Gender and Transnational Legal Discourse

Two years ago the Women, Justice, and Authority (WJA) Conference sponsored a panel on gender issues in a transnational context, whose discussion focused on how to advance and achieve gender equality. My own remarks focused on interfaces between different sources of law (state, national and international), on citizenship and on the constitutional state. Since that conference, the United States Supreme Court has held that the civil rights remedy of the VAWA is unconstitutional. It also has invalidated federal remedies against states for violations of other federal anti-discrimination statutes, and it has upheld a federal statute discriminating on the basis of gender in United States citizenship law.

Since that conference, as well, citizenship and nationality have assumed new and frightening saliency in our political and legal lives in the wake of terrorist attacks and government and public responses thereto.