A Woman's Day

What a day. I joke sometimes that I have a gay day or a woman day. Days were my life seems to revolve around my organization in my identity politics. Well today was a woman day. We met as a Steering Committee to discuss the Men’s Law Caucus. I took control of the meeting and ran it like I used to run support groups and discussion groups. We went around a circle, introduced ourselves and talked about our own reactions. The unanimous consensus was that the first time everyone saw the shirts they were offended the first time they saw the shirts. Many people inquired to people they know about the shirts and the groups. And while they felt a little better, it really did seem like there was lingering discomfort and feeling like it really was being done to mock our group in particular. There were some valid points brought up. Women at our school represent a majority, Is it possible men are beginning to feel marginalized. While I think that’s an important question to ask, I think it’s also important to look at empirical evidence. Which I am trying to do.
SBA – 14 positions available – for next year only four are held by women. Men make up 71% of the SBA leadership
Journals –56 leadership positions available at least 24 positions are held by men and 9 are people I don’t know whose names are gender ambiguous. So men make up between 43% and 58%. If it’s the former, that would be exactly proportionate.
Moot Court Honor Board - 8 Positions; 3 positions are held by men, so men make up about 38%
Then we have approximately 34 other student organizations, included in those are LWC, Civil Rights Org, (different from ACLU), Immigrant Family Law program, and Law Students for Choice are predominantly female. The Federalist and the Military Law Students are predominantly male. Some of the others may have stark gender representations, but I don’t really know.
Part of my purpose for trying to look at things empirically is because I don’t want to loose sight of the fact that things are changing and maybe someday gender inequality will be completely gone. But I wonder if, the absence of gender inequality translates to the lack of oppression. Because here at the UZ we have a little overrepresentation of women in class, but I don’t think we defy the statistics that less than 10% of students talk and off those, only about 10% of the voices are female.

After the MLC discussion and then another class, I hosted a discussion on rape. Two other people showed up, one guy and one woman. The conversation was thoughtful and intelligent. It was actually pretty cool to think about some of the issues with other people, especially another guy. The issue is complicated and it’s nice to hear different perspectives.

And now, now I’m procrastinating on a brief that desperately needs to be written for it is due tomorrow. I feel completely unprepared for how to draft an appellate brief, which is some of my block. Part of that is my own fault for not getting a better draft done sooner (although I’ve been stuck with about the same amount for over a week now – so I guess part of it is not realizing that I needed some additional help). The other part is due in no small part to our terrible legal writing program. In a previous life, I did a lot of writing and if there is a truism about writing, it is that you have to do the work to get better. We have done a paper a quarter, and while that may sound like a lot, we spent approximately six weeks last quarter doing completely pointless exercises looking up reference materials. Which did very little to help, I don’t think having a problem that says go to this book and look for this case and tell me if fact x is true does anything to build a basis of how to find relevant law, precedent, or anything else when faced with an issue. But more importantly, random research trips do very little to almost nothing to help you figure how to write a good legal argument. As someone who wants to write clear, concise, and intelligent legal arguments this is especially troubling.

Instead of doing additional work to try and overcome the shortcomings, I struggle alone and distract myself with issues I wish didn’t exist.