Voice and video learning tools can efficiently and effectively strengthen the traditional law sch... more Voice and video learning tools can efficiently and effectively strengthen the traditional law school classroom to meet the evolving needs of our students and the profession. These tools respond to transitions in legal education as faculty cultivate more inclusive classrooms, adapt to changing bar exam methodologies, and add professional identity formation to their teaching objectives. These reforms also weigh on institutions at a moment of jolting and deepening wellness concerns affecting students, staff, and faculty alike, necessitating scalable tools that build community. Voice and video learning tools, such as VoiceThread and Flipgrid, offer sustainable supplements to traditional courses and materials that are well‐suited for the family law classroom. These tools engage students in advocacy, client counseling, and policy debates that are more inclusive, interactive, and self‐efficacious than Socratic dialogue and traditional casebook practice problems alone. These tools empower students to argue motions, deliver legislative testimony, advise clients, explain rules, and interpret statutes. Students apply rules in practice‐based settings while cultivating their voices as lawyers and engaging with peer colleagues collaboratively. The professor pivots critically and symbolically from a “sage on the stage” to a “guide on the side.” These more intentional and equitable approaches to classroom management better meet the needs of modern students and align with intersecting curricular reform goals. Voice and video assignments thus offer both symbolic and substantive pedagogical improvements, dynamically promoting professional identity formation, practice readiness, inclusion, and wellness.
Women’s abortion decision-making and parental decision-making in child rearing are constructed as... more Women’s abortion decision-making and parental decision-making in child rearing are constructed as polarized methods of decision-making. Women’s abortion decision-making is understood as myopic and individualistic. Parental decision-making is understood as sacrificial and selfless. This polarization leaves reproductive decision-making isolated, marginalized, and vulnerable while parental decision-making is essentialized, protected, and revered. Both framings are inaccurate and problematic. A unified family decision-making framework that aligns abortion decision-making and parental decision-making reveals that both forms of decision-making are more multi-dimensional, relational, and family-centered than currently understood. This article exposes the ground to be gained by crossing longstanding boundaries in family law and reproductive rights to more accurately and inclusively frame decision-making. This is a critical step to pull abortion decision-making from its marginalized periphery and reposition it as complex, imperfect, family-focused, and central to family law.
The amicus briefs filed in landmark abortion cases before the U.S. Supreme Court serve as a barom... more The amicus briefs filed in landmark abortion cases before the U.S. Supreme Court serve as a barometer revealing how various constituencies talk about abortion, women, fetuses, physicians, rights, and harms over time. This article conducts an interdisciplinary legal-linguistic study of the amicus briefs that were filed in the milestone abortion cases of Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health. As the first large-scale study of all amicus briefs submitted in these key cases, this article identifies the roles of amicus briefs, analyzes their rhetorical strategies, and describes how their authors engage with the Court. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, the study reveals how the discursive construction of the pregnant person, fetus, physician, and abortion as a right have evolved over fifty years and shows why these shifts matter. In so doing, this study offers historical perspectives into evolving arguments in abortion litigation, contemporaneous insights into the status of polarized abortion politics, and future implications for amicus activity and abortion advocacy.
This article studies the triad of 2016 social media campaigns known as “#AskDr.Kasich,” “#askbevi... more This article studies the triad of 2016 social media campaigns known as “#AskDr.Kasich,” “#askbevinaboutmyvag,” and “#PeriodsforPence.” While these campaigns, each located in the regional mid-South, were motivated by restrictive state abortion bills, they uniquely positioned menstruation and women’s bodies at the center of their activism—not abortion alone. They leveraged, as a political fault line, the contradiction of these states’ governors’ perceived disgust relating to basic women’s reproductive health, relative to their patriarchal assuredness in regulating and controlling women’s bodies.
In so doing, they tapped into meaningful disruptions in the geographies, religiosities, and masculinities of abortion politics. These campaigns achieved regional collective solidarity and a frame transformation in the rhetoric of abortion access. They catalyzed the lens of “disgust,” used manipulatively in anti-abortion rhetoric, into a source of poignant activism. Masculine discomfort with menstruation and women’s health paradoxically became a tool to protect abortion access. The insights garnered from these social media campaigns inform the vital work of regional law reform in a post-Dobbs America.
