The group will meet online at 4:00PM on the following Mondays: October 21, November 18, and December 2.-Melissa Murray, “Children of Men: The Roberts Court’s Jurisprudence of Masculinity,” Houston Law Review 60:4 (2023) Symposium, pp. 799-864
-Melissa Murray, “Mothers in Law,” Michigan Law Review 121: 6 (2023-04), pp.909-937
-Optional: Strict Scrutiny: “We Read Josh Hawley’s Book So You Don’t Have To” (Season 5: Episode 50)
We will focus on Murray’s analyses of cases involving abortion rights, gun rights, and rights to the free exercise of speech and religion as well as her reviews of Tomiko Brown-Nagin’s Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality (2022) and Josh Hawley’s Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs (2023). Through her analyses of these texts, we will explore what Murray has referred to as “jurisprudence of masculinity.” As she argues, “the jurisprudence of masculinity goes beyond prioritizing the rights of men…[It] reorganizes the traditional public-private divide to insulate men’s bodies from the imposition of state regulation, it recasts women’s bodies in terms that makes them particularly susceptible and well-suited to public regulation, and it recharacterizes the relationship between the state, rights, and regulation.” As a result, the Court, according to Murray, “leaves the protection of women and their rights to the political process” (2023, p.800).
-Melissa Murray and Katherine Shaw, “Dobbs and Democracy,” Harvard Law Review 137:3 (2024-01), pp. 728-807
-Melissa Murray, “Inverting Animus: Masterpiece Cakeshop and the New Minorities,”The Supreme Court Review 2018-1 (2019-01), pp. 257-297, Article 257
-Optional: Melissa Murray, “Dobbs, Democracy, and Distrust,” The 2023 Samuel J. Konefsky Memorial Lecture at Brooklyn College (November 9, 2023)
We will discuss several related questions that arise from the readings for the last meeting and this meeting: What does it mean to “leave the protection of women and their rights to the political process,” especially given the workings of our current electoral and legislative processes? What does it mean that increasingly “litigants deploy antidiscrimination law and its principles to vindicates their claims against those who are the imagined subjects of antidiscrimination law’s protection” (2019, p. 259). How do these issues influence our understandings of democracy?
-Melissa Murray, “Making History,” The Yale Law Journal Forum (April 11, 2024), pp. 990-1015
-Melissa Murray, Leah Litman, and Katherine Shaw, "A Podcast of One's Own", Michigan Journal of Gender & Law 28:1 (2021), pp. 51-74.
We will explore the relationship between the law, humanities, and social sciences. We will consider: How can the humanities and social sciences help us understand the ethical and practical consequences of the law? How can they help us understand how the law influences the everyday lives of those who are the targets of the law, whether immigrants, women, the poor, racial and sexual minorities, and so on? How can we incorporate the work of legal scholars into humanities and social science classes?
Melissa Murray, the 2024-25 Robert L. Hess Scholar in Residence at Brooklyn College, is the Frederick I. and Grace Stokes Professor of Law at NYU School of Law. She teaches constitutional law, family law, criminal law, and reproductive rights and justice. She is a co-author (with Andrew Weissman) of the New York Times bestselling book The Trump Indictments: The Historic Charging Documents with Commentary. Murray’s writing has appeared in a range of legal and lay publications, including the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Atlantic. She is a legal analyst for MSNBC, and is a co-host of Strict Scrutiny, a Crooked Media podcast about the Supreme Court and legal culture. Murray is a graduate of Yale Law School and the University of Virginia. Following law school, she served as a judicial clerk to Justice Sonia Sotomayor, then a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and Stefan Underhill of the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut.
More information: https://libguides.brooklyn.cuny.edu/wolfe2024/melissamurray
