• This Month’s Issue: Women & the Law and Women's History
• Women's Legal History
• The Abortion Debate
• Encyclopedias about Women
• Women & the Law in Cyberspace
• Forthcoming

In honor of Women's History Month, Books-on-Law focuses on women's progress in the legal profession, and how women's increased presence in the profession has shaped legal thought. I am pleased to serve again as Contributing Editor for this, Books-on-Law's second, women & the law issue during academic year 2000-2001.

Perhaps no book has chronicled the personal and professional tug-of-war modern women feel better than Peggy Orenstein's FLUX: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids and Life in a Half-Changed World. For that reason, the book is the centerpiece of this issue. We are fortunate to present an interview, in both audio and transcript format, with Ms. Orenstein about her book and what her findings might mean for women lawyers. We also feature three different reviews of the book by accomplished lawyers from different sectors of legal practice and academia: Amy Longo, an associate at O'Melveny & Myers in Newport Beach, California and Associate Editor of the American Bar Association publication, Litigation News; Ruth Kahn, a partner at Steptoe & Johnson in Los Angeles; and Professor Christine Corcos of the Louisiana State University Law Center.

We also feature reviews of books that demonstrate the breadth of recent publications concerning women and the law. Professor Richard Ford of Stanford Law School reviews Adrien Katherine Wing's Global Critical Race Feminism. Susan Berke Fogel and Khanum Shaikh of the California Women's Law Center provide their views on Bonnie Anderson's Joyous Greetings: The First International Women's Movement. Julie Goldscheid and Mary Davis of NOW Legal Defense & Education Fund provide insight into Elizabeth Schneider's Battered Women and Feminist Lawmaking. And Nine & Counting: The Women of the Senate is the focus of Stanford Law School graduate and Stanford Magazine Associate Editor Kathy Zonana's review.

Finally, the Past-Perfect section contains the 1984 and 1992 Harvard Law Review book reviews of two classic titles, which respectively celebrate their tenth and twentieth publishing anniversaries this year: Susan Faludi's Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women and Cynthia Epstein's Women in Law.

The definitive guide to women's rights cases before the nation's highest court (through the October 1999 term) has finally been published by – who else? – the Supreme Court Historical Society. Supreme Court Decisions and Women's Rights:  Milestones to Equality (CQ Press, 2001) (ISBN: 1568026137), edited by Clare Cushman, contains a foreword by Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who also reviewed a manuscript of the book prior to publication and contributes an essay on the first female law clerks at the Court). In a straightforward manner equally accessible to the general and legally trained reader, the book chronicles the Court's decisions in the areas of sex discrimination in employment, single-sex education, jury duty, reproductive rights, maternity leave, military service, and sexual harassment, to name a few. Serving as bookends to the summaries and explanations of the Court's landmark decisions are two chapters that provide insight into the "romantic paternalism" that precluded women's full political and professional participation in society until the mid-20^th Century, as well as the first women advocates before the Supreme Court, the first female law clerks, and the two women justices currently on the court.

Woven throughout are profiles of famous plaintiffs, such as Norma McCorvey (Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade), Estelle Griswold (of Griswold v. Connecticut, in which the court struck down a state statute outlawing the use and prescription of birth control), Ann Hopkins (who filed a sex discrimination suit against accounting firm Price-Waterhouse, where she was denied partnership for being overbearing, abrasive, and insufficiently feminine; a divided Court ruled that such sex stereotyping amounted to gender discrimination and, unless the company could prove it would have fired her for other reasons, it must admit her as a partner), Myra Bradwell (an early advocate of women's rights whose exclusion from the Illinois bar based on her gender was upheld by the Court), and Stephen Wiesenfeld (who, represented by then-advocate Ruth Bader Ginsburg, succeeded in overturning gender distinctions in the social security laws and as a result, obtained survivor benefits which allowed him to stay home and raise his son). These profiles lend a human face to the landmark case law and provide a unique "behind-the-scenes" view of how and why these plaintiffs' cases were brought and pursued all the way to the Supreme Court.

In short, the book provides a fascinating historical overview of the personalities and reasoning behind the Court's blockbuster decisions effecting social change in the area of women's rights, and reflects how far we have come in a relatively short period of time. As Justice Ginsburg notes in her foreword: "It is my hope and expectation that readers of this book will experience the realization of Susan B. Anthony's ultimate vision: 'man and woman working together to make the world the better for their having lived.'"

Abortion remains a hot topic in publishing. An updated edition of Marian Faux's Roe v. Wade (Cooper Square Press, 2000) (ISBN: 081541093X), an in-depth account of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court abortion decision, was published in the fall. A broader, more academic treatment of the topic is also contained in Is the Fetus a Person?:  A Comparison of Policies Across the Fifty States (Cornell University Press, 2000) (ISBN: 0801437075).