Women's abortion and parental decision-making in child rearing are constructed as polarized metho... more Women's abortion and parental decision-making in child rearing are constructed as polarized methods of decision-making in law, politics, and society. Women's abortion decision-making is understood as myopic and individualistic. Parental decision-making is understood as sacrificial and selfless. This polarization leaves reproductive decision-making isolated, marginalized, and vulnerable while parental decision-making is essentialized, protected, and revered. Both framings are inaccurate and problematic. A unified family decision-making framework that aligns abortion decision-making and parental decision-making reveals that both forms of decision-making are more multi-dimensional, relational, and family-centered than currently understood. This Article exposes the ground to be gained by crossing longstanding boundaries in family law and reproductive rights to more accurately and inclusively frame decision-making. This is a critical step to pull abortion decision-making from its marginalized periphery and reposition it as complex, imperfect, family-focused, and central to family law.
Two seismic curricular disruptions create a tipping point for legal education to reform and trans... more Two seismic curricular disruptions create a tipping point for legal education to reform and transform. COVID-19 abruptly disrupted the delivery of legal education. It aligned with a tectonic racial justice reckoning, as more professors and institutions reconsidered their content and classroom cultures, allying with faculty of color who had long confronted these issues actively. The frenzy of these dual disruptions starkly contrasts with the steady drumbeat of critical legal scholars advocating for decades to reduce hierarchies and inequalities in legal education pedagogy. This context presents a tipping point supporting two pedagogical reforms that leverage this unique moment. First, it is time to abandon the presumptive reverence and implicit immunity given to problematic Socratic teaching despite the harms and inadequacies of such performances. Professor Kingsfield depicted an archetype of Socratic teaching where the professor wields power over students instead of wielding knowledge to empower students. He used strategic tools of humiliation, degradation, mockery, fear, and shame. Socratic performances that are professor-centered and power-centered do not merit the reverence and immunity they still receive after decades of sound critiques. This critique is framed as a call to “cancel Kingsfield.” Socratic teaching can (must) be performed inclusively. This Article proposes a set of shared Socratic values that are student-centered, skills-centered, client-centered, and community-centered. Second, this Article proposes refining law school accreditation standards to ensure that students achieve learning outcomes equitably in inclusive classrooms. Accreditation reforms cannot happen around the architectural perimeter of legal education. Nor can reforms be implemented solely in episodic siloes by staff, external speakers, or even robust seminar courses. Rather, accreditation standards need to hold institutions accountable to measuring learning outcomes and addressing identified disparities and inadequacies in the curricular core of legal education.
This chapter, which will appear in the Oxford Handbook of Feminism and Law in the United States (... more This chapter, which will appear in the Oxford Handbook of Feminism and Law in the United States (Deborah Brake, Martha Chamallas & Verna Williams, eds.), traces and evaluates the influences of feminism in legal education. It explores how feminist critiques challenged the substance of legal rules, the methods of law teaching, and the culture of legal education. Following decades of advocacy, feminist pedagogical reforms have generated new fields, new courses, new laws, new leaders, and new feminist spaces. This chapter captures many reasons to celebrate the accomplishments of our feminist pioneers and champions. It also serves as a critical call to action to modern faculty, administrators, and students to carry the work forward with a vigilant purpose and determination.
This Article makes a feminist case for acknowledging women’s acts of violence as consistent with ... more This Article makes a feminist case for acknowledging women’s acts of violence as consistent with — not threatening to — the goals of the domestic violence movement and the feminist movement. It concludes that broadly understanding women’s use of strength, power, coercion, control, and violence, even illegitimate uses, can be framed consistent with feminist goals. Beginning this conversation is a necessary — if uncomfortable — step to give movement to the movement to end gendered violence. The domestic violence movement historically framed its work on a gender binary of men as potential perpetrators and women as potential victims. This binary was an essential starting point to defining and responding to domestic violence. The movement has since struggled to address women as perpetrators. It has historically deployed a “strategy of containment” to respond to women as perpetrators. This strategy includes bringing male victims of domestic violence within existing services, monitoring ex...
