Household Regulation Prof Weblog

Bailey Sanders not too long ago posted to SSRN her article On the Foundation of Childbirth: How the Federal Clerkship’s Lack of Parental Go away Fosters Gender Inequality (UCLA Girls’s Regulation Journal, Forthcoming).  Right here is the summary:

This essay argues that the shortage of paid parental depart for federal legislation clerks allows being pregnant discrimination, restricts girls’s reproductive selection, and perpetuates gender inequality inside the authorized career writ giant. Protections towards being pregnant discrimination are hole when clerks might be fired—or have clerkship presents rescinded—for requiring maternity depart, and the shortage of depart disproportionately impacts feminine clerks by constraining their means to pursue profession and household concurrently. The dearth of depart additionally restricts (some) pregnant girls’s reproductive selection by forcing them to decide on between retaining their place or carrying their being pregnant to time period. Such a state of affairs was insupportable up to now however has now turn into unconscionable within the devastating wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Girls’s Well being Group. Many clerks shall be serving in huge abortion deserts, minimize off from medical care and dealing with threats of legal prosecution ought to they try to finish their pregnancies to save lots of their job. For all these causes, present congressional efforts to supply higher protections to time period legislation clerks from discrimination and office misconduct, whereas an vital step ahead, have to be supplemented to incorporate assured parental depart for time period legislation clerks.