Posts Tagged Constitutional Law

By Katherine Cross • 9 years ago

No One is Disposable: #JusticeForJane and why dignity is a human right

As of this writing, seventy one days have passed since Jane Doe was unjustly incarcerated in the Connecticut State Prison by a government body charged with protecting her—a vulnerable, sixteen year old trans girl.

To recap her situation: Jane Doe was a ward of Connecticut State’s Department of Children and Families (DCF) for much of her life, but according to the DCF’s commissioner, Joette Katz, became violent and unruly. Her transgender status also, allegedly, complicated her placement in alternate facilities. So, the DCF availed itself of statute 17a-12: an obscure law that allows it to place children in the Connecticut State prison system.

Thus it was that she was sent to the York Correctional Facility for Adult Women in Niantic, ...

As of this writing, seventy one days have passed since Jane Doe was unjustly incarcerated in the Connecticut State Prison by a government body charged with protecting her—a vulnerable, sixteen year old trans girl.

To recap her ...
By Katherine Cross • 10 years ago

Out From Privacy’s Penumbra: What the “Peeping Mike” Case Tells Us About Women and Law

In her peerless analysis of privacy’s social construction, feminist legal theorist Catharine MacKinnon pointedly observed in Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws that,

“The realm in which women’s everyday life is lived, the setting for many of these daily atrocities [rape, battery, sexual assault], is termed ‘the private.’ Law defines the private as where law is not, that into which the law does not intrude, where no harm is done other than by law’s presence. In everyday life, the privacy is his.”

This dramatic reframing of women’s experience was one that forced us to consider what our cherished notion of “privacy”—that evanescent constitutional right that Supreme Court Justice William Douglas found in the “penumbras and emanations” of the 1789 document—actually ...

In her peerless analysis of privacy’s social construction, feminist legal theorist Catharine MacKinnon pointedly observed in Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws that,

“The realm in which women’s everyday life is lived, the setting for many of ...