This article invites feminists to leverage the #MeToo Movement as a critical analytical tool to e... more This article invites feminists to leverage the #MeToo Movement as a critical analytical tool to explore the longevity of the enduring rape crisis framing of victim services. For nearly half a century, victims have visited rape crisis centers, called rape crisis hotlines, and mobilized rape crisis response teams to provide services and support. This enduring political and social framing around rape as a crisis is opaque, has prompted a political backlash, and risks distorting hard-fought feminist legal, social, and political battles. It has yielded underreporting, underutilization, and recurring risks of budgetary cuts. This model and terminology have gone virtually unchanged for nearly half a century. Crisis language denotes urgency, decisiveness, judgment, action, and mobilization, all leading to closure. These descriptions can be problematic when mapped onto the lived experiences of certain communities. The #MeToo Movement presents modern feminists with a powerful, productive, and...
This article applies a family law lens to explore the systemic and traumatic effects of modern la... more This article applies a family law lens to explore the systemic and traumatic effects of modern laws and policies on immigrant families. A family law lens widens the scope of individuals harmed by recent immigration laws and policies to show why all families are affected and harmed by shifts in state power, state action, and state rhetoric. The family law lens reveals a worrisome shift in intentionality that has moved the state from a bystander to family-based immigration trauma to an incendiary agent perpetrating family trauma. Modern immigration laws and policies are deploying legal and political strategies that intentionally sever the parent-child relationship and demonize immigrant families. The family law lens brings into focus how the state is acting under the parens patriae power, which positions the state as the “parent of the nation.” For the state to intervene using its parens patriae power to perpetrate the exact kinds of harms that would be considered abusive if deployed ...
Conflict Studies: International Relations Theory eJournal, 2016
Existing legal responses to sexual assault and harassment in the military have stagnated or faile... more Existing legal responses to sexual assault and harassment in the military have stagnated or failed. Current approaches emphasize the prevalence of sexual assault and highlight the masculine nature of the military’s statistical composition and institutional culture. Current responses do not, however, incorporate masculinities theory to disentangle the experiences of men as a group from men as individuals. Rather, embedded within contestations of the masculine military culture is the unstated assumption that the culture universally privileges or benefits the individual men that operate within it. This myth is harmful because it tethers masculinities to military efficacy, suppresses the costs of male violence to men, and positions women as perpetual outsiders. Debunking the myth of universal male privilege in heavily masculinized institutions would advance gender equality and shift the law reform focus. It would bring sexual assault, domestic violence, and sexual harassment into the sa...
Page 1. Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1931660 Legal Studies Research Pap... more Page 1. Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1931660 Legal Studies Research Paper Series Research Paper No. 11-25 Examining Entrenched Masculinities Within the Republican Government Tradition Jamie R. Abrams West Virginia Law Review, Vol. 114, No. ...
Page 1. LEGAL PROTECTIONS FOR AN INVISIBLE POPULATION: AN ELIGIBILITY AND IMPACT ANALYSIS OF U VI... more Page 1. LEGAL PROTECTIONS FOR AN INVISIBLE POPULATION: AN ELIGIBILITY AND IMPACT ANALYSIS OF U VISA PROTECTIONS FOR IMMIGRANT VICTIMS OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE By Jamie Rene Abrams* omestic ...
Voice and video learning tools can efficiently and effectively strengthen the traditional law sch... more Voice and video learning tools can efficiently and effectively strengthen the traditional law school classroom to meet the evolving needs of our students and the profession. These tools respond to transitions in legal education as faculty cultivate more inclusive classrooms, adapt to changing bar exam methodologies, and add professional identity formation to their teaching objectives. These reforms also weigh on institutions at a moment of jolting and deepening wellness concerns affecting students, staff, and faculty alike, necessitating scalable tools that build community. Voice and video learning tools, such as VoiceThread and Flipgrid, offer sustainable supplements to traditional courses and materials that are well‐suited for the family law classroom. These tools engage students in advocacy, client counseling, and policy debates that are more inclusive, interactive, and self‐efficacious than Socratic dialogue and traditional casebook practice problems alone. These tools empower students to argue motions, deliver legislative testimony, advise clients, explain rules, and interpret statutes. Students apply rules in practice‐based settings while cultivating their voices as lawyers and engaging with peer colleagues collaboratively. The professor pivots critically and symbolically from a “sage on the stage” to a “guide on the side.” These more intentional and equitable approaches to classroom management better meet the needs of modern students and align with intersecting curricular reform goals. Voice and video assignments thus offer both symbolic and substantive pedagogical improvements, dynamically promoting professional identity formation, practice readiness, inclusion, and wellness.
