Ruth Rubio Marín to Deliver Gruber Lecture on September 12

Ruth Rubio Marín, Professor of Constitutional Law at the Universidad de Sevilla, will deliver the 2019 Gruber Distinguished Lecture in Women’s Rights on September 12, 2019 in Sterling Law Building, room 127, at 4:10 p.m. Her lecture, “On Constitutionalism and Women's Citizenship,” will address the extent to which constitutionalism has helped women become equal citizens and shape the very understanding of citizenship.

Marín, who is also a Professor at the School of Transnational Governance of the European University Institute and Director of the UNIA UNESCO Chair in Human Rights and Interculturalism, focuses her research on comparative constitutionalism, law and gender, immigration and citizenship, and transitional justice. Marín studies how public law creates categories of inclusion and exclusion around different axes including gender, citizenship, nationality and ethnicity.

In her lecture, Marín will discuss suffragism and second wave feminism and their important but limited contributions to women’s equal citizenship given the constraints of constitutionalism and the entrenchment of the separate spheres of gender order. Her lecture marks the turn of the century as a participatory turn for feminist constitutionalism and ponders whether the current “anti-gender” backlash and its constitutional manifestations can be seen partly as a reaction to this tectonic shift signaling the constitutional disestablishment of modernity’s foundational gender order.

The lecture will be followed by a panel moderated by Judith Resnik, Arthur Liman Professor of Law, and Reva Siegel, Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Professor of Law and will feature justices from around the world: Hon. Rosalie Silberman Abella of the Supreme Court of Canada; Hon. Prof. Dr. Susanne Baer of the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany; Hon. Manuel Cepeda‐Espinosa, former President of the Constitutional Court of Colombia; and Right Hon. Brenda Hale, President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom.

Also on September 12, the Gruber Program for Global Justice and Women’s Rights will host a panel, “The Promise of Women’s Enfranchisement: The 19th Amendment of the United States Constitution, 1920–2020,” at 12:10 p.m. in Sterling Law Building, room 120. Resnik and Siegel will chair the panel, featuring: Fatima Goss Graves ’01, President and CEO, National Women’s Law Center; Jill Lepore, Professor, Harvard University; and Tomiko Brown-Nagin ’97, Dean, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, and Professor, Harvard Law School. The panelists will consider issues including what inequalities the 19th Amendment ameliorated and legitimated and how Americans might remember and interpret the 19th Amendment today.

Both events are open to the Yale Law School community. Lunch will be provided at the 12:10 panel. Attendees can register at rsvp.law.yale.edu.

The Gruber Distinguished Lecture in Global Justice and the Gruber Distinguished Lecture in Women’s Rights feature speakers whose exceptional achievements have served the causes of global justice and women’s rights. Previous lectures in the series are listed on the program’s webpage.