Equal Pay Day, Rhetoric, and Reality

Image by: Pictures of Money, licensed under CC BY 2.0

Today was Equal Pay Day, the date that indicates how much longer a woman had to work to earn what a man earned in the previous year. More than 20 years ago, the National Committee on Pay Equity started selecting one day a year—always a Tuesday in April—to highlight the continued disparity between men’s and women’s wages.

Now, you can quibble with me about the precise numbers or you can try to explain to me that there isn’t really a gender gap (both of which have been done and probably will be done again); however, as the Pew Research Center noted last summer, though some groups of women have narrowed the gap, there in fact remains some gap in wages between white men and all groups of women.

Much of that gap in wages can be explained by differing levels of education, workforce experience, or occupation. But even when you control for all of those more concrete and measurable variables, there remains an unexplained gap that may—may not—have to do with gender discrimination.

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Supreme Court Permits Some Light Into the Black Box of Jury Deliberations

A photo of the Supreme CourtJury deliberations are the proverbial black box. After passively receiving the law, evidence, and arguments at a trial, the jurors will retire to discuss the case in secret. When they return with a verdict, no explanation will be required for their decision. Afterward, the jurors will normally be instructed that they need discuss the case with no one. The parties are left to wonder how well the jurors understood the governing law, attended to the key evidence, and faithfully attempted to apply the former to the latter.

Occasionally, the public catches some glimpse of what happens inside the black box. But when this happens, the law’s typical response echoes the famous admonition of the Wizard of Oz: “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!” This position is reflected in Federal Rule of Evidence 606(b), which generally prohibits jurors from testifying about their deliberations and thought processes when the validity of a verdict is challenged.

Although it seems perfectly sensible to discourage losing litigants from harassing jurors in the hope of uncovering errors, it is not so clear that the system benefits when judges are required to turn a blind eye to substantial evidence that a jury’s decisionmaking went off the rails. 

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Women in Wisconsin Law: Jessie Jack Hooper

This is the third part of a three-part series on Women in Wisconsin Law. 

Not all women who were influential in Wisconsin law were lawyers. Among these influential women was Jessie Jack Hooper, a suffragist and politician who made history by running for one of Wisconsin’s seats in the United States Senate in 1922.

Jessie Jack Hooper was born on a farm in Iowa in 1865. In 1888, she married Ben Hooper and moved to Oshkosh, Wisconsin, to begin a new chapter of her life. Mr. Hooper, a graduate from Columbia University Law School, was extremely supportive of his wife’s passion for the women’s suffrage movement. Even before women were given the right to vote, Mr. Hooper went to great lengths to share his right to vote with his wife. One year he would vote as he saw fit, and then the next year, he would vote according to his wife’s wishes.

Once in Oshkosh, Hooper joined a variety of progressive movements in the state, including the Women’s Club and the Wisconsin Federation of Women’s Clubs. Although she was active in a variety of organizations, she was primarily involved in the women’s suffrage movement as a member of the executive board of the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association.

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