Melissa E

“But the fact that so much of the #MeToo movement is social rather than legal creates a problem: how to secure justice and protect equal dignity when punishment is meted out not by impartial legal institutions but by shaming and stigmatization.”
― Dahlia Lithwick, Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America

“Among other things, Hill cited a recent survey by the Department of Defense showing that sexual harassment and assault in the military rose by 38 percent from 2016 to 2018, and CDC reports that one in three women and one in four men will experience sexual violence during their lifetimes. According to the EEOC, claims of sexual harassment increased by more than 12 percent from 2017 to 2018.”
― Dahlia Lithwick, Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America

“I was constantly frustrated by the tension between those who walked away from collapsing institutions and those who remained to try to mitigate the damage. For myself, I felt that the country had betrayed Dr. Ford and her testimony, and there was a connection between the paternalism that led us to pity her, and yet step over her, and the paternalism of a legal system that would increasingly treat all women the same way.”
― Dahlia Lithwick, Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America

“In an interview years later, I asked Anita Hill whether and when it was appropriate to give up on the legal system, to walk away and claim that it was a force for more harm than good. So many of the women in this book shrugged and told me that the law is an imperfect solution at best, but Anita Hill recoiled when I suggested as much: “Without law it’s chaos, right? Because we will lose. We will lose with chaos. We will always lose.” Perhaps more than anyone else she articulated the special relationship that exists by necessity between vulnerable communities and the legal system. “Chaos,” she told me, “allows for behavior you could not anticipate. With institutions, if you understand an institution, you know how things work. They may not work perfectly for you, but you know how they work. Chaos, you don’t know how it works, and it’s survival of the fittest. And people can really act on their worst instincts. That may be true, to some extent, in institutions. But there is something that you can navigate.” Women have a special relationship with the law, because the next best alternative is violence. Women have a special relationship with the justice system, Hill believes, because it is something we can navigate. But for the law, she told me, January 6, 2021, the day on which rioters stormed the US Capitol seeking to halt the certification of the 2020 presidential election, “could have been passed off as just like any other day in the White House or in the Capitol.” So we rely upon the law, she explained, because without it we have far less. And perhaps because we are so vulnerable to its failures, we tend to be especially vigilant, maybe even hypervigilant, when it feels as if it were sliding away.”
― Dahlia Lithwick, Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America