In Is the Fetus a Person?, Jean Reith Schroedel, a professor in the Department of Politics and Policy at California's Claremont Graduate University, compares antiabortion statutes, statutes that criminalize drug use by pregnant women, and those that criminalize third-party fetal killings, to determine whether they are equally strong in their condemnation of fetal death. Schroedel hypothesizes that all three policies should be equally strong if the underlying justification of antiabortion policy is indeed to protect the fetus' right to life; conversely, if third-party killings are largely ignored, then antiabortion policy is more likely based on approbation of women's behavior than on protection of the fetus.

The New England Journal of Medicine declared Schroedel's book a "provocative and well-researched . . . test [of] the rhetoric of the pro-life movement, which focuses on the protection of the most vulnerable among us, and the rhetoric of the pro-choice movement, which focuses on the protection of women's equality and autonomy. By examining the degrees to which antiabortion forces also support other measures to enhance the well-being of fetuses and infants, Schroedel concludes that their motivations are better explained by a resistance to female autonomy. This perception is widely shared within the women's movement, but until now it has not had the benefit of systematic empirical research to support the claim."

Two encyclopedias covering legal and policy issues of importance to women are newly available from Routledge. The four-volume Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women: Global Women's Issues and Knowledge (Routledge, 2000) (ISBN: 0415920884), edited by Cheris Kramarae and Dale Spender, features global coverage of women's issues with entries by 1,000 feminist scholars and international activists on such topics as abortion, affirmative action, discrimination, domestic violence, equality, feminism (including historical, global, region-specific, and Third Wave), reproductive rights, sexual harassment and work (from part-time arrangements to feminist theories about it).

The more compact one-volume Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture (Routledge, 2001) (ISBN: 0415161614) contains entries from scholars and lawyers about politics and popular culture in this country, including summaries (both snapshot and more extended) on legal issues and personalities, including abortion, feminism, Title IX, sexual harassment, Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Ms. Magazine, Roe v. Wade, and United States Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Books-on-Law Contributing Editor Mary-Christine Sungaila provided some of the entries concerning women and the law in this volume.

In addition to Books-on-Law, other sources for women and the law publications are available on the Internet. A few examples:

• PortiaLaw.com, edited by University of Maryland law professor Paula Monopoli, provides an updated list of books of interest to women lawyers (including links to Books-on-Law reviews).
• Women Lawyers Association of Los Angeles maintains a comprehensive and extensive annotated bibliography of works related to business and management, glass ceiling issues, and work and family.
• The Women's Legal History Biography Project and Women's Legal History Bibliography Project, created by Stanford law professor Barbara Babcock, contain an extensive listing of books and articles about women's legal history, as well as original biographical profiles of pioneering women lawyers and links to original documents. An invaluable resource for women's legal history research.
• Women's Enews, a project of the women, policy and media program of NOW Legal Defense & Education Fund, is a professional news service that probes policy and politics, business and culture from a woman's perspective. Recent topics have included the U.S. Supreme Court's opinion striking down the Civil Rights Remedy of the Violence Against Women Act, and global equality for women.

The April issue of Books-on-Law is scheduled to contain the following:

• Thomas C. Berg, reviewing Shawn Francis Peters, Judging Jehovah's Witnesses: Religious Persecution and the Dawn of the Rights Revolution (University Press of Kansas, 2000)
• Jay A. Gertzman, reviewing Andrea Friedman, Prurient Interests: Gender, Democracy, and Obscenity in New York City, 1909-1945 (Columbia University Press, 2000)
• Peter Linzer, reviewing David Ibbetson, A Historical Introduction to the Law of Obligations (Oxford University Press, 2000)
• Linda C. McClain, reviewing Stephen Macedo, Diversity and Distrust: Civic Education in a Multicultural Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2000)
• Christopher Slobogin, reviewing Daniel Shuman & Alexander McCall Smith, Justice and the Prosecution of Old Crimes: Balancing Legal, Psychological, and Moral Concerns (American Psychological Press, 2000)

Mary-Christine Sungaila, Contributing Editor, Books-on-Law
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JURIST: Books-on-Law™ is edited by Ronald K.L. Collins and David M. Skover of the Seattle University School of Law.

Board of Editorial Consultants: Raj Bhala, George Washington University Law School; Miriam Galston, George Washington University Law School; Kermit Hall, Utah State University; Yale Kamisar, University of Michigan Law School; Lisa G. Lerman, Catholic University of America School of Law; Christine Littleton, University of California at Los Angeles Law School; David M. O’Brien, University of Virginia Department of Government and Foreign Affairs; Judith Resnik, Yale Law School; Edwin L. Rubin, University of Pennsylvania Law School; Steven H. Shriffrin, Cornell Law School; Nadine Strossen, New York Law School; David B. Wilkins, Harvard Law School.

Administrative Assistant for Books-on-Law: Ms. Nancy Ammons
Technical Assistant for Books-on-Law: Steven Pacillio, Esq.

© Ronald K.L. Collins and David Skover, 2001.