Janet Halley

Janet Elizabeth Halley (born February 1952) is an American legal scholar who is the Eli Goldston Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Her work is influenced by critical legal studies, legal realism and postmodernism.

A self-described feminist, Halley is known for her critique of American feminism, dominance feminism, and left legalism, as well as her work on family law and the regulation of sexuality. She has also been a prominent voice in the public debate regarding sexual conduct codes on campuses in the United States in recent years, arguing against the broadening of the definition sexual assault and the adoption of the affirmative consent standard. She was the first expert on gender and sexuality in the legal system to receive a position at Harvard University.

Education and legal career Halley received a Bachelor's degree summa cum laude in English literature from Princeton University in 1974. In 1980 she earned a PhD in English literature from the University of California at Los Angeles, focusing on seventeenth century English poetry. Before pursuing legal education, she taught English for five years at Hamilton College as an assistant professor. Halley received her J.D. from Yale University in 1988, and then clerked for Judge Gilbert S. Merritt Jr. at the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. She worked two years as a litigator for the Boston office of the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, before joining the Stanford Law School. She taught at Stanford from 1991 until 2000, and then joined the Harvard law school. In 2006 she was appointed to the Royall chair in the institution.

Research and academic activity Halley has written on a wide variety of issues, but is widely known for her criticism of left legalism, radical dominance feminist thought and cultural feminism. She argues that left legal identitarian projects, such as feminist ones, have "bestowed sacred cow status" on certain reforms and deployed "identity-based claims in the form of rights, supposedly trumping all competing normative claims". Such legal projects, according to her, include, among others, affirmative action, sexual harassment and racial justice legal reforms.

Much of her critical writing is directed towards legal projects of dominance feminism and cultural feminism, branches of feminism which she says hold on to a self-perception of political powerlessness, despite gaining many achievements and influence in governance since the 1980s, especially in the legal realm. According to her, this self-perception prevents American feminism from examining social issues through other theories of sexual life and politics, such as queer theory and the knowledge-power theory of Michel Foucault, as well as making it difficult for feminists to acknowledge other just causes and harm to men. By focusing on legal projects and sanctions on issues such as rape, pornography and commercial sex, Halley claims radical feminism has adopted a sentimental and moralizing view of legal action, and created alliances with conservative and paternalistic male elites. She argues that seeking State-centered and legal solutions is a narrow point of view and many times an obstacle to finding pragmatic solutions to wide social problems such as sexual inequality, and that this approach often fosters weakness in the group it is trying to protect, enforcing traditional social norms of female fragility. and published an article on queer theory under the name Ian Halley. In Split Decisions she described herself as:

A sex-positive postmodernist, only rarely and intermittently feminist, a skeptic about identity politics, with a strong attraction to "queer" revelations of the strangeness and unknowability of social and sexual life, and a deep distrust of slave-moralistic pretensions to identity-political "powerlessness".

Governance feminism The term "governance feminism" was first coined in Halley's book Split Decisions and later developed it in several articles, defining it as the new muscular feminist organizational style of the "quite noticeable installation of feminists and feminist ideas in actual legal-institutional power". Examples of such power according to her are the numerous sexual harassment programs in educational institutions and corporations in the United States and the development of feminist expertise that is used by special offices on gender equality and Non-governmental organizations. The name of the term was derived from the similarities Halley and colleagues identified between the powerful network-like non governmental organization establishments that feminists adopted, and the law produced by the school of new governance. ).

Halley claims that governance feminism, led mainly by radical and cultural feminists, fails to acknowledge its will to power and the power it has acquired, and still views itself as the underdog through a theory of male domination and female subordination.

War rape and international law One of the key feminist legal projects that are subject of Halley's writing is the criminalization of rape in international law. Governance feminism, according to her, had many achievements in this area, mainly in the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, international criminal tribunal for Rwanda and Rome statute of the international criminal court, where a wide range of feminist legal rules were accepted. This has created what Halley names "the war rape antinomy": a dilemma among two separate feminist projects, one aimed at moving sex crimes higher up the hierarchy of the international courts' criminality, and the other at isolating sexual assault on women for separate prosecution. "To put it bluntly", Halley writes, "making rape visible contextualised sexual assaults in war — while framing sexual violence as an independent predicate crime reclassified rape as war. The former placed the rape of women in visible proximity to the death of men; the latter exceptionalised the rape of women, detached it from other aspects of the armed conflict in which it occurred, and focused prosecution, conviction and punishment on rape alone".

Through a close literary reading of the memoir A Woman in Berlin, Halley raises several legal questions regarding the criminalization of rape. The memoir describes the efforts of a German woman to survive the occupation of Berlin by the Red Army in 1945, and the widespread rapes committed by Soviet soldiers. Halley suggests that a special condemnation of rape, which emphasises sexual crimes in war over others, may weaponise rape and make it a tool of war or a casus belli. She also draws attention to the possibility that the idea that rape in war is a fate worse than death, which is advocated by some feminist circles, has downsides. These include a tendency to classify some armed conflicts in which war rapes occurred as "wars against women," despite the clear suffering they have inflicted on men too. She urges for suspicion towards such comparisons in legal advocacy. In the following year after Halley and colleagues raised their concerns, the Harvard law school announced it will implement its own policy and procedures on prevention of sexual harassment, which unlike the general policy of the university, provides a lawyer to accused students and includes a separate adjudicatory panel to determine guilt, whose members are not associated with Harvard.

Halley has visited several universities to share her ideas and views on changes to sexual conduct codes on campuses. Williams argues that Halley's work is focused more on an assimilation-desire to resemble men, than on women's issues. She also hints that there is a connection between what she terms as Halley's "celebration of masculinity" and her position at Harvard, writing that "it is intriguing that Harvard has chosen a gender theorist who makes a name for herself by telling women not to make demands on men". She claims that Halley and her colleagues refuse to acknowledge human suffering and its causes as a subject for left-legal theoretical scholarship, and that this brings the new critical movement closer to libertarian goals that it might want to admit.

Publications Books Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism (Princeton University Press, 2006) Don't: A Reader's Guide to the Military's Anti-Gay Policy (Duke University Press, 1999)

Edited books and volumes Left Legalism/Left Critique (Duke University Press, 2002; co-editor Wendy Brown) After Sex? New Writing Since Queer Theory (Duke University Press, 2011; co-editor Andrew Parker) Critical Directions in Comparative Family Law, Vol. 58, no. 4 of the American Journal of Comparative Law (2010) Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance Literature: Essays in Feminist Contextual Criticism (University of Tennessee Press, 1989; co-editor Sheila Fisher)

Selected journal articles "What is Family Law?: A Genealogy Part II", Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, Vol. 23: Iss. 2, Article 1 (2011) "What is Family Law?: A Genealogy Part I", Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, Vol. 23: Iss. 1, Article 1 (2011) "Rape in Berlin: Reconsidering the Criminalisation of Rape in the International Law of Armed Conflict", 9 Melbourne Journal of International Law, Vol. 78 (2008)