Law project looks at gender, sexuality and family law in three countries

By Linda Myers

People associated with the Gender, Sexuality and Family Project meet recently in Myron Taylor Hall; they are, from left, law student Andrea Paparella, Dermot Feenan, Kristine Shaw, Professor Martha Fineman and Sally Sheldon. Paparella interned in Belfast last summer with Women's Aid, a policy office that fights domestic violence; Feenan and Sheldon are visiting scholars researching gender and the law; Fineman heads the interdisciplinary comparative law project, and Shaw, a recent Cornell Law School graduate, is the project's associate director. Robert Barker/University Photography

The Cornell Gender, Sexuality and Family (GS&F) Project compares how the issues are viewed in the United States, Northern Ireland and Canada. It offers faculty research fellowships across the disciplines and internships for law students. Martha Fineman, the Dorothea S. Clarke Professor of Feminist Jurisprudence at the Law School and a scholar of international stature, is the program's founder and director.

"How societies regulate such basic human activities as marriage, raising children and divorce reveals much about what its citizens value," said Fineman. The partner countries are good choices, she noted, because "we share a language and our laws are rooted in the same tradition, England's common law, although they have evolved differently in each country. In the U.K., family law is seen as a component of human rights law. In the U.S., we have a stigmatized social welfare system, and family is seen as the mediating institution between the individual and the state. Canada is somewhere in between."

Fineman believes that the United States would do well to borrow family-friendly policies from the other societies, such as universal health insurance, a broad social welfare system. the right to decent housing and greater tolerance for nontraditional family units such as same-sex partners. Most important, "we have to have a restructuring of society to value care-taking," she said. "The work is essential to society, and we owe a debt to those who do it. The state and market institutions should stop freeloading and do their share."

Fineman left a chaired professorship at Columbia University to join Cornell Law School in 1999. Her plan was to build a strong program in feminism and legal studies here and build a community of scholars in a range of disciplines ­ policy analysis, political theory, anthropology and others ­ who were "interested in how the law works in the larger society and had insights on gender and the law." She also hoped to attract exceptional graduate students and visiting scholars interested in those issues who would collaborate, learn from each other and educate the legal community.

The GS&F Project, an outgrowth of her ambitious agenda, offers competitive two-week and semester-long faculty exchanges between Cornell and four participating institutions: York University (Toronto); Queens University, (Kingston, Ontario); Queens University (Belfast), and the University of Ulster. Cornell law students also may apply for eight-week summer internships with government and community organizations in Toronto, Kingston, Belfast and Ulster, and students from partner universities in those cities may apply for internships in Ithaca. Their work must focus on gender, sexuality and family issues. GS&F covers the cost of transportation and living expenses plus a stipend.

Kristine Shaw, J.D. '01, associate director of the GS&F project, said, "Our goal is to create a space where scholars can work on issues like women's rights, sexual minorities' rights, and diverse-family-form rights, bring them more to the forefront and make students and scholars more aware of them."

As part of the program, Cornell law student Andrea Paparella spent last summer working for Women's Aid, a policy office in Belfast. "I talked to women's shelters and did lobbying to increase awareness about domestic violence and how to prevent it," she said. In addition, she drafted a report highlighting the progress made in stemming domestic violence since the enactment of a law in 1998 in Northern Ireland strongly prohibiting it. "I heard that a lot has changed in the last 10 years. Women there helped to create a new domestic violence officer position in the police department, and police inspectors, barristers and magistrates now take domestic violence seriously." But because of the legacy of 'the troubles,' some officers are reluctant to go into neighborhoods where they're unwelcome to enforce the new law, she said.

Dermot Feenan, the first GS&F visiting scholar from the University of Ulster, is on campus this semester to advance the argument that discrimination based on sexual orientation is a human rights violation. Feenan is researching challenges to rights for gay men and lesbians, including the heterosexual nature of law. He recently led a report to the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission that recommended including extensive gay rights in the new bill of rights currently being drafted in Northern Ireland. "As we move from conflict to peace, there's a commitment to a new human rights culture that will see a bill of rights that could be the best in the world," he said.

Sally Sheldon, another GS&F visiting scholar at Cornell from the United Kingdom this semester, is doing research on the laws regulating fatherhood. "Men's role in reproduction is becoming increasingly contested," she said, citing new reproductive technologies, environmental threats to men's reproductive health and men's demands for a greater role in the private sphere. Her research focuses on the socio-legal and ethical aspects of men's interests in the abortion decision, the basis for their claims, how that's changed over time and what the changes reveal about society's evolving understanding of fatherhood.

A GS&F grant allowed Anna Marie Smith, a Cornell associate professor of government, to spend two weeks at the University of Toronto working on a book-length manuscript on the moral dimension of contemporary U.S. welfare policy. "With the release from teaching, many quiet moments for reading and reflection and stimulating theoretical discussion with the law faculty there, I was able to take the time to develop the theoretical part of my project," said Smith, who now has a contract with Cambridge University Press to publish the project.

GS&F is supported by grants from Atlantic Philanthropies and other groups.
For more information on the project, contact Shaw at 255-9493, e-mail: kms35@cornell.edu or visit this web site: http://www.gendersexandfamily.org.