Women’s abortion decision-making and parental decision-making in child rearing are constructed as... more Women’s abortion decision-making and parental decision-making in child rearing are constructed as polarized methods of decision-making. Women’s abortion decision-making is understood as myopic and individualistic. Parental decision-making is understood as sacrificial and selfless. This polarization leaves reproductive decision-making isolated, marginalized, and vulnerable while parental decision-making is essentialized, protected, and revered. Both framings are inaccurate and problematic. A unified family decision-making framework that aligns abortion decision-making and parental decision-making reveals that both forms of decision-making are more multi-dimensional, relational, and family-centered than currently understood. This article exposes the ground to be gained by crossing longstanding boundaries in family law and reproductive rights to more accurately and inclusively frame decision-making. This is a critical step to pull abortion decision-making from its marginalized periphery and reposition it as complex, imperfect, family-focused, and central to family law.
The amicus briefs filed in landmark abortion cases before the U.S. Supreme Court serve as a barom... more The amicus briefs filed in landmark abortion cases before the U.S. Supreme Court serve as a barometer revealing how various constituencies talk about abortion, women, fetuses, physicians, rights, and harms over time. This article conducts an interdisciplinary legal-linguistic study of the amicus briefs that were filed in the milestone abortion cases of Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health. As the first large-scale study of all amicus briefs submitted in these key cases, this article identifies the roles of amicus briefs, analyzes their rhetorical strategies, and describes how their authors engage with the Court. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, the study reveals how the discursive construction of the pregnant person, fetus, physician, and abortion as a right have evolved over fifty years and shows why these shifts matter. In so doing, this study offers historical perspectives into evolving arguments in abortion litigation, contemporaneous insights into the status of polarized abortion politics, and future implications for amicus activity and abortion advocacy.
This article studies the triad of 2016 social media campaigns known as “#AskDr.Kasich,” “#askbevi... more This article studies the triad of 2016 social media campaigns known as “#AskDr.Kasich,” “#askbevinaboutmyvag,” and “#PeriodsforPence.” While these campaigns, each located in the regional mid-South, were motivated by restrictive state abortion bills, they uniquely positioned menstruation and women’s bodies at the center of their activism—not abortion alone. They leveraged, as a political fault line, the contradiction of these states’ governors’ perceived disgust relating to basic women’s reproductive health, relative to their patriarchal assuredness in regulating and controlling women’s bodies.
In so doing, they tapped into meaningful disruptions in the geographies, religiosities, and masculinities of abortion politics. These campaigns achieved regional collective solidarity and a frame transformation in the rhetoric of abortion access. They catalyzed the lens of “disgust,” used manipulatively in anti-abortion rhetoric, into a source of poignant activism. Masculine discomfort with menstruation and women’s health paradoxically became a tool to protect abortion access. The insights garnered from these social media campaigns inform the vital work of regional law reform in a post-Dobbs America.
Women's abortion and parental decision-making in child rearing are constructed as polarized metho... more Women's abortion and parental decision-making in child rearing are constructed as polarized methods of decision-making in law, politics, and society. Women's abortion decision-making is understood as myopic and individualistic. Parental decision-making is understood as sacrificial and selfless. This polarization leaves reproductive decision-making isolated, marginalized, and vulnerable while parental decision-making is essentialized, protected, and revered. Both framings are inaccurate and problematic. A unified family decision-making framework that aligns abortion decision-making and parental decision-making reveals that both forms of decision-making are more multi-dimensional, relational, and family-centered than currently understood. This Article exposes the ground to be gained by crossing longstanding boundaries in family law and reproductive rights to more accurately and inclusively frame decision-making. This is a critical step to pull abortion decision-making from its marginalized periphery and reposition it as complex, imperfect, family-focused, and central to family law.
