On the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law's Future Role


ON THE COLUMBIA JOURNAL OF GENDER
AND LAWS FUTURE ROLE

THE HONORABLE JACK B. WEINSTEIN*

Providing gender equity and equality in organizations is an
important route to major improvements in status and opportunity. In the
last ten years, statutory reforms, caselaw, and private changes in attitude
have reduced many institutional inequalities-with far more to be done.

We need to take a broader view of "gender problems." Implicated
in such a view will be the more intractable sociological problems of
individuals in one-on-one relationships or community situations, of single
parenthood and of child rearing in nontraditional and traditional families, of
the continuing intergenerational effects of poverty, poor education and cruel
childhoods, and of heritage-based views of man-woman characteristics and
affinities, particularly in terms of real equality of opportunity. That so
many are in prison, for example, is a critical aspect of gender issues for the
future.'

These issues include those affecting the status of men as well as of
women. Reducing welfare has not, for example, solved many of the
problems of substantial numbers of men, women, and children. Men's
institutional and other problems need further work; women's and children's
welfare does not exist in an island cut off from conditions for men.

In case after case, husbands or boyfriends have apparently resented
efforts of women they live with to improve their position, even striking out
physically to keep them in check. Perhaps the reverse is true. Perhaps this
phenomenon is also true in the stunting of children's ambition and in
depriving them of love and affection, creating a perpetual handicap.
Women's and children's welfare may then depend upon how men feel
about themselves and why, and how their situation can be changed. And, of
course, the reverse is true.

The legal problems are hardly resolvable without considering
economic, psychological and sociological issues. Interdisciplinary work is
essential.

With so many men (and now increasingly women) in prison, do we
need to reconsider conjugal visits and home visits so that family
relationships and those with the community are not unnecessarily stunted
and destroyed? We know that unless there is a good deal of love and

Senior Judge, United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York.

'See e.g., Mark Mauer, Felon Voting Disenfranchisement: A Growing Collateral
Consequence of Mass Incareceration, 12 Fed. Sent. Rep. 248 (2000).



Columbia Journal of Gender and Law

affection for youngsters and a secure family life, the probability of their
growing up imbued with altruism and a sense of responsibility for their
fellows is substantially reduced. We have to be careful, for example, in
sentencing or in enforcing our laws on the homeless to avoid separations of
parents from children who depend upon them for the love and affection that
will reduce the likelihood of a new generation of criminals or homeless. 2

What can, or should, be done about different views of women's or
men's place in the social structure by new immigrant families (or even
second or third generation Americans) or those with different religious and
"inherited" views of gender? In our heterogeneous society, how much legal
pressure should be imposed to homogenize these views toward more
general American views of equality of the sexes or rights of children?
Would such legal pressure for equalization infringe upon First Amendment
rights of religion? How? What, if anything, should the law do about these
matters?

Are the rights and legally supportable claims of the "poor" being
fairly adjudicated? While substantive gender rights may be increasing, the
right to a sufficiently compensated lawyer when and where needed is
increasingly attenuated-even in capital cases.3

On the international level, there will be increasing pressure to
protect men's, women's and children's rights and opportunities by treaty
and the growth of international law; through international tribunals such as
the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia on matters
such as rape, and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda on
genocide; through national and international courts such as the European
Court of Human Rights on killings by state agents or "torture" of children
by parental beatings, or the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on
"disappearances;" 4 by private persons and non-governmental agencies
opposing child labor on products brought into the United States; and by
governmental pressure to improve women's rights and eliminate slavery, as
by action of the United States State Department in Afghanistan and the
Sudan. Gender issues are more and more recognized as "one world" issues.

There is plenty of room for the Columbia Journal of Gender and
Law to contribute to better law and an improved society in the next century.

2 See generally Jack B. Weinstein, The Effect of Sentencing on Women, Men, and

the Community. 5 Colum. J. Gender & L. 169 (1996). Disenfranchisement of hundreds of
thousands of minority persons is but one aspect of our harsh criminal laws.

3 See Jack B. Weinstein, Notes on Adjudicate Justice in a Diverse Mass Society, 8
J.L. & Pol'y 385 (2000).

4 Examples of the action of all these international tribunals at work will be found in
the Aspen Institute Justice and Society Program, International Human Rights Update, Fall
1999.

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