Law Library Continuing Legal Education: The Ongoing Fight for Equality

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Session info

This is a live presentation only. No recording will be available this month.

In a nation whose Constitution purports to speak for “We the People,” too many of the stories that powerful Americans tell about law and society include only We the Men. A long line of judges, politicians, and other influential voices have ignored women’s struggles for equality or distorted them beyond recognition by wildly exaggerating American progress. Even as sexism continues to warp constitutional law, political decisionmaking, and everyday life, prominent Americans have spent more than a century proclaiming that the United States has already left sex discrimination behind.

Jill Elaine Hasday’s We the Men is the first book to explore how forgetting women’s struggles for equality—and forgetting the work America still has to do—perpetuates injustice, promotes complacency, and denies how generations of women have had to come together to fight for reform and against regression. Hasday argues that remembering women’s stories more often and more accurately can help the nation advance toward sex equality. These stories highlight the persistence of women’s inequality and make clear that real progress has always required women to disrupt the status quo, demand change, and duel with determined opponents.

America needs more conflict over women’s status rather than less. Conflict has the power to generate forward momentum. Patiently awaiting men’s spontaneous enlightenment does not. Transforming America’s dominant stories about itself can reorient our understanding of how women’s progress takes place, focus our attention on the battles that are still unwon, and fortify our determination to push for a more equal future.

Speaker: Professor Jill Hasday

Speaker University of MN Professor Jill Hasday Distinguished McKnight University Professor Centennial Professor in Law. Professor Jill Hasday teaches and writes about anti-discrimination law, constitutional law, family law, and legal history. She is the author of three books: Family Law Reimagined (Harvard University Press 2014), Intimate Lies and the Law (Oxford University Press 2019), and We the Men: How Forgetting Women’s Struggles for Equality Perpetuates Inequality (Oxford University Press 2025).  Intimate Lies and the Law won the Scribes Book Award for “the best work of legal scholarship published during the previous year” and the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award for Family and Relationships.

Professor Hasday’s articles have appeared in many leading law reviews, including the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, New York University Law Review, Michigan Law Review, California Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, UCLA Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, and Minnesota Law Review.

Professor Hasday received her B.A. from Yale University in 1994, graduating summa cum laude with distinction in history and winning election to Phi Beta Kappa. In 1997, Professor Hasday graduated from Yale Law School, where she was an articles editor of the Yale Law Journal and received honors in all graded courses. After law school, Professor Hasday clerked for Judge Patricia M. Wald of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.  Professor Hasday joined the University of Minnesota Law School as a tenured faculty member in 2005. She has been the Centennial Professor in Law since 2013.

In 2014, Professor Hasday became a Distinguished McKnight University Professor. The University of Minnesota awards this honor to its "most distinguished and highest-achieving mid-career faculty."

In 2018 and 2024, Professor Hasday won the Stanley V. Kinyon Tenured Teacher of the Year Award.

Professor Hasday is also the Editor-in-Chief of Constitutional Commentary. Please visit the journal's webpage for more information and past issues.

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