Two seismic curricular disruptions create a tipping point for legal education to reform and trans... more Two seismic curricular disruptions create a tipping point for legal education to reform and transform. COVID-19 abruptly disrupted the delivery of legal education. It aligned with a tectonic racial justice reckoning, as more professors and institutions reconsidered their content and classroom cultures, allying with faculty of color who had long confronted these issues actively. The frenzy of these dual disruptions starkly contrasts with the steady drumbeat of critical legal scholars advocating for decades to reduce hierarchies and inequalities in legal education pedagogy. This context presents a tipping point supporting two pedagogical reforms that leverage this unique moment. First, it is time to abandon the presumptive reverence and implicit immunity given to problematic Socratic teaching despite the harms and inadequacies of such performances. Professor Kingsfield depicted an archetype of Socratic teaching where the professor wields power over students instead of wielding knowledge to empower students. He used strategic tools of humiliation, degradation, mockery, fear, and shame. Socratic performances that are professor-centered and power-centered do not merit the reverence and immunity they still receive after decades of sound critiques. This critique is framed as a call to “cancel Kingsfield.” Socratic teaching can (must) be performed inclusively. This Article proposes a set of shared Socratic values that are student-centered, skills-centered, client-centered, and community-centered. Second, this Article proposes refining law school accreditation standards to ensure that students achieve learning outcomes equitably in inclusive classrooms. Accreditation reforms cannot happen around the architectural perimeter of legal education. Nor can reforms be implemented solely in episodic siloes by staff, external speakers, or even robust seminar courses. Rather, accreditation standards need to hold institutions accountable to measuring learning outcomes and addressing identified disparities and inadequacies in the curricular core of legal education.
This chapter, which will appear in the Oxford Handbook of Feminism and Law in the United States (... more This chapter, which will appear in the Oxford Handbook of Feminism and Law in the United States (Deborah Brake, Martha Chamallas & Verna Williams, eds.), traces and evaluates the influences of feminism in legal education. It explores how feminist critiques challenged the substance of legal rules, the methods of law teaching, and the culture of legal education. Following decades of advocacy, feminist pedagogical reforms have generated new fields, new courses, new laws, new leaders, and new feminist spaces. This chapter captures many reasons to celebrate the accomplishments of our feminist pioneers and champions. It also serves as a critical call to action to modern faculty, administrators, and students to carry the work forward with a vigilant purpose and determination.
This Article makes a feminist case for acknowledging women’s acts of violence as consistent with ... more This Article makes a feminist case for acknowledging women’s acts of violence as consistent with — not threatening to — the goals of the domestic violence movement and the feminist movement. It concludes that broadly understanding women’s use of strength, power, coercion, control, and violence, even illegitimate uses, can be framed consistent with feminist goals. Beginning this conversation is a necessary — if uncomfortable — step to give movement to the movement to end gendered violence. The domestic violence movement historically framed its work on a gender binary of men as potential perpetrators and women as potential victims. This binary was an essential starting point to defining and responding to domestic violence. The movement has since struggled to address women as perpetrators. It has historically deployed a “strategy of containment” to respond to women as perpetrators. This strategy includes bringing male victims of domestic violence within existing services, monitoring ex...
This article invites feminists to leverage the #MeToo Movement as a critical analytical tool to e... more This article invites feminists to leverage the #MeToo Movement as a critical analytical tool to explore the longevity of the enduring rape crisis framing of victim services. For nearly half a century, victims have visited rape crisis centers, called rape crisis hotlines, and mobilized rape crisis response teams to provide services and support. This enduring political and social framing around rape as a crisis is opaque, has prompted a political backlash, and risks distorting hard-fought feminist legal, social, and political battles. It has yielded underreporting, underutilization, and recurring risks of budgetary cuts. This model and terminology have gone virtually unchanged for nearly half a century. Crisis language denotes urgency, decisiveness, judgment, action, and mobilization, all leading to closure. These descriptions can be problematic when mapped onto the lived experiences of certain communities. The #MeToo Movement presents modern feminists with a powerful, productive, and...
