Law\u27s Nobility

Robin West

2016

In the epigram to her most important book, Catharine MacKinnon sought to invent a new plot with respect to the ways men and women negotiate (or not) the terms of their planetary cohabitation.\u27 Through historically momentous scholarship and national and international legal advocacy spanning a thirty year career in public life, she has largely succeeded in doing so. Most visibly, from within law\u27s perspective, MacKinnon invented a new plot by fundamentally restructuring our civil rights law, and she did so by reconceiving the ideal of equality that is at that law\u27s heart. As is now well recognized, she did so in a two step argument: She first exposed the relative emptiness of a formal understanding of the ideal of equality that seeks solely to rationalize the treatment of men and similarly situated women-an approach which, virtually by definition, does little but provide a modest boost for women who are already relatively well-off. She then provided an alternative, substantiv...