law at Yale Law School; and Nancy Levit, Curators’ Distinguished Professor and Edward D. Ellison Professor of Law, University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law. We are seeking essays of approximately 4,000-5,000 words each. Please submit a short (about 200 words) prospectus of what you would like to write to Laura, Judith, and Nancy (l.rothstein@louisville.edu; judith.resnik@yale.edu; levitn@umkc.edu ) by February 17, 2025. Selected essays will ultimately be due at the end of July, 2025.
Laura Rothstein,
Professor and Distinguished University Scholar Emerita and former Dean
Louis D. Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville
Judith Resnik
Arthur Liman Professor of Law
Yale Law School
Nancy Levit
Curators’ Distinguished Professor and Edward D. Ellison Professor of Law
UMKC School of Law