This article applies a family law lens to explore the systemic and traumatic effects of modern la... more This article applies a family law lens to explore the systemic and traumatic effects of modern laws and policies on immigrant families. A family law lens widens the scope of individuals harmed by recent immigration laws and policies to show why all families are affected and harmed by shifts in state power, state action, and state rhetoric. The family law lens reveals a worrisome shift in intentionality that has moved the state from a bystander to family-based immigration trauma to an incendiary agent perpetrating family trauma. Modern immigration laws and policies are deploying legal and political strategies that intentionally sever the parent-child relationship and demonize immigrant families. The family law lens brings into focus how the state is acting under the parens patriae power, which positions the state as the “parent of the nation.” For the state to intervene using its parens patriae power to perpetrate the exact kinds of harms that would be considered abusive if deployed ...
Conflict Studies: International Relations Theory eJournal, 2016
Existing legal responses to sexual assault and harassment in the military have stagnated or faile... more Existing legal responses to sexual assault and harassment in the military have stagnated or failed. Current approaches emphasize the prevalence of sexual assault and highlight the masculine nature of the military’s statistical composition and institutional culture. Current responses do not, however, incorporate masculinities theory to disentangle the experiences of men as a group from men as individuals. Rather, embedded within contestations of the masculine military culture is the unstated assumption that the culture universally privileges or benefits the individual men that operate within it. This myth is harmful because it tethers masculinities to military efficacy, suppresses the costs of male violence to men, and positions women as perpetual outsiders. Debunking the myth of universal male privilege in heavily masculinized institutions would advance gender equality and shift the law reform focus. It would bring sexual assault, domestic violence, and sexual harassment into the sa...
Page 1. Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1931660 Legal Studies Research Pap... more Page 1. Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1931660 Legal Studies Research Paper Series Research Paper No. 11-25 Examining Entrenched Masculinities Within the Republican Government Tradition Jamie R. Abrams West Virginia Law Review, Vol. 114, No. ...
Page 1. LEGAL PROTECTIONS FOR AN INVISIBLE POPULATION: AN ELIGIBILITY AND IMPACT ANALYSIS OF U VI... more Page 1. LEGAL PROTECTIONS FOR AN INVISIBLE POPULATION: AN ELIGIBILITY AND IMPACT ANALYSIS OF U VISA PROTECTIONS FOR IMMIGRANT VICTIMS OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE By Jamie Rene Abrams* omestic ...
Forthcoming in Oxford Handbook of Feminism and Law in the United States, 2021
This chapter, which will appear in the Oxford Handbook of Feminism and Law in the United States (... more This chapter, which will appear in the Oxford Handbook of Feminism and Law in the United States (Deborah Brake, Martha Chamallas & Verna Williams, eds.), traces and evaluates the influences of feminism in legal education. It explores how feminist critiques challenged the substance of legal rules, the methods of law teaching, and the culture of legal education. Following decades of advocacy, feminist pedagogical reforms have generated new fields, new courses, new laws, new leaders, and new feminist spaces. This chapter captures many reasons to celebrate the accomplishments of our feminist pioneers and champions. It also serves as a critical call to action to modern faculty, administrators, and students to carry the work forward with a vigilant purpose and determination.
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Papers by Jamie Abrams
In so doing, they tapped into meaningful disruptions in the geographies, religiosities, and masculinities of abortion politics. These campaigns achieved regional collective solidarity and a frame transformation in the rhetoric of abortion access. They catalyzed the lens of “disgust,” used manipulatively in anti-abortion rhetoric, into a source of poignant activism. Masculine discomfort with menstruation and women’s health paradoxically became a tool to protect abortion access. The insights garnered from these social media campaigns inform the vital work of regional law reform in a post-Dobbs America.
In so doing, they tapped into meaningful disruptions in the geographies, religiosities, and masculinities of abortion politics. These campaigns achieved regional collective solidarity and a frame transformation in the rhetoric of abortion access. They catalyzed the lens of “disgust,” used manipulatively in anti-abortion rhetoric, into a source of poignant activism. Masculine discomfort with menstruation and women’s health paradoxically became a tool to protect abortion access. The insights garnered from these social media campaigns inform the vital work of regional law reform in a post-Dobbs America.