Around the world, discriminatory legislation prevents women from accessing their human rights. It can affect almost every aspect of a woman's life, including the right to choose a partner, inherit property, hold a job, and obtain child custody. Often referred to as family law, these laws have contributed to discrimination and to the justification of gender-based violence globally. This book demonstrates how women across the world are contributing to legal reform, helping to shape non-discriminatory policies and to counter current legal and social justifications for gender-based violence. The book takes case studies from Brazil, India, Iran, Lebanon, Nigeria, Palestine, Senegal, and Turkey, using them to demosntrate in each case the varied history of family law and the wide variety of issues impacting women’s equality in legislation. Interviews with prominent women's rights activists in three additional countries are also included, giving personal accounts of the successes and failures of past reform efforts. Overall, the book provides a complex global picture of current trends and strategies in the fight for a more egalitarian society. These findings come at a critical moment for change. Across the globe, family law issues are contentious. We are simultaneously witnessing an increased demand for women’s equality and the resurgence of fundamentalist forces that impede reform, invoking rules rooted in tradition, culture, and interpretations of religious texts. The outcome of these disputes has enormous ramifications for women’s roles in the family and society. This book tackles these complexities head on, and will interest activists, practitioners, students, and scholars working on women's rights and gender-based violence.

Women’s rights advocates in the United States have long argued that violence against women denies women equality and citizenship, but it took a movement of feminist activists and lawyers, beginning in the late 1960s, to set about realizing this vision and transforming domestic violence from a private problem into a public harm. This important book examines the pathbreaking legal process that has brought the pervasiveness and severity of domestic violence to public attention and has led the United States Congress, the Supreme Court, and the United Nations to address the problem. Elizabeth Schneider has played a pioneering role in this process. From an insider’s perspective she explores how claims of rights for battered women have emerged from feminist activism, and she assesses the possibilities and limitations of feminist legal advocacy to improve battered women’s lives and transform law and culture. The book chronicles the struggle to incorporate feminist arguments into law, particularly in cases of battered women who kill their assailants and battered women who are mothers. With a broad perspective on feminist lawmaking as a vehicle of social change, Schneider examines subjects as wide-ranging as criminal prosecution of batterers, the civil rights remedy of the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, the O. J. Simpson trials, and a class on battered women and the law that she taught at Harvard Law School. Feminist lawmaking on woman abuse, Schneider argues, should reaffirm the historic vision of violence and gender equality that originally animated activist and legal work.

Weaving together universal themes of family, geography, and death with images of America's frontier landscape, former Kentucky Poet Laureate Joe Survant has been lauded for his ability to capture the spirit of the land and its people. Kliatt magazine has praised his work, stating, "Survant's words sing.... This is storytelling at its best." Exploring the pre-Columbian and frontier history of the commonwealth, The Land We Dreamed is the final installment in the poet's trilogy on rural Kentucky. The poems in the book feature several well-known figures and their stories, reimagining Dr. Thomas Walker's naming of the Cumberland Plateau, Mary Draper Ingles's treacherous journey from Big Bone Lick to western Virginia following her abduction by Native Americans, and Daniel Boone's ruminations on the fall season of 1770. Survant also explores the Bluegrass from the perspectives of the chiefs of the Shawnee and Seneca tribes. Drawing on primary documents such as the seventeenth-century reports of French Jesuit missionaries, excerpts from the Draper manuscripts, and the journals of pioneers George Croghan and Christopher Gist, this collection surveys a broad and under-recorded history. Poem by poem, Survant takes readers on an imaginative expedition -- through unspoiled Shawnee cornfields, down the wild Ohio River, and into the depths of the region's ancient coal seams.

Many feminists grapple with the problem of hyper-incarceration in the United States, and yet commentators on gender crime continue to assert that criminal law is not tough enough. This punitive impulse, prominent legal scholar Aya Gruber argues, is dangerous and counterproductive. In their quest to secure women’s protection from domestic violence and rape, American feminists have become soldiers in the war on crime by emphasizing white female victimhood, expanding the power of police and prosecutors, touting the problem-solving power of incarceration, and diverting resources toward law enforcement and away from marginalized communities. Deploying vivid cases and unflinching analysis, The Feminist War on Crime documents the failure of the state to combat sexual and domestic violence through law and punishment. Zero-tolerance anti-violence law and policy tend to make women less safe and more fragile. Mandatory arrests, no-drop prosecutions, forced separation, and incarceration embroil poor women of color in a criminal justice system that is historically hostile to them. This carceral approach exacerbates social inequalities by diverting more power and resources toward a fundamentally flawed criminal justice system, further harming victims, perpetrators, and communities alike. In order to reverse this troubling course, Gruber contends that we must abandon the conventional feminist wisdom, fight violence against women without reinforcing the American prison state, and use criminalization as a technique of last—not first—resort.

This collection of essays is written by some of the world's leading experts in international human rights law, and corresponds to the main junctures in the professional life of Professor David Kretzmer, a leading human right academic and practitioner. The different essays focus on contemporary human rights protection challenges. They address conceptual problems such as differences between limits and restrictions, and application of human rights standards to businesses and international organisations; legal doctrinal responses to changing realities in the field of surveillance and identity politics; the weakness of monitoring institutions engaged in standard setting; and the practical difficulties in applying international human rights law to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a manner sensitive to gender dimensions and the particular political dynamics of the situation. Collectively, the essays offer a rich picture of the current potential shortcomings of international human rights law in addressing complex problems of law, politics and ethics.

WINNER OF THE HILLMAN PRIZE FOR BOOK JOURNALISM, THE HELEN BERNSTEIN BOOK AWARD, AND THE LUKAS WORK-IN-PROGRESS AWARD * A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BOOKS OF THE YEAR * NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST * LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE FINALIST * ABA SILVER GAVEL AWARD FINALIST * KIRKUS PRIZE FINALIST NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2019 BY: Esquire, Amazon, Kirkus, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, BookPage, BookRiot, Economist, New York Times Staff Critics “A seminal and breathtaking account of why home is the most dangerous place to be a woman . . . A tour de force.” -Eve Ensler "Terrifying, courageous reportage from our internal war zone." -Andrew Solomon "Extraordinary." -New York Times ,“Editors' Choice” “Gut-wrenching, required reading.” -Esquire "Compulsively readable . . . It will save lives." -Washington Post “Essential, devastating reading.” -Cheryl Strayed, New York Times Book Review An award-winning journalist's intimate investigation of the true scope of domestic violence, revealing how the roots of America's most pressing social crises are buried in abuse that happens behind closed doors. We call it domestic violence. We call it private violence. Sometimes we call it intimate terrorism. But whatever we call it, we generally do not believe it has anything at all to do with us, despite the World Health Organization deeming it a “global epidemic.” In America, domestic violence accounts for 15 percent of all violent crime, and yet it remains locked in silence, even as its tendrils reach unseen into so many of our most pressing national issues, from our economy to our education system, from mass shootings to mass incarceration to #MeToo. We still have not taken the true measure of this problem. In No Visible Bruises, journalist Rachel Louise Snyder gives context for what we don't know we're seeing. She frames this urgent and immersive account of the scale of domestic violence in our country around key stories that explode the common myths-that if things were bad enough, victims would just leave; that a violent person cannot become nonviolent; that shelter is an adequate response; and most insidiously that violence inside the home is a private matter, sealed from the public sphere and disconnected from other forms of violence. Through the stories of victims, perpetrators, law enforcement, and reform movements from across the country, Snyder explores the real roots of private violence, its far-reaching consequences for society, and what it will take to truly address it.