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Please note that Attorney Jennifer Racine will not be presenting today because she is providing a haven for her own newborn, who arrived a few weeks early. The schedule will be adjusted to allow more time for the other speakers and additional time for questions and discussion.

The Wisconsin Women’s Law Journal will celebrate its 20th anniversary with a symposium on December 5, 2005, beginning at 12:30 p.m. in Lubar Commons, Room 7200 of the UW Law School. Three distinguished speakers will present papers.

Keynote speaker is Katharine Silbaugh, professor and associate dean for academic affairs at Boston University School of Law.  Silbaugh is widely recognized for her pioneering work on the legal response to women’s domestic labor.  Recently, she contributed to the plaintiffs' case in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, the landmark Massachusetts case leading to the first court-approved same-sex marriages in 2004.  

Silbaugh will present her article titled "The Practice of Marriage, in which she looks at a number of recent cases and developments, ranging from the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court opinion in Goodridge, the Terri Schiavo controversy, the prosecution of polygamist Tom Green in Utah, and the issuance of the ALI Family Law Principles, that have demonstrated that neither the functional nor the formal definition of marriage can survive on its own.

[CANCELLED: The symposium’s second presenter will be Jennifer Racine, a previous Wisconsin Women’s Law Journal (WWLJ) board member and registered patent attorney at LaFollete Godfrey & Kahn.  Racine is currently co-teaching copyright law at the Law School.  Her paper is titled, "A Dangerous Place for Society and its Troubled Young Women: A Call for an End to Newborn Safe Haven Laws in Wisconsin and Beyond." Racine argues that newborn safe haven laws neither prevent the abandonment of newborn children, nor help preserve the health and future of their mothers.]

The third presenter will be Sally Day, also a previous WWLJ board member.  Day will speak on "Mothers in Prison: How the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 Threatens Parental Rights."  Day's article looks at mothers in the criminal justice system and examines how the Act has greatly diminished their chances of retaining parental rights while incarcerated.  She will also discuss how race, gender and social class all play a part in determining which parents are in jeopardy of permanently losing their children to adoption.  Day represents parents in Termination of Parental Rights proceedings as an appointed counsel of the Wisconsin State Public Defender in Milwaukee County.

All three presentations will be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal.

For more information, contact Diana Aguilar, editor-in-chief of the Wisconsin Women’s Law Journal, doaguilar@wisc.edu .

 

Submitted by on November 22, 2005

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