Professor Julie Suk’s new book, After Misogyny: How the Law Fails Women & What to Do About It, was released today. Published by the University of California Press, After Misogyny explores why feminism is essential to constitutional democracy, and examines efforts to end male over-empowerment around the world.
Professor Suk discussed the central themes of the book and how they relate to current legal events on the Constitutional Crisis Hotline podcast, which she cohosts with Professor Jed Shugerman, along with guest Deb Tuerkheimer. She also joined Samuel Moyne to discuss the book on Digging A Hole: The Legal Theory Podcast.
Constitutional Crisis Hotline co-host Julie Suk argues in a new book that misogyny is the over-empowerment of men and the collective over-entitlement of society to women’s forbearance, pain, and sacrifices for the common good. Misogyny not woman-hatred alone; it is the legal structure that enables that hatred and extracts benefits to society at women’s expense. In this conversation, occurring in the moment that Donald Trump was finally indicted for concealing his hush-money payments to a porn actress, and a federal judge in Texas invalidated abortion pills, Deb Tuerkheimer and Julie Suk explore how this reframing of misogyny sheds light on abortion bans, and how women in U.S. history and around the world today have sought constitutional changes to reset male entitlement and power.
The sun is shining, the flowers are blooming, and David’s back on the pod. More importantly, we’re thrilled this week to be joined by Julie Suk, Professor of Law at Fordham University School of Law in New York City, to discuss her new book After Misogyny: How the Law Fails Women and What to Do about It. After Misogyny, like much of Professor Suk’s scholarship, including her first book, is impressively interdisciplinary, centering women and gender in the legal, historical, sociological, and political stories of liberal constitutionalism.
After Sam lays out all of the different fields that After Misogyny contributes to, ranging from feminist legal theory to comparative constitutionalism, Professor Suk explains her focus on the structural and legal aspects of misogyny. We discuss Professor Suk’s appropriation of the term “unjust enrichment” from private law, and how it explains what, on her view, is wrong with misogyny. Come with us on a journey through Prohibition and the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment in America and cross the pond to Sweden, Ireland, and France. We round out our wide-ranging conversation discussing the limits, but also the necessity, of legal and constitutional approaches to social problems. All this and more on this week’s pod – take a listen and find out.