One hundred years ago, in 1908, two Boston women hired Arthur Winfield MacLean to teach them so they could take the Massachusetts bar exam. From this humble but significant beginning, the Portia Law School grew, which flourished in the New England School of Law. Portia was the first law school founded exclusively for women, who at that time were denied access to all but a few existing law schools. This year, New England Law celebrates its 100th anniversary and the integration of women into the legal profession, with women representing more than half of the body studying at some law schools and making progress in achieving partnerships and faculty positions. Recently, some feminists have drawn attention to the fact that «equality» in American legal culture tends to be translated as «equal treatment» and, for this reason, actually serves as a conceptual obstacle to formulating and implementing solutions to women`s unique economic and social problems. These «post-egalitarian feminists» push to rethink and reconstruct differences – this time from a feminist perspective. Feminists who now want to go beyond equality and establish affirmative theories of difference recognize that the initial adherence to a concept of equality was necessary to take the first steps toward a change in the law and legal institutions. However, the lesson that some of us have learned from the results of the past decades of equality feminism is that a theory of difference is needed to do more than just open the doors to institutions designed for men. Advocacy for a theory of difference challenges the supposed neutrality of institutions and questions their legitimacy because they primarily reflect male experiences and concerns. In this way, a theory of difference has the potential to empower women.

Feminist Theory in Law: The Difference It Makes «Demantling Assimilation in the Legal Profession» will be presented on Thursday, February 20, 2020, from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m., at Husch Blackwell LLP at 190 Carondelet Plaza, Suite 600, Clayton, MO 63105. This CLE will have 2.0 CLE credit hours and will include 2.0 CLE diversity credit hours in accordance with the new Missouri Bar By-law 15.05. Our speakers will be Christopher A. Pickett, Esq., Officer and Diversity Officer of Greensfelder, Hemker & Gale, P.C., and the Honourable Lawrence E. Mooney, retired judge of the Missouri Court of Appeals, Eastern District. For registration, see Dismantling CLE assimilation. For more information, please contact our Executive Director, Lael Richter Simon, at (314) 282-0050 or stlcountybar@gmail.com. In 1908, the legal profession was not the only one to exclude women. The early twentieth century was a period of gender discrimination deeply entrenched – even celebrated – in American society. Treating women differently and keeping them out of politics and professions was justified by assumptions about their inherent specificity as human beings. Certainly, the unique role of women has been appreciated, perhaps even more than that of their male counterparts, at least rhetorically.

However, the general perception of society was reflected in legal statements that women`s constitution and temperament meant that they were ill-equipped to cope with the demands of public and political life. The divine destiny of women was found in the manger and kitchen. Until recently, legal feminism was first and foremost a strategy based on equality, which did not presume any legally relevant differences between men and women. This emphasis may have been determined by the many ways in which the law has historically facilitated and tolerated the exclusion of women from the public (and therefore openly powerful) aspects of society. The difference was the justification and justification for this exclusion, which was based on the belief that the unique biological role of women required their protection from the rigors of public life. It is therefore not surprising that when a significant number of women began to invade public institutions such as the law, they tried to dismantle the ideology that had excluded them – assimilation became the goal and equality the articulated norm. Vulnerability theory rejects this statically flawed misrepresentation of what it means to be a human being, arguing for the recognition of a legal subject that reflects the complex and diverse lives actually lived by people. The concept of the «vulnerable subject» recognizes that humans are first and foremost incarnate beings who are inherently universal and constantly «vulnerable.» The term vulnerable is used to reflect the reality that throughout life we are constantly sensitive to changes in our physical or physical well-being. Changes in incarnation can be developmental and develop as we move from birth to death. Such changes can be negative and due to our mortality, or positive, reflecting our growth and increasing capacity. Changes in physical well-being often result from circumstances over which individuals have little or no control: accident, disease or disaster (natural or man-made).

We must therefore understand vulnerability as the human condition and not only as a characteristic of certain individuals who are particularly or particularly weak or disadvantaged. This legal entity is one of its equals who inhabits a world that reinforces personal responsibility, not social responsibility. State intervention or regulation is perceived as a violation of freedom. Social arrangements and institutions such as the family and businesses are considered «private», although they have a significant impact on the well-being of society and on children and the self-reliant. Proposals for public surveillance are easily distracted by ideological constructs such as family privacy, meritocracy, and free markets. «This essay is a consideration of the feminist project in law and two contemporary feminist legal approaches to the historical construction of women as `different` – a characterization that has impacted how women are understood as objects and subjects of law. These competing feminist responses are based on similar findings about women`s uncomfortable relationship with the law and other institutions of power in our society. However, they differ in their analyses of the nature and extent of the difference between women and men and the conceptual and theoretical implications of the differences. Course Description The legal profession lags far behind other employment sectors when it comes to recruiting and retaining more people from different backgrounds in its ranks. This is due in part to a high expectation of compliance and assimilation within the legal culture, which has historically excluded people who do not fit established norms. This presentation questions the usefulness of these expectations in 2020 and encourages participants to broaden their norms and standards to be more inclusive. This is the second claim of a vulnerability approach that is of particular importance for the assertion that there can be no «I» without the «we».

Because there is no position of invulnerability and we are born, live and die in a fragile materiality, we are also inevitably integrated beings. Individual and collective vulnerability must be compensated, housed or mitigated if people are to survive, leading us to form social relationships and institutions ranging from the family to the nation-state and beyond. In other words, a functional and reactive social unit is the only (albeit partial) antidote to human vulnerability. Incarnation forces us into relationships of dependence on others, whether they are other individuals or institutions. This inevitable confidence is most evident in childhood, when we depend on others to take care of ourselves. But the prospect of addiction can also be associated with aging, disability, or illness. The social relations contained in these institutions are often unequal in terms of power and privilege. We recognize this to some extent when we pass laws against discrimination based on certain identity characteristics, such as race or gender. But vulnerability is universal and its implications go beyond traditional identity categories.