Women and the Law Conference 2004

What U.S. Lawyers Can Learn from International Law: Concepts of Gender Equality Across Legal Cultures

Ruth Bader Ginsburg Lecturer: Professor Martha Albertson Fineman

Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law, Emory University

The Fourth Annual Women and the Law Conference in 2004 focused on What U.S. Lawyers Can Learn from International Law: Concepts of Gender Equality across Legal Cultures. It brought together distinguished professors from law, the social sciences and humanities. Martha Albertson Fineman, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law at Emory School of Law and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Lecturer, discussed how a more expansive, substantive notion of equality grounded in international human rights law can be used by progressive lawyers and policy makers to address systemic inequality in the United States and develop a robust vision of the role and responsibility of the state vis-à-vis its most vulnerable citizens. Her talk was followed by Thomas Jefferson School of Law Professors Linda Keller and Marjorie Cohn, who addressed worldwide noncompliance with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the failure of the United States to ratify the treaty; Professor Huma Ahmed-Ghosh, who focused on gender discrimination in Afghanistan; and Professor Abigail Saguy, who compared the sexual harassment laws in the United States to France.