Elizabeth F. Emens

• Professor at Columbia University

Same-sex marriage debates in recent years have prompted a broader questioning of the institution of marriage. This chapter argues that we should take this opportunity to imagine the widest possible range of alternatives to our current marriage regime-or what this chapter calls countermarriage regimes. The chapter draws on an unlikely source of lega...

This Article concerns a relatively unseen form of labor that affects us all, but that disproportionately burdens women: admin. Admin is the office type work - both managerial and secretarial - that it takes to run a life or a household. Examples include completing paperwork, making grocery lists, coordinating schedules, mailing packages, and handli...

In 1987, Adrienne Asch published a short essay entitled “What's Missing (or What I Haven't Found Yet).” The essay sketched an agenda for future research in disability studies by cataloguing the questions she wished had been answered and the research she wished had been conducted thus far in the field. My tribute to Adrienne, written just over twent...

Asexuality is an emerging identity category that challenges the common assumption that everyone is defined by some type of sexual attraction. Asexuals--those who report feeling no sexual attraction to others--constitute one percent of the population, according to one prominent study. In recent years, some individuals have begun to identify as asexu...

Mainstream attitudes toward disability lag behind U.S. law. This tension between attitudes and law reflects a wider gap between the ideas about disability pervasive in mainstream society — what this Article calls the "outside" view — and the ideas about disability common within the disability community — what this Article calls the "inside" view. T...

This chapter addresses the progressive resistance to nature talk by tracing key themes in the rhetoric of the nature-versus-culture debate across five identity categories: sex, disability, sexual orientation, age, and race. Reflecting on the role of nature in the rhetoric of identity-group politics reveals three recurring assumptions about nature,...

This is a crucial juncture for U.S. disability law. In 2008, Congress passed the ADA Amendments Act (ADAAA), which aims to reverse the courts’ narrowing interpretations of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. This legislative intervention provides an important lens through which to consider attitudes toward disability, both because the succ...

Debates about marriage currently capture much public attention. Scholars have pushed beyond the question of whether gays are worthy of marriage to ask whether marriage is worthy of gays. The present moment of questioning marriage in its current form may be brief. Thus, we should take this opportunity to imagine the widest possible range of alternat...

This Essay includes a first-person narrative of having a child through surrogacy, responses to that narrative by other law professors and the surrogate, and a concluding response and epilogue by the Author.

This is a challenging moment for the law of discrimination. The state’s role in discrimination has largely shifted from requiring discrimination - through official policies such as segregation - to prohibiting discrimination - through federal laws covering areas such as employment, housing, education, and public accommodations. Yet the problem of d...

Courts and agencies interpreting the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) generally assume that workplace accommodations benefit individual employees with disabilities and impose costs on employers and, at times, coworkers. This belief reflects a failure to recognize a key feature of ADA accommodations: their benefits to third parties. Numerous ac...

Marital names shape our ideas about marriage, about our children, and about our selves. For about a hundred years, American states required married women to take their husbands' names in order to engage in basic civic activities such as voting. While the law no longer requires women to change their names, it still shapes people's decisions about ma...

Storytelling and resistance are powerful tools of both lawyering and individual identity, as I argue in this brief essay published in Narrative as part of a dialogue on disability, narrative, and law with Rosemarie Garland-Thompson and Ellen Barton. Garland-Thompson's work shows us the life-affirming potential of storytelling, its role in shaping d...

In Roper v. Simmons, the Supreme Court confronted a difficult question: Given that being younger than eighteen is merely a proxy for diminished culpability, why not let jurors decide whether youth mitigates the culpability of an individual sixteen- or seventeen-year-old offender? The Court's subtle answer draws on psychological literature about the...

"I would like to suggest," Rosemarie Garland-Thomson tells us, "that 'shape structures story' is an informing principle of disability identity" (113). In her essay in this volume, Garland-Thomson eloquently describes how our bodies tell stories, create stories. Her founding principle—shape structures story—draws upon an essay by Caroline Walker Byn...

Discrimination against people with mental illness occurs in part because of how those with mental illness can make other people feel. A psychotic person may make others feel agitated or afraid, for example, or a depressed person may make others feel sad or frustrated. Thus, a central basis for discrimination in this context is what I call hedonic c...

Marriage and monogamy feature prominently on the public stage, but not all romantic relationships come in pairs. While people across the political spectrum debate the different-sex requirement of civil marriage, this article focuses on another limiting principle of monogamy's core institution: the twoness requirement. In particular, the article ela...