Plaza B Hilton San Francisco and Towers Lobby Level
Section on Women in Legal Education Joyce E. McConnell, West Virginia University, Chair
Categories of Entitlement: Race, Gender, Age Disability, Sexual Orientation and the Social Policy of Public and Private Wealth
Moderator:
Joyce E. McConnell, West Virginia University
Speakers:
Stop in the Name of Love: Thinking about TANF Reauthorization Karen Czapanskiy, University of Maryland
Heteronormativity and Federal Tax Policy Nancy J. Knauer, Temple University
Justice, Egalitarianism and Disability: Contextualizing Distributive Outcomes Under the Americans with Disabilities Act Elizabeth A. Pendo, St. Thomas University
Reproductive Wrongs: Women's Sterilization and Inequalities Judith Allison Marie Scully, West Virginia University
Law and public policy governing wealth transmission, both public and private, reflects assumptions about justice: who is deserving and who is not. An essential method for distributing justice is to create categories of entitlement and disentitlement, of attention and neglect. This panel addresses this dynamic of justice nationally and internationally. In addition, it explores how legal education may engage law students in examining the justice dynamic in law and public policy. To capture the range of how law and public policy determine public and private wealth transmission, the session explores disparate categories of entitlement and disentitlement. Access or the denial of access to benefits by the disabled is one foci of this session. Recent "welfare reform" and its compelling issues of justice and public wealth distribution is another. The session also looks at a complex international issue of how access and beneficial health care can be wealth enhancing, while the use of chemical sterilization primarily on women of color in developing nations is wealth decreasing because of its negative impact on health and personal empowerment of women. Finally, this session examines the use of categories of sexual orientation in U.S. tax policy to govern wealth transmission and contributions to the public tax revenue.